Boudreau joins key NASA project
Kevin Boudreau, Assistant Professor of Strategic and International Management, is to play a key role in the running of a software development initiative established by NASA and Harvard University.
The NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) is a forum where the space agency can present computational or complex data processing problems and software developers can compete with each other to create the computer code that will provide the best solution.
Professor Boudreau, an expert on platform-based competition, will be the chief economist of the NTL.
NASA hopes the NTL will prove so popular that its researchers will be able to effectively "order" a solution to a problem, like they would order laboratory tests or stationery.
The lab will be housed at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Prof Boudreau and Harvard Business School Professor Karim R Lakhani will monitor the success of the scheme and it is hoped the competition setting will drive innovation and yield highly effective solutions.
If the method does prove successful the use of innovation tournaments as a problem solving approach within NASA and the rest of the public sector could be rolled out.
Prof Boudreau and Prof Lakhani have previously run three experimental competitions using problems from the Harvard Medical School's Clinical and Translational Science Centre and NASA's division of Space Life Sciences.