Hila Lifshitz-Assaf

How do organizations accelerate and maintain an innovative edge in the face of tech disruption? Companies that are still keeping the innovation process solely in-house are missing out on vast resources of knowledge, says Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, award-winning researcher, Warwick Business School Professor of Management and Harvard Laboratory for Innovation Science visiting faculty.

A global authority on leveraging digitization and artificial intelligence (AI) whose research is taught to executives and MBA students around the world, she urges leaders to embrace outside knowledge work to accelerate innovation leadership and gain a rapid understanding of working with emerging technologies, especially AI systems.

Lifshitz-Assaf showed the great advantages of an open innovation process through research with one of the most iconic innovation organizations in the world – NASA. In a three-year study at NASA’s Space Life Sciences Directorate, she uncovered that an open innovation model that brings in outside voices resulted in faster technological solutions than a traditional internal-only model. Through a practical framework for including a variety of voices throughout the innovation process, Lifshitz-Assaf demonstrates that leaders can efficiently leverage new technologies that will allow their organization to lead, not follow.

“By opening the process of innovation, you create a distributed network model,” explains Lifshitz-Assaf, winner of the 2023 Impact to Innovation Award from the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals. “Doing so will allow organizations to be leaders in knowledge work innovation instead of responding to what competitors are doing.”

Let Disruptive Technology Uncover the “Why” of an Organization

When an emerging technology disrupts an organization, before deciding whether to adopt it or not, Lifshitz-Assaf encourages leaders to zoom out of the “how” of what their organization does and the impact that new technology will have on the process, and instead focus on the “why.”

“The ‘how’ of what we do as professionals has become attached to the emotional part of who we are as individuals. Then, once we feel like new technology is threatening the ‘how’ process, we feel it as threatening to us personally,” she explains. “But that’s not necessarily the case. Think back to your schooling and the expertise you developed through your studies that led you to joining a specific profession. We all have a bigger ‘why’ that drew us to what we do in the first place.”

By applying a three-step framework that helps to identify the purpose, or the “why” within an organization, Lifshitz-Assaf empowers leaders to see the future of work as one that allows technology to augment knowledge experts, not replace them.

Take Control of Artificial Intelligence Tools

One of the emerging technologies that has had the biggest impact on business and society has been AI. But, Lifshitz-Assaf says, AI systems aren’t one size fits all, and managers should be an active part of the process of evaluating systems that may or may not deliver what an organization requires.

“Whether to trust AI with critical decisions is the wrong question,” she advises. “Trust is emotional. Leaders need to know how AI is built and how it works to understand it. Organizations need to move from a passive mode of just consuming AI to a more proactive mode of demanding the ways they want the AI to be designed that will lead to the best results.”

Through her ability to relate to leaders’ daily challenges with memorable, illustrative examples and anecdotes, Lifshitz-Assaf empowers managers to take control of emerging technologies to become innovation leaders who consistently widen the competitive gap.

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf is professor of management at Warwick Business School and a Harvard Laboratory for Innovation Science visiting faculty. Her research focuses on developing an understanding of the foundations of innovation and knowledge creation processes in the digital age. She explores how the ability to innovate is being transformed, as well as what the transformation means for R&D organizations, professionals and their work. Her three-year longitudinal field study of NASA’s experimentation with open innovation online platforms and communities received the best dissertation Grigor McClelland Award at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) 2015, Best Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) paper based on dissertation (2018), and best published paper elected by the organizational communication and information systems division of the Academy of Management (2018).

A winner of the 2023 Impact to Innovation Award from the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals, her work has received the prestigious INSPIRE grant from the National Science Foundation and has been presented and taught at a variety of institutions including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD, Wharton, London Business School, Bocconi, IESE, UCL, UT Austin, Columbia and Carnegie Mellon. She received the Industry Studies Association Frank Giarrantani Rising Star award and the Industry Research Institute grant for research on R&D.

Lifshitz-Assaf earned a doctorate from Harvard Business School, an MBA from Tel Aviv University, magna cum laude, a BA in Management and an LLB in Law from Tel Aviv University, Israel, both magna cum laude.

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group^®.