Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,500)
- Faculty Publications (497)
- March 2012 (Revised October 2012)
- Case
Gary Hirshberg and Stonyfield Farm
By: Nancy F. Koehn, Nora N. Khan and Elizabeth W. Legris
Gary Hirshberg and Stonyfield Farm is the story of one entrepreneur's vision and journey to create a market-leading, environmentally responsible business founded on the principles of product quality, organizational alignment, and sustainability. A former environmental... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurs; Values; Development Stage Enterprises; Innovation; Management By Objective; Experimentation; Emerging Technologies; Mission and Purpose; Management Style; Values and Beliefs; Social Issues; Organizational Culture; Environmental Sustainability; Business Growth and Maturation; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Innovation and Invention; Food and Beverage Industry; New Hampshire
- March 2012
- Article
Does America Really Need Manufacturing?
By: Gary P. Pisano and Willy C. Shih
Too many U.S. companies base decisions about where to locate production largely on narrow financial criteria. They don't consider whether keeping manufacturing at home makes more sense strategically or take into account the impact it might have on their ability to... View Details
- 2012
- Chapter
Schumpeterian Competition and Diseconomies of Scope: Illustrations from the Histories of Microsoft and IBM
By: Timothy F. Bresnahan, Shane Greenstein and Rebecca M. Henderson
We address a longstanding question about the causes of creative destruction. Dominant incumbent firms, long successful in an existing technology, are often much less successful in new technological eras. This is puzzling, since a cursory analysis would suggest that... View Details
- January 2012
- Case
Taikang Insurance: Standing Out In China's Crowded Insurance Market
By: William C. Kirby and Tracy Yuen Manty
As a joint-stock insurance company in China, with both state-owned enterprises and foreign firms as investors, Taikang Insurance was becoming a force in the industry. It not only competed with well-entrenched state-owned rivals, but it was also seen as an... View Details
- December 2011
- Article
Did R&D Firms Used to Patent? Evidence from the First Innovation Surveys
By: Tom Nicholas
Matching 2,777 R&D firms in surveys conducted by the National Research Council between 1921 and 1938 with U.S. patents reveals that 59 percent of all firms and 88 percent of publicly-traded firms patented. These shares are much higher than those observed for modern R&D... View Details
- December 2011
- Article
Do Powerful Politicians Cause Corporate Downsizing?
By: Lauren Cohen, Joshua Coval and Christopher J. Malloy
This paper employs a new empirical approach for identifying the impact of government spending on the private sector. Our key innovation is to use changes in congressional committee chairmanship as a source of exogenous variation in state-level federal expenditures. In... View Details
- November – December 2011
- Article
Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation
By: Carliss Baldwin and Eric von Hippel
In this paper, we assess the economic viability of innovation by producers relative to two increasingly important alternative models: innovations by single-user individuals or firms and open collaborative innovation. We analyze the design costs and architectures and... View Details
Keywords: Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Design; Cost; Communication; Competition; Economy; Research; Policy; Practice
- Fall 2011
- Article
A Brief Postwar History of U.S. Consumer Finance
By: Gunnar Trumbull and Peter Tufano
In this brief history of U.S. consumer finance since World War II, the sector is defined based on the functions delivered by firms in the form of payments, savings and investing, borrowing, managing risk, and providing advice. Evidence of major trends in consumption,... View Details
- July – August 2011
- Article
What Factors Drive Analyst Forecasts?
A firm's competitive environment, its strategic choices, and its internal capabilities are considered important determinants of its future performance. Yet there is little evidence on whether analysts' forecasts of firm performance actually reflect any of these factors... View Details
- June 2011 (Revised August 2011)
- Case
Colgate-Palmolive: Staying Ahead in Oral Care
By: Rebecca M. Henderson and Ryan Johnson
In 2011, Colgate-Palmolive (Colgate) was the global leader in oral care, with a dominant market share lead in toothpaste and a growing presence in toothbrushes and mouthwash. However, the firm faced stiff competition with perennial rivals P&G increasing their focus on... View Details
- 2011
- Book
Accelerating Energy Innovation: Insights from Multiple Sectors
By: Rebecca Henderson and Richard G. Newell
Accelerating energy innovation could be an important part of an effective response to the threat of climate change. Written by a stellar group of experts in the field, this book complements existing research on the subject with an exploration of the role that public... View Details
- April 2011
- Article
Private Equity and Long-Run Investment: The Case of Innovation
By: Josh Lerner, Morten Sorensen and Per Stromberg
A long-standing controversy is whether LBOs relieve managers from short-term pressures of dispersed shareholders, or whether LBO funds themselves are driven by short-term profit motives and sacrifice long-term growth to boost short-term performance. We investigate 495... View Details
- March 2011 (Revised March 2012)
- Case
Fraunhofer: Innovation in Germany
By: Diego A. Comin, J. Gunnar Trumbull and Kerry Yang
Fraunhofer is one of the largest applied research organizations in the world. With 17,000 employees and a 1.6 billion euros budget, Fraunhofer has 60 institutes in Germany that cover most fields of science. The case examines the consequences that Fraunhofer has for the... View Details
- March 2011 (Revised February 2012)
- Case
Innovation and Growth at Actelion Ltd.
By: Gary P. Pisano, Daniela Beyersdorfer and Ruth Dittrich
In late 2010, Jean-Paul Clozel, CEO of the Swiss biotech pharmaceuticals firm Actelion, looks back on a successful decade. The small venture that he had started with a few of his scientist colleagues in the late 1990s to discover novel medicine in a research-driven... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Do Powerful Politicians Cause Corporate Downsizing?
By: Lauren H. Cohen, Joshua D. Coval and Christopher J. Malloy
This paper employs a new empirical approach for identifying the impact of government spending on the private sector. Our key innovation is to use changes in congressional committee chairmanship as a source of exogenous variation in state-level federal expenditures. In... View Details
- February 2011 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
Hindustan Unilever's 'Pureit' Water Purifier
By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Mona Sinha
The case asks students to formulate a strategy to respond to various competitive threats to its Pureit Water purifier, launched in 2008, targeted at millions of low-income Indian consumers who did not have access to safe drinking water. The case describes in detail the... View Details
- January 2011
- Case
AIC Netbooks: Optimizing Product Assembly
By: Steven C. Wheelwright and Sunru Yong
AIC Systems, located in Taichung, Taiwan, is a manufacturer of printed circuit boards, primarily for motherboards and video cards for personal computers. The firm is considered an original design manufacturer (ODM) and takes an active role in innovating and designing... View Details
- January – February 2011
- Article
Creating Shared Value
By: Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer
The capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business has been criticized as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely thought to be prospering at the expense of their communities. Trust in business has fallen to new... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
A Brief Postwar History of U.S. Consumer Finance
By: Andrea Ryan, Gunnar Trumbull and Peter Tufano
This article describes the consumer finance sector in the US since World War II. We first define the sector in terms of the functions delivered by firms (payments, savings/investing, borrowing, managing risk, and providing advice.) We provide time series evidence on... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations
By: Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr
We study how exploration versus exploitation innovations impact economic growth through a tractable endogenous growth framework that contains multiple innovation sizes, multi-product firms, and entry/exit. Firms invest in exploration R&D to acquire new product lines... View Details