Jacqueline Ng Lane

I'm Jacqueline (Jackie) Lane, an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School and Faculty Co-Director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH). I study how great ideas take shape — and why so many don't. 

I study three questions at the heart of innovation: how we identify good problems to solve, how we generate solutions, and how we decide which ideas are worth pursuing. I run field experiments with organizations such as NASA, research universities, startup accelerators, and global health initiatives to understand the conditions under which good ideas are recognized and funded. Increasingly, that means asking how artificial intelligence is changing these processes: which ideas AI helps us find, which ones it leads us to overlook, and how we can design human-AI collaboration that makes our collective judgment better rather than just faster. 

I teach Technology and Operations Management in the HBS MBA program. Before academia, I worked in sales and trading at Morgan Stanley and in finance and operations at Microsoft.

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS

🏆 2025 Wharton People Analytics White Paper Competition — 1st Place For "The Narrative AI Advantage?" — on how generative AI shapes evaluations of early-stage innovations

📄 Just Published in Strategic Management Journal "Beyond Feasibility Filters: How Domain-Spanning Expertise Enables Recognition of Innovation Potential"

📰 In the news "The Dangers of Deferring to AI: It Seems So Right Even When It's Wrong" — Harvard Gazette & HBS Working Knowledge

🔬 New research Building a large-scale map of the kinds of problems startups are tackling — and what this reveals about where AI is reshaping the economics of entrepreneurship.

CONTACT ME: jnlane[@]hbs.edu