Karim R. Lakhani, the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration, started his career at General Electric in the 1990s. At that time, he recalls, a young MBA graduate could be successful simply by being a good manager. It wasn’t necessary to understand the technology that powered the company’s washing machines, turbines, or jet engines.

“But executives now need to understand the technologies behind their products and think about their implications on the business model. They need to understand how things like digitalization and data science and artificial intelligence are deployed as management and business tools,” Lakhani explains. And that means HBS needs to think differently, too.

Enter the Digital, Data, and Design Institute at Harvard (D^3), which Lakhani conceptualized in close partnership with Vladimir Jacimovic (MBA 1992), an HBS executive fellow and founder of ContinuumLab.ai, a differentiated venture firm that incubates and launches AI startups. The Institute, which launched in July, has repurposed the lab-based research model prevalent in natural science and engineering schools to enable faculty to address the most pressing business questions of the day with the same agility and speed at which technology is reshaping the marketplace. “HBS is the premiere business learning platform in the world,” Jacimovic says, “but the world around us now is accelerating exponentially. A new research model was needed that we could adapt continuously so the School would always be on the bleeding edge.”

The Institute is not the first to recognize the dramatic impact of digitalization, data science, and design on the world, Lakhani says. What makes Harvard’s approach unique is the decision to study the three together—and to start from the point of view of business. “Instead of beginning with technology, we will start with use cases,” he explains.

In this conversation, Lakhani introduces the goals and key components of the multifaceted institute, which include research labs organized by six general areas of inquiry, and engagement platforms, such as the Learning Network and the Research Accelerator. These are the initial building blocks of an ever-evolving institute, stresses Jacimovic. “The three Ds are just the beginning. We’re not designing the institute just for today. We are designing it for the future.”

How has technology reshaped the business landscape in the 21st century?

Karim R. Lakhani: Over the last 20 years, we have entered an era where the rate of improvement in these digital technologies is growing at an exponential rate. There are some companies that are able to take advantage of them and do amazingly well, but most of our organizations—in every single industry across every single economy—grow linearly and not exponentially. That means we need to change the structure of our organizations.

What are some of the trends you’ve identified within this rapid change?

KL: We see three distinctive trends. One is nonstop and relentless investment in digitalization. The second is an emphasis on data science. When you invest in digitalization, you also have to invest in a data science artificial intelligence across your enterprise to take advantage of the large volume of data being produced. And finally, to actually deliver new value to your customers, you need to design new business models and new operating models.

How will Harvard’s Digital, Data, and Design Institute address these trends?

KL: Our aspiration is to help invent the future of capitalism. Let’s figure out how companies can operate ethically with digital technologies and how we can get all of our workers trained up properly. To do that, we need to bring forth a new way of doing research at HBS.

We’ve done it before. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the case method, an innovation that radically changed the School and business education. The case method enabled HBS to be close to practice, understand the fast-evolving world of business, and draw insights for our students. However, like most social sciences, it’s historically based and typically involves one faculty member and their research assistant working on the case project.

But there is a real opportunity here to adopt a scaled research model, a lab model borrowed from engineering and the life and natural sciences. The lab is focused on solving problems in the world. You may have multiple faculty members immersed in the issue, but you also have doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, data scientists, visiting researchers, and other cross-school collaborators. These labs can be more ambitious than the solo investigator and they can be future oriented.

Consider the issue of data and bias: Through the Institute, we can look at past examples and write papers about our findings, but we can also partner with companies dealing with the question now. We can help them solve their problems and generate new knowledge at the same time. We think there’s room for 15 or 20 large-scale labs exploring a range of issues, from how companies and regulators can use technology to address the climate crisis, to the ways in which finance and accounting functions will need to change in the digital age (see related story)

How can the Institute support this type of forward-looking research?

KL: At HBS, we don’t study single-person companies. We study growing and large-scale companies, with CEOs and executives who can do big things because they have employees supporting them. We can learn from that model. In order for us to do big things with our research agenda, we need the same kind of support apparatus; the Institute will provide both research and administrative support. And we need to be sure the Institute doesn’t get frozen in time by constantly asking: How do we keep ourselves current? How do we make sure we are addressing the right problems and communicating our findings back to the business world in a rapid way?

How can an institute like this stay current?

KL: We’ve created four platforms to stay engaged with our constituents. One is a Learning Network (see related story) in which we foster a feedback loop among our alumni, practitioners, and faculty. We are building ways to share what we are learning in our labs with interested alumni in real time, but we also want to learn from them. The second is a Research Accelerator, which will engage with companies to identify problems for our labs to address and share learnings from the research. The third is a Digital Business Observatory, which will predict what issues will be important in the future through expert input and data analysis. And finally, we have the Startup Foundry. We want the ideas developed by the Institute to shape the way new enterprises are created and we want to see businesses grow out of these insights.

What does this institute look like today, and what will it look like in five years?

KL: The Institute launched in July, so we’re very much in the startup mode, asking what are our commitments and how will we deliver on them. We are launching with 12 new labs and are engaging 30 faculty members across all academic units at HBS. In five years, what I hope for is that we have the lab model firmly established at HBS as an important part of the portfolio of the ways we do research and that the platform components are all humming. I hope that we will have created new courses in both the Required Curriculum and the Elective Curriculum and have new offerings that engage our alumni on an ongoing basis so that they can continue to learn along with us. Because we want to have an impact beyond the School. We want to have an impact on alumni, on practitioners, on companies, and on society. That’s the exciting part for us here at the Institute.

Post a Comment