Meeting of the minds
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...