Publications

May 2012 (Revised September 2012)
Case

HTC Corp. in 2012

By: David B. Yoffie, Juan Alcacer and Renee Kim

After 15 years of remarkable achievements, Taiwan-based HTC Corp. faced difficult times by 2012. CEO Peter Chou, who drove HTC's transformation from an unknown manufacturer of PDAs for other companies to a well-known global player in smartphones, faced an uncertain and... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility; Telecommunications; Brand Management; Economies Of Scale And Scope; Market Positioning; Intellectual Property Management; Technological Innovation; Information Infrastructure; Competitive Strategy; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Product Positioning; Telecommunications Industry; Taiwan

01 Dec 2000
News

Opening Doors: Inside the World of Museum Management

be quite so literal, museums across the country are working hard to shed their stodgy images and appeal to a broader spectrum of visitors with blockbuster exhibitions, well-stocked gift shops, remodeled cafés, and, in some cases, even singles happy hours. Extensive... View Details

Keywords: Susan Young; museums; marketing; management; nonprofits; education; facilities; Internet; Museums, Historical Sites, and Similar Institutions; Arts, Entertainment; Advertising, Public Relations, and Related Services; Professional Services

March 2015 (Revised December 2016)
Case

American Well: The DTC Decision

By: Elie Ofek and Natalie Kindred

In late 2013, telehealth company American Well, which developed a digital platform that allowed patients to conduct online medical consultations with physicians, is considering pursuing a direct-to-consumer (DTC) strategy. Founded in 2006, American Well had, to date,... View Details

07 Apr 2020
Research & Ideas

What Customers Need to Hear from You During the COVID Crisis

As the COVID-19 virus pandemic began to sweep across the world, Doug McMillon and his team at Walmart watched in horror. Suddenly, they realized, tomorrow would be nothing like “business as usual” and everything in the company’s marketing... View Details

Keywords: by Jill Avery and Richard Edelman

28 Mar 2023
Research & Ideas

The FDA’s Speedy Drug Approvals Are Safe: A Win-Win for Patients and Pharma Innovation

Stern and her colleagues’ research found that BTD drugs spent 23 percent less time in the final stage of clinical trials as compared to a matched set of drugs that came to market just before the BTD program... View Details

Keywords: by Kasandra Brabaw; Pharmaceutical

September 1991 (Revised January 1997)
Case

Manzana Insurance: Fruitvale Branch (Abridged)

By: Steven C. Wheelwright

Deals with performance assessment and improvement of a service operation in the insurance industry, a market that is highly sensitive to response time. Two branch offices in direct competition are described, and the impact of response time on performance is suggested.... View Details

Keywords: Business Offices; Decision Choices and Conditions; Time Management; Service Operations; Performance Evaluation; Competition; Insurance Industry

21 Oct 2022
Research & Ideas

People Trust Business, But Expect CEOs to Drive Social Change

Public trust in business remains relatively unshaken amid economic turbulence and a lingering pandemic, even as faith in the media and government falters, but leaders could do more to address social issues, a new global opinion survey shows. However, not everyone... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

David E. Bell

David E. Bell is a Baker Foundation Professor at HBS. He has taught marketing many times in the MBA program including as course head.

During his career at HBS, David has taught a variety of other courses to both MBAs and executives, including risk... View Details

Keywords: marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry; marketing industry

01 Mar 2023
News

3-Minute Briefing: Qiao Ma (MBA 2010)

My dad was an engineering professor, but his true passion was the stock market. When I was six or seven years old, he brought me to a local brokerage office in Guangzhou. It was the early 1990s and the room was packed with men, all smoking. People cheered when the live... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; stock market; investment; finance; Australia; China; Asia; strategy; Securities, Commodities, and Other Financial Investments; Finance

November 2019 (Revised April 2021)
Technical Note

Rechargeable Batteries, 2017: Gigafactory Wars in the Offing?

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In 2017, the global market for rechargeable lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries was 126 gigawatt-hours (GWh) valued at $37 billion, growing by $10 billion in two years. Once confined largely to consumer electronics and appliances, the rapid increase in demand was spurred by... View Details

23 Dec 2019
Blog Post

Taking the Risk to Start a Company at Business School

“For me, attending HBS was about choosing a time to take a risk on myself. It sets you up to take a chance and start a company,” says Julie Johnson, Co-Founder and CEO Armored Things, HBS 2017. When Julie Johnson applied to Harvard... View Details

Summer 2013
Article

Real Estate Prices During the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression

By: Tom Nicholas and Anna Scherbina

Using new data on market-based transactions we construct real estate price indexes for Manhattan between 1920 and 1939. During the 1920s prices reached their highest level in the third quarter of 1929 before falling by 67% at the end of 1932 and hovering around that... View Details

Keywords: Property; Market Transactions; Price; Value; Financial Crisis; Investment; Real Estate Industry; New York (state, US)

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May 2002 (Revised May 2003)
Case

Performance Indicator

Performance Indicator is a start-up that holds patents on the use of color-change technology to indicate when golf balls have been damaged by exposure to water. Because golfers put two to five used golf balls into play for every one new ball they buy, the used golf... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Patents; Entrepreneurship; Sports; Sports Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry

Ashley Whillans is the Volpert Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where she teaches the Motivation and Incentives course to MBA students. Professor Whillans earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of... View Details

01 Sep 2020
News

Action Plan: Finding Fluency

also lets me daydream about the trip to Paris I’m going to get back on the calendar someday.” Dunaway, the chief marketing officer for Duolingo, is not alone in her desire to use her time in quarantine for... View Details

Keywords: April White; foreign language; education and technology; digital marketing; change management; COVID-19; Educational Services

January 2015 (Revised April 2015)
Case

Zeal: Launching Personalized and Social Learning

By: John J-H Kim and Christine S. An

Set in 2014, this case follows John Danner and his team at Zeal as they consider their product development strategy. In February 2013, serial entrepreneurs John Danner and Sanjay Noronha co-found Zeal, an education technology start up providing a web-based, mobile... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Education Technology; MVP; Product Development; Product Market Fit; Monetization Strategy; SaaS Business Models; Education; Personalized Learning

Article

Small States in an Age of Empires: The Duchy of Parma's Colonial Moment, 1750–1770

By: Arnaud Orain and Sophus A. Reinert

Often thought of as the "Athens of Italy" during the Enlightenment, and as a microcosm of the Italian peninsula and of the eighteenth century alike, the Duchy of Parma played a unique role in the culture and politics of the age. This essay focuses on its "colonial... View Details

Keywords: Duchy Of Parma; French Empire; Internal Colonization; Enlightenment; Political Economy; Small States In World Markets; Guillaume Dutillot; Étienne-François De Choiseul

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October 2000
Background Note

Sustaining Value

By: Robert J. Dolan

Describes the challenges a firm faces in building and sustaining a value proposition over time. Describes major ways in which the marketing environment changes over time and the methods a firm can use to protect its market position. View Details

Keywords: Price; Marketing Strategy; Competition; Situation or Environment