Kevin Boudreau

Education

• PhD Behavioral and Policy Sciences, MIT
• MA Economics, University of Toronto – Canada
• BASc Engineering, University of Waterloo – Canada

Research & Teaching Interests

Boudreau is an expert on platform design and on the design of innovation systems that harness the efforts of large numbers of problem-solvers—using open innovation, multi-sided markets, and crowdsourcing approaches. His research involves large-scale field experiments and econometric analysis of observational data.

Industry & Academic Experience

Boudreau's earliest career began in engineering research, where he designed and carried out experiments in heat transfer of microelectronics and statistical analysis of the lithographic production of silicon chip wafers. He later worked in Strategy and M&A positions in several tech sectors.

He has held positions at Bell Northern Research, Nortel Networks, the Economist Group, Qualcomm, NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, Braxton Associates, and Deloitte Consulting. He has since collaborated with or advised companies and governmental agencies on research-related topics. These organizations include G.E., Harvard Medical School, Babbage Innovation and Analytics, Zain, Syngenta, Altx Hedge Funds, TopCoder.

Boudreau studied Engineering at University of Waterloo in its Cooperative Education program and then Economics at the University of Toronto, before completing his PhD in Behavioral Policy Sciences at MIT.

Services to the Profession

Beyond Northeastern, he is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Program on Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship and a Research Fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Quantitative Social Science.

Kevin's research has been published in journals such as Management Science, the RAND Journal of Economics, the Strategic Management Journal, Science, Nature Biotech, Organization Science, Research Policy, Innovation Policy and the Economy, the Review of Economics and Statistics. He is an associate editor of Management Science in both Innovation and Entrepreneurship and in Business Strategy departments. He is on the editorial board of the Strategic Management Journal.

Awards & Recognition

His research has been generously supported by Google, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Microsoft, the Paris Chamber of Commerce, Harvard Business School, the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the M-Lab, the Kauffman Foundation, and HEC-Paris.

Selected Publications

• Miric, M., K. Boudreau, L. Jeppesen (2018) “Protecting their Digital Assets.” Research Policy.
• Lakhani, K., K. Boudreau, E. Guinan (2018) “Randomized Insights: Field Experiments in Understanding Knowledge Production in the Sciences.” Science.
• Boudreau, K., T. Brady, I. Ganguli, P. Gaule, E. Guinan, T. Hollenberg, K. Lakhani (2017) “A Field Experiment on Search Costs and the Formation of Scientific Collaborations.” Review of Economics and Statistics.
• Boudreau, K., (2017) “Platform-Based Organization and Boundary Choices: Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Growth in the Early History of Mobile Computing.” Advances in Strategic Management on “Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Platforms.” eds. Furman, Gawer, Stern, Silverman.
• Boudreau, K., K. Lakhani, M. Menietti. (2016) “Performance Responses To Competition Across Skill-Levels In Rank Order Tournaments: Field Evidence and Implications For Tournament Design.” RAND Journal of Economics.
• Boudreau, K., K. Lakhani, M. Menietti. (2016) “Performance Responses To Competition Across Skill-Levels In Rank Order Tournaments: Field Evidence and Implications For Tournament Design.” RAND Journal of Economics.
• Boudreau, K., E. Guinan, K. Lakhani and C. Riedl (2016) Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance, Novelty and Resource Allocation in Science. Management Science.