Publications

27 Feb 2007
First Look

First Look: February 27, 2007

Cases & Course MaterialsDesign: More Than a Cool Chair Harvard Business School Note 607-026 This introduction to the Design industry includes definitions, and industry statistics, as well as descriptions of geographic clustering,... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

12 Jan 2010
First Look

First Look: Jan. 12

and barriers to creating and claiming value, the most promising sequence and process design, etc.— should be informed and modified by two classes of potentially relevant cross-border factors, the general and the negotiation-specific.... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

11 Aug 2008
Research & Ideas

Strategy Execution and the Balanced Scorecard

set of tasks be carried out by a small cadre of professionals to orchestrate the various strategy management processes for the executive team. The Office of Strategy Management has multiple roles and responsibilities. First, as an... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

July 2000 (Revised September 2005)
Case

Madison Avenue: Digital Media Services (A)

Introduces a "new-economy" company, Madison Avenue, facing challenges of mega-success. In the two years since its founding, the company's revenues have grown from zero to nearly $30 million, head count has swollen from the start-up handful to more than 200, and the... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Online Advertising; Advertising Industry

05 May 2003
Research & Ideas

How Bank of America Turned Branches into Service-Development Laboratories

Companies often use rigorous R&D processes to guide new product development, but are much less scientific when it comes to creating services. Not Bank of America, which has turned Atlanta-area branches into consumer laboratories.... View Details

Keywords: by Stefan Thomke; Banking; Financial Services

Research Summary

Overview

By: Feng Zhu

Professor Zhu’s research focuses on the design of platform business models and its impact on platform performance. Platforms have become central to our economy. A platform is a product or service that enables two or more customer groups to interact. For example,... View Details

May 2012
Case

BoldFlash: Cross-Functional Challenges in the Mobile Division

By: Michael Beer and Rachel Shelton

Roger Cahill has spent less than a year as head of the Mobile Division of BoldFlash, a flash memory component maker. On the corporate level, BoldFlash has adapted to an evolving and difficult marketplace, but the Mobile Division is struggling. The four groups within... View Details

Keywords: United States; Massachusetts; Morale; Human Resource Management; Technology; Leadership; Opportunities; Organizational Design; Conflict and Resolution; Product Development; Change Management; Information Infrastructure; Business Processes; Manufacturing Industry; Electronics Industry; Massachusetts

August 2023
Article

The 5G Spectrum Auction in Chile

By: Juan Escobar, Rafael Epstein, Jose Correa, Pamela Gidi, Jozsef Markovits, Natalie Epstein, Yerko Montenegro and Abner Turkieltaub

In 2021, the Chilean government implemented a first-price package auction to allocate electromagnetic spectrum for 5G mobile services. The auction was run sequentially for different spectrum bands, allowing firms to exploit band complementarities. It was a... View Details

Keywords: Bids and Bidding; Competition; Revenue; Telecommunications Industry; Chile

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March 2020 (Revised February 2023)
Case

Performance Management at Afreximbank (A)

By: Robert S. Kaplan, Siko Sikochi and Josh Steimle

Based in Cairo, Afreximbank was founded in October 1993 as a specialized continental financial institution designed to address the low level of intra-African trade, the decline in financial flows to Africa, the worsening external debt situation of many African... View Details

Keywords: Performance Management; Balanced Scorecard; Performance Expectations; Performance Evaluation; Performance Improvement; Organizational Culture; Strategy; Banking Industry; Africa; Egypt

March 2009 (Revised July 2014)
Case

PNC Financial: Grow Up Great (A)

By: Christopher Marquis, V. Kasturi Rangan and Alison Comings

In 2003, PNC Financial focused its corporate citizenship and philanthropic resources on a ten-year, $100 million investment in early childhood education called PNC Grow Up Great. The case tracks the origination of Grow Up Great, how it was developed and implemented... View Details

Keywords: Early Childhood Education; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Leadership; Brands and Branding; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Organizational Structure; Business and Community Relations

2022
Working Paper

Institutional Emplacement and the Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores

By: Ryan Raffaelli and Ryann Noe

This study reveals how actors leverage physical place as an asset to facilitate organizational adaptation and industry evolution. Through a longitudinal, qualitative analysis of the U.S. independent bookselling industry from 1995 to 2019, we outline how dispersed... View Details

Keywords: Industry Growth; Small Business; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Business Processes; Retail Industry; Publishing Industry; United States

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25 Jul 2005
Research & Ideas

An Organization Your Customers Understand

its administrative heritage; also, the "fit" or alignment among important organization design elements such as structure, business systems, staffing, rewards, and tasks.1 In other words, the problem is too difficult. There is no... View Details

Keywords: by Robert Simons

December 2009
Article

Restructuring Within an Academic Health Center to Support Quality and Safety: The Development of the Center for Quality and Safety at the Massachusetts General Hospital

By: Richard Bohmer, Jonathan David Bloom, Elizabeth Mort MD, Akinluwa Demehin and Gregg Meyer MD

Recent focus on the need to improve the quality and safety of health care has created new challenges for academic health centers (AHCs). Whereas previously quality was largely assumed, today it is increasingly quantifiable and requires organized systems for... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Design; Performance Improvement; Quality; Safety; Massachusetts

Find at Harvard

2009
Chapter

Creating Superior Customer Value in a Connected World

By: Ranjay Gulati

"In the early twenty-first century, customers are more demanding than ever, and difficult economic times make them all the more so. As customers tighten their wallets and increase their demands, firms face greater pressure to provide superior customer value. Reducing... View Details

Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Customer Value and Value Chain; Consumer Behavior; Product Design; Social and Collaborative Networks; Value Creation

06 Nov 2013
What Do You Think?

Is Top-Down Resource Allocation on the Rise?

Summing Up Is Business Agility a Product of Top-Down or Bottom-Up Resource Allocation? Respondents to this month's column provided possible explanations for greater reliance on top-down resource allocation processes (RAPs) while reminding... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

February 2014
Article

Learning by Supplying

By: Juan Alcacer and Joanne Oxley

Learning processes lie at the heart of our understanding of how firms build capabilities to generate and sustain competitive advantage: learning by doing, learning by exporting, learning from competitors, users, and alliance partners. In this paper we focus attention... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Advantage; Organizations; Learning

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September 2009 (Revised October 2010)
Case

Elkay Plumbing Products Division

By: Robert S. Kaplan

The vice president of sales learns that the most profitable 1% of the division's customers generate 100% of profits, and that two of the division's largest customers lose 50% of profits. The division has just finished a project to install a time-driven activity-based... View Details

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management; Profit; Management Systems; Consumer Products Industry; Industrial Products Industry

September 2001 (Revised May 2006)
Case

Webvan

Examines Webvan's operations and the processes by which it delivers groceries that were ordered from the Internet to customers' homes. Recounts Webvan's history from founding through early 2001 and concentrates on the unique approaches to warehousing, delivery,... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Failure; Business Startups; Consumer Products Industry; Service Industry

October 2009
Article

Influence and Inefficiency in the Internal Capital Market

By: Julie Wulf

I model inefficient resource allocations in M-form organizations due to influence activities by division managers that skew capital budgets in their favor. Corporate headquarters receives two types of signals about investment opportunities: private signals that can be... View Details

Keywords: Capital Markets; Resource Allocation; Business Processes; Capital Budgeting; Business Headquarters; Investment; Opportunities; Cost; Value; Motivation and Incentives; Equity