Editors Discussion

Nik Franke, Karim Lakhani & Ruth Stock-Homburg

Vienna University of Economics & Business/Harvard Business School/Technische Universität Darmstadt

Nik Franke- Founded the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation of Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) in 2001 and has been serving as its Director since then. He earned his doctoral and habilitation degree at University of Munich and spent several semesters as Visiting Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is fascinated by the paradigm-shifting phenomenon of open and user innovation. In his research, he studies how firms can benefit from user creativity and analyzes success potential, functioning, and effects of methods such as toolkits for user innovation and design, innovation communities, crowdsourcing, lead user analyses etc. Beyond this and more generally, he is interested in the fields of entrepreneurship, innovation management, marketing, behavioral economics and psychology, and prefers to work empirically. He believes that rigor alone it is not a sufficient criterion for good academic research. It should be practically relevant as well and should be communicated as clearly as possible. He has cooperated with scholars around the globe in projects that have been funded by EU, Volkswagen Stiftung, Vienna Science and Technology Fund, OeNB and FWF. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Marketing, Management Science, Organization Science, Research Policy, cited frequently, and honored with several international awards.

Karim Lakhani- Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, the Principal Investigator of the Crowd Innovation Lab and NASA Tournament Lab at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the faculty co-founder of the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative. He specializes in technology management and innovation. His research examines crowd-based innovation models and the digital transformation of companies and industries. Professor Lakhani is known for his pioneering scholarship on how communities and contests can be designed and managed to achieve innovative outcomes. He has partnered with NASA, TopCoder and the Harvard Medical School to conduct field experiments on the design of crowd innovation programs. His research on digital transformation has shown the importance of data and analytics as drivers of business and operating model transformation and source of competitive advantage.

Ruth Stock-Homburg - Professor of Marketing and Human Resource Management, Dean of the Faculty of Business Administration at Technische Universität Darmstadt, and the founder of the Future Innovation Lab Darmstadt, Germany. In addition, she is a member of the associate editor board of the Journal of Product Innovation Management and of the management board of the German Academic Association for Business Research (VHB). Her primary research interests refer to user innovation and innovative work behavior. Her research also covers the areas of customer relationship management, work-life balance, and leadership. She has published in various forums, including Research Policy, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and Psychology and Marketing.