Meeting of the minds | Harvard Gazette

"They weren’t quite Willy Wonka’s golden tickets, but when some Harvard Business School (HBS) alumni opened their mailboxes last fall, they found invitations to participate in a new research project with Professor Clayton Christensen, a top management theorist and influential thinker who coined the term “disruptive innovation.” Little did the recipients know that they might end up blazing a bold, new path to the future of academic scholarship. Looking to use the convening power of HBS to engage some of the more than 4,000 graduates of his course “Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise,” Christensen put together a project that would build on his new theory about the flawed way that companies make investment decisions, an idea he first explored in a 2012 piece in The New York Times. He also wanted to see if crowdsourcing could accelerate the development and refinement of academic theory, said Derek van Bever, a senior lecturer of business administration who co-teaches the course with Christensen, the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at HBS. At the same time, the Digital Initiative, one of seven new cross-disciplinary efforts across HBS that reconsiders and aids innovation and disruption in business, wanted to test the local utility of crowdsourcing ... Using OpenIDEO, a collaborative online platform founded by HBS alumnus Tom Hulme, about 500 of the 1,700 alumni who signed up actively participated in the project, which took place between November and April. First, they helped diagnose some of the issues Christensen and van Bever raised, and then they offered their perspectives in an open format. Later, they proffered ideas and solutions to those problems before group members critiqued sections of the draft article before it was submitted to the publisher ... The resulting piece, “The Capitalist’s Dilemma,” published in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review (HBR), is the first formally crowdsourced article in HBR’s history. In it, Christensen and van Bever consider whether slow economic growth in the United States is triggered by corporate reluctance to invest in long-range innovations. Finding that it is, the research concludes that investors and executives rely on faulty metrics and notions about capital as a scarcity best squirreled away, a misguided view that clouds their ability to assess accurately potential job- and market-creating investments.  Van Bever says crowdsourcing offers a vital benefit for faculty, subverting the often-glacial pace of publishing academic research. The publishing process involves submitting a draft article to a publisher, which then gives copies to reviewers it selects, and who are unknown to the author. Those reviewers send their comments back to the publisher, which forwards them to the author for consideration and revisions. All those handoffs can add years to the publishing process and leave research lagging behind the real-world speed of business ... Crowdsourcing also revealed some surprising insights about M.B.A. graduates and even some possible tweaks for the M.B.A. curriculum around the way students think about finance and strategy ..."