He is the principal investigator of the Crowd Innovation Lab at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Lakhani is the founder and one of the principal investigators of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).
His Ph.D. dissertation was advised by Eric von Hippel, with Tom Allen and Wanda Orlikowski.
Lakhani edited the book Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (ISBN 0-262-06246-1) published by MIT Press.
[4] In particular, he is known for his research on the T-shirt company Threadless,[5][6] and prize-based open innovation firms like InnoCentive[7][8][9] & Topcoder.