Researching how to design and organize massive platforms to harness knowledge, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

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Introduction

Welcome to my website. Thank you for your interest. I am a research of innovation, entrepreneurship and strategy with a specific focus on designing modern platform-based organizations. In my research, I consider how platforms should be designed and optimized in order to maximize growth, innovation, knowledge creation, and productive interactions.

In this work, I often collaborate with organizations to run large-scale field-experiments on "live" platforms. I am interested in carefully understanding the micro-level behaviors of actors on platforms (e.g., entrepreneurs, individuals, suppliers, users, complementors, problem-solvers, contributors, etc.)--so as to determine how platform design, strategy and policies can best deliver overall outcomes for the platform.

I have taught courses in Strategy and Business Model Design, Innovation and Technology-Based Entrepreneurship, Data Analysis and Research Methods, and Microeconomics. I currently teach courses on how to design a new generation of Digital, Data-driven, and Platform-based business models.

I have degrees in Behavioral and Policy Sciences (MIT), Economics (Toronto), and Engineering (Waterloo). I have held M&A, strategy consulting and engineering positions at The Economist, NASA, Deloitte/Braxton Associates, Qualcomm, and Nortel, as well as advise startups related to data science and platforms. Prior to establishing a research and teaching program at Northeastern, I previously taught at Harvard, LBS, and HEC-Paris.

Roles & Contributions

• Northeastern University - D'Amore McKim School of Business: Strategy, Entrepreneurship & Innovation; courtesy appointments at the Khoury School of Computer Science and the Department of Economics; PI IoT Open Innovation Lab; Faculty at Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things

• Harvard University - Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Laboratory for Innovation Science

• National Bureau of Economic Research - Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program

• Editorial Board: Strategic Management Journal

• Associate Editor: Management Science

  • Business Strategy department, Entrepreneurship & Innovation department, Information Systems department (ad hoc), Finance department (ad hoc), Behavioral and Decision Sciences department (ad hoc), Revenue Management and Market Analytics department (ad hoc)

Research Contributions

1. Despite unique challenges for research design, there are feasible means of empirically investigating platforms, including field experiments and fine-grained observations at a large-scale. (e.g., Boudreau 2006, 2010, 2012, 2020, etc.).

2. Production and consumption are governed and regulated by the platform owners, beyond their firm boundaries, via a variety of price and non-price mechanisms (e.g., Boudreau 2006, 2010, 2017; Boudreau & Hagiu 2009; Boudreau & Lakhani 2013).

3. Platform-based organizations can be designed in many ways other than just (multi-sided) markets, including tournaments, contributions to public goods in "communities," and collaborating teams. (e.g., Boudreau 2006, 2017; Boudreau & Lakhani 2009, 2013; Boudreau & Hagiu 2009; Boudreau, Lacetera & Lakhani 2011; Boudreau & Lakhani 2013).

4. To understand aggregate platform productivity, it is necessary to understanding complementor behavior:

   • Strategic and economic incentives -- competition and complementaries between complementor competition and externalities -- and competing for a share of a growing pie (e.g., Boudreau 2006, 2010, 2012, 2017, 2018, 2020a,b; Boudreau & Jeppesen, 2014);

   • Micro-mechanisms underlying externalities, spill-overs, and network effects (e.g., Boudreau 2006, 2010, 2012, 2018; Boudreau & Jeppesen, 2014);

   • Non-pecuniary motivations and behavioral factors. (e.g., Boudreau 2006, 2012, 2017, 2018, 2020a,b; Boudreau and Lakhani, 2009; Boudreau & Jeppesen, 2014; Boudreau, Jeppesen, et al., 2020);

   • Coordination, regulation of behaviors, and governance (e.g., Boudreau 2006, 2017; Boudreau & Lakhani 2009; Boudreau & Hagiu 2009).

   • Heterogeneity (of knowledge, beliefs, motivations, productive capacity) and aggregate diversity of complementors. (e.g., Boudreau 2006, 2012, 2018, 2020);

   • Stochastic and uncertain entrepreneurial processes, bounded cognition (e.g., Boudreau 2006, 2018; Boudreau et al. 2016);

5. Platform-based organization enables knowledge, innovation, and entrepreneurship to be harnessed on an unprecedented scale -- with qualitative departures from traditional markets (e.g., Boudreau 2006, 2012, 2017, 2018).

6. Many kinds of enterprises (science, firms, universities, etc.) are usefully analyzed as multi-sided platforms (e.g., Boudreau 2006; Boudreau & Hagiu 2009; Boudreau, et al. 2016; Boudreau & Marx, 2019).