Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,397)
- Faculty Publications (723)
- August 2015 (Revised January 2017)
- Technical Note
From Correlation to Causation
By: Feng Zhu and Karim R. Lakhani
To make sound business decisions, managers must be comfortable with the concepts of correlation and causation. This background note provides an overview of correlation and causation using examples and explains why the former does not imply the latter. It also describes... View Details
- August 2015 (Revised May 2017)
- Case
TSG Hoffenheim: Football in the Age of Analytics
By: Feng Zhu, Karim R. Lakhani, Sascha L. Schmidt and Kerry Herman
In 2015, Dietmar Hopp, owner of Germany's Bundesliga football team TSG Hoffenheim and co-founder of the global enterprise software company SAP, was considering how to ensure long-term sustainability and competitiveness for TSG Hoffenheim. While historically a small... View Details
- August 2015 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
Bridj and the Business of Urban Mobility (A): Developing a New Model
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Daniel Fox
Bridj, a Boston startup that provides Big Data-powered, "pop-up" bus routes that respond to transportation demand, has been in operation for a little over a year and has recently launched service in Washington, D.C., its second market. Despite media acclaim and... View Details
Keywords: Startup; Startup Management; Big Data; Smart Transit; Stakeholder Engagement; Stakeholder Management; Urban Vehicle; Mobility; Mass Transit; Uber; Government Relations; Technological Innovation; Analytics and Data Science; Entrepreneurship; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Transportation; Business Startups; Management; Business and Government Relations; Transportation Industry; Boston; District of Columbia
- August 2015
- Article
Hospital Board and Management Practices Are Strongly Related to Hospital Performance on Clinical Quality Metrics
By: Thomas C Tsai, Ashish K. Jha, Atul A. Gawande, Robert S. Huckman, Nicholas Bloom and Raffaella Sadun
National policies to improve health care quality have largely focused on clinical provider outcomes and, more recently, payment reform. Yet the association between hospital leadership and quality, although crucial to driving quality improvement, has not been explored... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy
By: Ramana Nanda, Ken Younge and Lee Fleming
We document three facts related to innovation and entrepreneurship in renewable energy. Using data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, we first show that patenting in renewable energy remains highly concentrated in a few large energy firms. In 2009, the top 20... View Details
- Article
Matching Firms, Managers, and Incentives
By: Oriana Bandiera, Luigi Guiso, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun
We combine unique administrative and survey data to study the match between firms and managers. The data include manager characteristics, firm characteristics, detailed measures of managerial practices, and outcomes for the firm and the manager. A parsimonious model of... View Details
- 2015
- Article
Testing Strategy with Multiple Performance Measures: Evidence from a Balanced Scorecard at Store24
We analyze balanced scorecard data from a convenience store chain, Store24, during the implementation of an innovative, but ultimately unsuccessful, strategy. Quarterly strategic reviews, based in part on the firm's balanced scorecard, led executives at Store24 to... View Details
- June 2015 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
Uber and Stakeholders: Managing a New Way of Riding
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Daniel Fox
By 2015, technological innovations—the smartphone and the advanced data connectivity that enabled it—created new opportunities for people to move around cities quickly and conveniently without owning a car, via car-sharing services like Zipcar or new ride-sharing... View Details
Keywords: Uber; Ride-sharing; Sharing Economy; Transportation Network Company; Leadership And Change Management; Stakeholder Management; Managing Change; Leadership; Regulation; Smartphones; Web-enabled Application; Disruptive Technology; Startup Management; Entrepreneurship; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Transportation; Mobile Technology; Transportation Industry; Technology Industry
- May–June 2015
- Article
Big Data: Big Deal or Big Hype?
By: Sunil Gupta
Google Flu Trends article of November 2008 heralded a new age for big data where it is possible to leverage the vast amount of data to speak for itself, without theory or expert knowledge of the subject matter. However, in a short span the pendulum swung from big data... View Details
- Article
Does Management Matter in Schools?
By: Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We collect data on operations, targets and human resources management practices in over 1,800 schools educating 15-year-olds in eight countries. Overall, we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. The UK, Sweden,... View Details
Keywords: Management; Education; Business Strategy; Education Industry; Germany; Sweden; India; Canada; Italy; Brazil; United Kingdom; United States
- April 2015
- Case
Carolinas HealthCare System: Consumer Analytics
By: John A. Quelch and Margaret L. Rodriguez
In 2014, Dr. Michael Dulin, chief clinical officer for analytics and outcomes research and head of the Dickson Advanced Analytics (DA2) group at Carolinas HealthCare System (CHS), successfully unified all analytics talent and resources into one group over a three year... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Firms and the Economics of Skilled Immigration
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr and William F. Lincoln
Firms play a central role in the selection, sponsorship, and employment of skilled immigrants entering the United States for work through programs like the H-1B visa. This role has not been widely recognized in the literature, and the data to better understand it have... View Details
- March 2015
- Case
BOLT: Seed Venture Capital Firm
By: William A. Sahlman and Robert F. White
BOLT is a different kind of seed venture capital firm built to serve the needs of early-stage startups at the intersection of hardware and software.
In the past decade, the cost of entrepreneurial experimentation has dropped dramatically, particularly in web... View Details
In the past decade, the cost of entrepreneurial experimentation has dropped dramatically, particularly in web... View Details
- March 2015 (Revised June 2015)
- Case
Medalogix
By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Matthew G. Preble
This case examines an exciting new approach to health care that will help care providers identify when hospice services are the appropriate type of care for patients. The company, Medalogix, already has a product on the market that uses a proprietary algorithm to... View Details
Keywords: Health Care; Health Care Entrepreneurship; Health Care Services; Implementing Strategy; Dissemination; Innovation; Market Selection; Health; Health Care and Treatment; Analytics and Data Science; Marketing Strategy; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Health Industry; United States
- February 2015 (Revised September 2017)
- Supplement
Omar Selim: Building a Values-Based Asset Management Firm (B)
By: George Serafeim, Rebecca Henderson and Shannon Gombos
The case describes the decision of Omar Selim to set up Arabesque as an independent organization and how he organized Arabesque to use both financial and environmental, social and governance (ESG) data in order to deliver performance for its clients. View Details
- February 2015 (Revised June 2016)
- Case
AltSchool: School Reimagined
By: John J-H Kim, Kyla Wilkes and Christine S. An
Max Ventilla and his team launches in 2013 AltSchool, a new network of tech-savvy independent K-8 "micro-schools." AltSchool is born out of Ventilla's frustration with the education options available for his young daughter. During his search, Ventilla comes to the... View Details
Keywords: Education Technology; School Models; Product Development; Entrepreneurship; Talent Development And Retention; Social Impact Investment; Information Technology; Business Model; Education; Business Startups; Customization and Personalization; Growth and Development Strategy; Education Industry; United States
- 2015
- Working Paper
Crowdsourced Digital Goods and Firm Productivity: Evidence from Open Source Software
By: Frank Nagle
As firms increasingly rely on crowdsourced digital goods, understanding their impact on productivity becomes critical. This study measures the firm-level productivity impact of one such good, non-pecuniary (free) open source software (OSS). The results show a... View Details
- December 2014
- Supplement
Interview with Anders Byriel and Mads Nygård: Kvadrat
By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott
Anders Byriel, CEO of the family-owned Danish textiles company, Kvadrat, and Mads Nygård, SVP of Strategy & Organization at Kvadrat, discuss the challenges and opportunities faced by the company. They elaborate on areas covered in the case including: 1.) Asia; 2.) Soft... View Details
- December 2014 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
Discovery Limited
By: Michael E. Porter, Mark R. Kramer and Aldo Sesia
Discovery Ltd. is a South Africa-based insurance company. Started in the early 1990s, Discovery used behavioral economics and data collection to innovate in the health care insurance industry. Its founder Adrian Gore believed that the company's products needed to not... View Details
- December 2014
- Article
The Discipline of Business Experimentation
By: Stefan Thomke and Jim Manzi
The data you already have can't tell you how customers will react to innovations. To discover if a truly novel concept will succeed, you must subject it to a rigorous experiment. In most companies, tests do not adhere to scientific and statistical principles. As a... View Details