How do good ideas take shape?

I’m Jacqueline (Jackie) Lane, an Assistant Professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. I’m also Faculty Co-Director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard.

I study how people and organizations identify problems worth solving, generate possible solutions, and decide which ideas to pursue. I run field experiments with NASA, research universities, startup accelerators, and global health initiatives to understand when good ideas are recognized—and why some are overlooked.

A growing part of my work asks how artificial intelligence is changing this process: which ideas AI helps us find, which it leads us to miss, and how we can design human–AI collaboration that improves judgment rather than simply making it faster.

I teach Data Science and AI for Leaders (DSAIL) in the HBS MBA program. Before academia, I worked at Morgan Stanley and Microsoft.