Lazonick's research seeks to understand how, on the basis of innovative enterprise, a national economy can achieve stable and equitable economic growth.
Lazonick also conducts cross-national comparative research on the social conditions that enable or proscribe innovative enterprise, focusing in particular on the economies of Britain, Japan, and China as well as the United States.
In 1989–90, Lazonick was a visiting member in social sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Albert Hirschman was the resident economist.
The lure was the opportunity provided, under the administration of Chancellor William T. Hogan, to build an interdisciplinary graduate program in regional economic and social development at an engineering school that had deep historical roots in local industry and was now in the midst of a leading high-tech district, "Route 128".
From 1996 to 2007 Lazonick was also on the faculty of INSEAD, the international business school in France, where he held an appointment as distinguished research professor.
Although RESD no longer exists,[6] Lazonick remains a professor at UMass Lowell, where he co-directs the Center for Industrial Competitiveness.
This began during his time at Harvard in the 1980s, where he took note of his colleague Michael C. Jensen, who became a major proponent of mass stock buybacks.
[8] Lazonick began this line of research in the late 1980s, becoming an early critic of the belief that companies should be run to maximize shareholder value.