Publications

05 Aug 2020
News

Rethink How You Do Business in Order to Keep Being Innovative

20 Oct 2021
News

Drive Innovation with Better Decision-Making

December 2014 (Revised August 2015)
Case

Muñoz Group: Sustaining Global Vertical Integration Through Innovation

By: Jose B. Alvarez and Annelena Lobb

Muñoz Group, which supplied supermarket chains and food distribution chains around the world with fruit, flowers, juice and ice cream, was at a strategic crossroads in 2014. CEO Alvaro Muñoz had to choose the best way to achieve profit goals and provide his company... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Supply Chain; Retail; Agribusiness Industry; Globalized Firms and Management; Supply Chain Management; Competitive Advantage; Vertical Integration; Profit; Innovation and Invention; Retail Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; North and Central America

Educators

Dec 2001
Other Presentation

Innovation Lecture

By: Michael E. Porter

In his lecture, Professor Porter gave a sharp analysis of the Dutch economy. His message was that the Netherlands must watch its step because it is losing momentum as a knowledge-based economy. Not because it is performing badly, but because other countries are doing... View Details

Keywords: Economics; Netherlands

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01 Sep 2013
News

HBS's Unique Economic Model

Rick Melnick Harvard Business School is renowned for educating leaders who make a difference in the world. Less well known is the economic model that enables HBS to do this—model that is unique in higher... View Details

Keywords: Melnick, Richard; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

November 2000
Case

Model E: An Incubated Enterprise

By: Myra M. Hart

Provides a close-up view of an entrepreneurial search for opportunity, the role of incubators in the process, and the development of a viable business concept. Also depicts the changes made to the business concept as new people (with new expertise and experience) are... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Transformation; Entrepreneurship; Human Resources; Problems and Challenges; Internet and the Web

September 2010
Article

Strategies to Fight Ad-sponsored Rivals

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Feng Zhu

We analyze the optimal strategy of a high-quality incumbent that faces a low-quality ad-sponsored competitor. In addition to competing through adjustments of tactical variables such as price or the number of ads a product carries, we allow the incumbent to consider... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Business Models; Tactics; Pricing; Business Model; Advertising; Competition; Quality; Price; Product Marketing

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

Keywords: Business Ventures; Decision Choices and Conditions; Economic Growth; Investment; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Size; Research and Development; United States

09 Mar 2009
Research & Ideas

How to Revive Health-Care Innovation

effective solution. In the past, business model innovation was common in health care. When the technological enablers for the diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases... View Details

Keywords: by Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman, M.D. M.D. & Jason Hwang; Health

May 2014
Article

Making 'Freemium' Work: Many Start-ups Fail to Recognize the Challenges of This Popular Business Model

By: Vineet Kumar

The article discusses the "freemium" business model, which is used by some Internet businesses and smartphone application developers to give users free basic features of a digital product and access to premium functionality for a subscription fee. The discussion topics... View Details

Keywords: Freemium; Startups; Product Design; Business Model; Marketing; Business Startups

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Article

Financial Innovation and Endogenous Growth

By: Luc Laeven, Ross Levine and Stelios Michalopoulos

Is financial innovation necessary for sustaining economic growth? To address this question, we build a Schumpeterian model in which entrepreneurs earn profits by inventing better goods, and profit-maximizing financiers arise to screen entrepreneurs. The model has two... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Economic Growth

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September 21, 2018
Article

Innovation Should Be a Top Priority for Boards. So Why Isn't It?

By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng and Boris Groysberg

Corporate directors and executives alike recognize that today’s pace of change continues to accelerate and that firms need to innovate to stay ahead. But are boards doing enough to support innovation, as they should? We conducted a survey of over 5,000 board members... View Details

Keywords: Board Of Directors; Innovation; Technology; Innovation and Invention; Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Business Strategy

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April 2019
Supplement

Innovation and Business in Emerging Markets: Mavath R. Chandran

By: G. Jones, Tarun Khanna and Nataliya Langbird Wright

April 2019
Supplement

Innovation and Business in Emerging Markets: Syed Babar Ali

By: G. Jones, Tarun Khanna and Nataliya Langbird Wright

May 2021
Supplement

Hello Alfred: Come Home Happy — Operating the Business Model Exercise, Instructor Version

By: Joseph B. Fuller and Christopher Payton

On a mission to "automate the on-demand economy," Harvard Business School classmates Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck launched Hello Alfred in 2013 to provide subscribers with an "Alfred" to complete various chores for a monthly fee. In early 2016, the company has built... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Internet and the Web; Business Startups; Service Operations; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Service Industry; New York (city, NY); Boston

21 Jun 2016
News

Case Study: Should You Adjust Your Business Model for a Major Customer?

TopCoder Innovation Series - Professor Karim Lakhani on Open Innovation

Professor Lakhani - Harvard Business School - shares his thoughts on the extreme value outcomes born from Open Innovation competitions, Big Data opportunities and the TopCoder... View Details

July 2018 (Revised December 2018)
Case

SOFWERX: Innovation at U.S. Special Operations Command

By: Herman Leonard, Mitchell Weiss, Jin Hyun Paik and Kerry Herman

James “Hondo” Geurts, the Acquisition Executive for U.S. Special Operations Command, was in the middle of his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. The questions had a common theme: how... View Details

Educators

November–December 2018
Article

Slack Time and Innovation

By: Ajay Agrawal, Christian Catalini, Avi Goldfarb and Hong Luo

Traditional innovation models assume that new ideas are developed up to the point where the benefit of the marginal project is just equal to the cost. Because labor is a key input to innovation when the opportunity cost of time is lower, such as during school breaks or... View Details

Keywords: Crowdfunding; Slack Time; Innovation and Invention; Labor; Projects; Complexity; Value