The Importance of Innovation with Business Analytics
Karim Lakhani is a professor at Harvard Business School (HBS), co-director of Harvard’s Laboratory for Innovation Science and co-chair of its new Business Analytics Program. In partnership with organizations like NASA, Lakhani has researched the efficacy of crowdsourcing to solve organizations’ data analytics problems.
With his specialization in the management of technological innovation in organizations, Lakhani will explore with students in the Business Analytics Program how companies’ business models, use of analytics and business strategies are evolving. We spoke to Lakhani about his goals for the program and the pressing need for data analytics experts in the business world today.
As students begin the Harvard Business Analytics Program, you’ll co-teach the first course, Digital Strategy and Innovation, with Professor Marco Iansiti. What do you think will surprise students about what they learn in this course?
I think how the trends that they’re seeing now have roots back 30 years ago in terms of the broad digitization of the economy, and with digitization there’s more data being produced. In the last 30 years the tech sector has been transformed to be highly data and analytics driven. But now the same forces that affected the tech sector are affecting all industries.
So, the surprising thing is that we’ve seen this story before. We know how it rolls out, and there are some real lessons to be learned as the rest of the economy is digitized and data analytics start to play a really important role in how decisions get made in the economy.
The Harvard Business Analytics Program offers courses through the Harvard Business School, the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Why did faculty decide to take this interdisciplinary approach to designing the program?
Business analytics requires both fundamental knowledge and understanding of quantitative analysis, programming, data architecture and data science, so we need to develop a deep sense of the technical aspects. But beyond that there is the need to apply them to the business context. It’s inherently an interdisciplinary field, where the business side and the economic side are complementary.
Our hypothesis is that leaders of organizations that are data centric will require both the technical skills and the understanding of their application to the business side; hence, all three parts of Harvard have come together to work on this.
We see it in our own training and how our students are being trained in our PhD programs. For example, many students in doctoral programs in business schools now have to learn machine learning and AI and apply that knowledge to the study of business. And five of the top ten Fortune 100 companies have a core strength in business analytics, which is really combining the engineering part with the business side.
Who are the ideal students for the Business Analytics Program?
We anticipate mid-career executives that are finding themselves in roles that require managing business analytics functions inside organizations. They may have come from either a technical background or a business background, but now they have to learn how to integrate the two. I think there’s a clear need there.
And what we’re observing more broadly is that business analytics is now moving into the center of organizations. Before it tended to be seen as a retrospective recording function. Now it’s a prospective decision-making function.
