Publications

April 1998 (Revised July 2005)
Case

Acquisition of Consolidated Rail Corporation (A), The

By: Benjamin C. Esty, Lori A. Flees and Mathew M Millett

On October 15, 1996, Virginia-based CSX and Pennsylvania-based Consolidated Rail (Conrail), the first and third largest railroads in the eastern United States, announced their intent to merge in a friendly deal worth $8.3 billion. This deal was part of an industry-wide... View Details

Keywords: Valuation; Mergers and Acquisitions; Decisions; Contracts; Rail Industry; United States

Research Summary

Distributed Innovation in Open Systems—The Role of Modularity

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

Distributed innovation in open systems is an important trend in the modern global economy. As education levels rise and communication costs fall, more people have the means and motivation to innovate. Supply chains now stretch around the world as firms outsource... View Details

16 Apr 2001
Research & Ideas

Breaking the Code of Change

expressed as shareholder value. Its focus is on formal structure and systems. It is driven from the top with extensive help from consultants and financial incentives. Change is planned and programmatic. Theory O has as its purpose the... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Beer & Nitin Nohria

2012
Book

Strategic IQ: Creating Smarter Corporations

By: John R. Wells

In today's world, only the smartest survive. The competitive landscape is littered with graves of well-known firms whose revenues, profits and stock prices rose for decades until they suddenly imploded.
In fast-changing business environments, firms must adapt... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Competition; Business Growth and Maturation; Adaptation; Corporate Strategy; Decision Making; Innovation and Invention

2009
Case

The North America Environmental Fund (NAEF)

By: Roberto Charvel, Fernando Fabre and T. Putimahtama

NAEF was the first VC fund created in Latin America. It was also the first fund to focus on green technologies. The fund and its managers confronted several issues regarding the under-developed governance and cultural structures required for succesful VC investments. View Details

Keywords: Clean Tech; Emerging Market; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Energy; Entrepreneurship; Finance; Governance; Technology; Green Technology Industry; Financial Services Industry; Latin America; North and Central America

Research Summary

Research Summary

By: Ranjay Gulati

My research has focused on interorganizational relationships, with an emphasis on interfirm strategic alliances, which include voluntary exchange or co-development of products, technologies, or services between firms. I examine the factors that influence the... View Details

12 Mar 2006
Research & Ideas

New Research Explores Multi-Sided Markets

Andrei Hagiu is on the vanguard of a new field of business research that explores the dynamics of multi-sided markets. Although these markets have been around a long time, they have not really been recognized as entities unique from other... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Technology

October 2009
Article

Managing Risk in the New World

By: Robert S. Kaplan, Anette Mikes, Robert Simons, Peter Tufano and Michael Hofmann Jr.

Five experts gathered recently to discuss the future of enterprise risk management: Kaplan, the Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, who with his colleague David Norton developed the balanced scorecard; Mikes, an assistant professor at HBS who studies... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Financial Crisis; Capital Structure; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Risk Management

Find at Harvard

03 Jan 2011
Research & Ideas

Most Popular Articles of 2010

Judging by the most-read articles and faculty working papers over the last year, our readers continue to be fascinated by the emergence of social networks and their potential impacts on business and management. Another developing area of... View Details

Keywords: by Staff

29 Jul 2013
Research & Ideas

A Manager’s Moral Obligation to Preserve Capitalism

through the writings of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek among other foundational thinkers. "Many economists think of it as a positivist system that does not impose morality upon society, but this is not the case," says Harvard View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

February 2008 (Revised September 2010)
Case

Enterprise Culture in Chinese History: Zhang Jian and the Dasheng Cotton Mills

By: Elisabeth Koll

This case focuses on the legal and managerial evolution of limited-liability firms in China, using the example of the Dasheng cotton mills in Nantong near Shanghai. Dasheng, one of the earliest and most successful industrial enterprises in pre-war China, was founded by... View Details

Keywords: History; Law; Organizational Culture; Family Ownership; State Ownership; Corporate Governance; Financial Crisis; Business and Government Relations; Entrepreneurship; Change; Manufacturing Industry; Shanghai; China

07 Jul 2008
Research & Ideas

Innovation Corrupted: How Managers Can Avoid Another Enron

Legacy of Enron's Collapse (Harvard University Press), the devastation of Enron was total—yet there is much that business today can gain from a postmortem of the once-triumphant company. Salter had access to an extensive library of public... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Energy; Utilities

January 2002
Exercise

Socrates, Inc.

By: Alan D. MacCormack and Kerry Herman

Socrates, Inc., a provider of e-learning tools and technologies to educational institutions and, potentially, corporations, must decide which of several opportunities to pursue next and which priorities to focus on in terms of better structuring the firm's processes... View Details

Keywords: Business Plan; Business Startups; Internet and the Web; Opportunities; Business Processes; Organizational Structure; Decision Choices and Conditions; Organizational Design; Education Industry; Information Technology Industry

Find at Harvard

June 20, 2013
Article

The Tyranny of Minority Shareholders

By: Josh Baron and Henry Foley

The article discusses challenges arising from minority ownership in the context of the proposed Empire State Building IPO. It emphasizes the complexities that minority shareholders can introduce in business decisions when families take their assets public. The article... View Details

Keywords: Business and Shareholder Relations; Ownership; Family Ownership; Corporate Governance; Power and Influence

Read Now

March 2023
Case

Roche: ESG and Access to Healthcare

By: George Serafeim, Susanna Gallani and Benjamin Maletta

In May 2022, Roche Group, one of the largest healthcare companies in the world, hosted its first ESG investor event focused exclusively on its efforts to impact access to healthcare. While Roche had recently set an ambitious goal to double the number of patients that... View Details

10 May 2012
Working Paper Summaries

The Flattened Firm—Not as Advertised

Keywords: by Julie Wulf

05 Mar 2019
First Look

New Research and Ideas, March 5, 2019

Organizational Challenge of Pursuing Joint Social and Financial Goals: Social Enterprise as a Laboratory to Understand Hybrid Organizing By: Battilana, Julie Abstract— While in recent decades the social and business sectors have evolved... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

March 2008
Article

Linguistic Network Configurations: Management of Innovation in Design-intensive Firms

By: Claudio Dell'Era, Alessio Marchesi and Roberto Verganti

In today's business and academic arenas, design is more and more viewed as an important strategic resource. In fact, over the last couple of years, we have seen a real explosion in business and research literature that see scholars and companies alike trying to... View Details

Keywords: Networks; Design; Innovation and Management; Product Development