KEVIN BOUDREAU
Assistant Professor, Strategy
London Business School
kboudreau at london dot edu
I am an applied microeconomist and strategy
researcher, focusing on questions of innovation & technology strategy at
the intersection of innovation, competition and organization. My work is
empirical.
I have a PhD from MIT, an MA in Economics from the University of Toronto
and a BASc in Engineering from the University of
Waterloo. I have taught courses in Strategic Management, Innovation and New
Venture Strategies.
Opening the Platform vs. Opening the
Complementary Good? The Effect on Product Innovation in Handheld Computing, conditional acceptance Management Science
Competition and Modular Innovation:
Evidence from an “App Store” on Variety and Quality (under review)
Racing and Searching in Innovation
Contests: An Empirical Analysis (under review) (with N. Lacetera, CWRU and K. Lakhani, HBS)
How to Manage Outside Innovation: “Communities” or “Markets” of External Innovators? Sloan Management
Review 2009 (with K. Lakhani, HBS)
Platform Rules: Regulating the
Ecosystem around a Multi-Sided Platform
(with A. Hagiu, HBS) in Gawer,
A. (ed) (2009), Platforms,
Markets and Innovation
I am currently pursuing several projects
related to experiments and econometric analysis of naturally-occurring
data in systems industries, open markets and open communities.
I do econometric research on the how innovation is best organized in a
large group or “ecosystem” of firms. This has implications for a wide range of
sectors such as: telecommunications, publishing, aerospace, IT, video games,
computing, television, on-line portals, automotive, fashion, franchises of
various kinds, defense, aerospace, shopping centres
and many more contexts.
This work leads me to study what owners of key bottleneck platform
technologies can do to stimulate the productivity of the surrounding ecosystem.
This can be done through a variety of strategic instruments (contractual,
technical, informational, social, property rights and firm boundaries).
For example, an important part of the strategy of firms such as Facebook and Apple is to take actions to influence
surrounding software development, advertisers and to set economic and social
mechanisms into motion to encourage continued adoption and innovation.
Whereas the traditional focus of Strategy has been to understand to
understand resource allocation and actions within one’s own four walls, the
strategizing of a platform owner is fantastically more challenging: to
orchestrate, govern, regulate the actions of the larger value chain beyond its
own boundaries.
A necessary accompanying thrust of my research agenda is to understand
the micro-mechanisms shaping the productivity of the ecosystem itself (so that
we might understand how a platform owner might then try to influence it). How
do small contributors around a platform compete? How do they cooperate? How
might they do so more productively? What is really fundamentally different
about these contexts in relation to more traditional value chains?
Prior to academics, I was a director of research and
consulting at the Economist
Intelligence Unit focusing on communications and media industries in
Western Europe and North America. In an earlier position I was program leader
for M&A and large-scale infrastructure contracting projects at Qualcomm Inc, working mostly
in Latin America. At Braxton Associates, I supported
the Canadian practice as a business analyst, consulting to media and telecoms
companies and their investors in North and South America. In engineering school
I interned at the Canadian Space Agency working on the
Canadarm robotic arm for the international space
station and researched heat transfer problems for Nortel Networks.