Publications

July 2007 (Revised March 2009)
Case

Berkshire Partners: Purchase of Rival Company (A)

Berkshire Partners, a private equity firm in Boston, was pleased with their recent investment in the Holmes Group, a home comfort consumer electronics company. The portfolio company was exceeding key financial targets and Berkshire Partners was confident that it would... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Capital Structure; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment; Acquisition; Financial Services Industry; Boston

October 2018 (Revised July 2023)
Case

The Boston Beer Company (A): New CEO

By: Christina R. Wing and Marco Iansiti

In 1984, when the Boston Beer Company’s Samuel Adams Boston Lager was first sold, founder Jim Koch had helped ignite a craft beer movement by making small-batch premium beers in an era of industry consolidation. By 2018, Boston Beer was a publicly traded company that... View Details

Keywords: Beer/brewing Industry; Succession; Leadership; Change; Supply Chain; Change Management; Entrepreneurship; Supply Chain Management; Management Succession; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; Boston

16 Jan 2019
News

New Research Reveals Caregiving for Elders Impacts Employee Performance

12 May 2021
Working Paper Summaries

Accounting for Product Impact in the Water Utilities Industry

Keywords: by George Serafeim and Katie Trinh

2019
White Paper

Impact-Weighted Financial Accounts: The Missing Piece for an Impact Economy

By: George Serafeim, T. Robert Zochowski and Jennifer Downing

Reimagining capitalism is an imperative. We need to create a more inclusive and sustainable form of capitalism that works for every person and the planet. Massive environmental damage, growing income and wealth disparity, stress, and depression within developed... View Details

Keywords: Impact-Weighted Accounts; IWAI; Background; Economic Systems; Economy; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Measurement and Metrics; Financial Statements

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October 2024
Case

SWEN Blue Ocean: Impact Investing Goes to Sea

By: Vikram S Gandhi and David Allen

In August 2023, SWEN Blue Ocean, a €170 million impact fund that invested in startups contributing to ocean sustainability, faced a critical investment decision. Part of SWEN Capital Partners, an €8 billion, Paris-based private equity fund, Blue Ocean was co-founded in... View Details

Keywords: Communication Technology; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Finance; Capital; Venture Capital; Private Equity; Investment; Investment Funds; Science-Based Business; Financial Services Industry; France; Paris; Italy

03 Jul 2017
News

Will shareholder pressure reshape company policies?

01 Oct 2021
News

From Scholarship to Life-Saving Impact

prices and expand access to life-saving therapies,” she says. After college, Rabah joined the biotech company Sio Gene Therapies, where she had the opportunity to speak with parents of children with Tay-Sachs disease, an ultra-rare... View Details

01 Mar 2017
News

Students Forecast Climate Change’s Impact

Digital Initiative to facilitate online and offline conversations around classroom topics. Responses ranged from oil companies to ice-cream makers and almost everything in between. We’ve excerpted a few of them here. Shake Shack Data... View Details

Keywords: Dan Morrell

September 2009 (Revised May 2011)
Supplement

Acumen Fund: Measurement in Impact Investing (B)

By: Alnoor Ebrahim and V. Kasturi Rangan

As Acumen Fund, a global venture philanthropy firm, moves forward with an investment portfolio exceeding $22 million, it runs into two critical measurement problems. First, how should it track the performance of each investment when its interest is not just the bottom... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Investment Portfolio; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Standards; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Performance Evaluation; Social Enterprise; Competition; Financial Services Industry; Kenya

15 Oct 2019
News

Advancing China’s Impact Investing Ecosystem

As a second-year student, Cissy Chen (MBA 2019) worked with Jingsheng Huang, managing executive director of the Harvard Center Shanghai, to organize an impact investing conference in Shanghai. (photo courtesy Harvard Center Shanghai) As a... View Details

Web

Case Studies - Social Impact Collaboratory

the VELUX Foundations of Denmark have decided to allocate a small percentage of their investment portfolio to impact investments. Cambridge Associates, one of the leading investment advisory firms in the... View Details

July 1992 (Revised January 1995)
Case

An Investment Linked to Commodity Futures

By: Kenneth A. Froot, Jay O. Light and Nancy Donohue

Describes a new investment which is linked to an index of commmodity futures prices. Explores how the index is constructed, how commodity futures (as opposed to other futures and spot prices) behave, and what the portfolio impacts of such an investment might be. View Details

Keywords: Commodity Market; Investment Management; Portfolio Management; Financial Markets; Investment; Investment Portfolio; Futures and Commodity Futures

There is growing interest in impact investing, the idea of deploying capital to obtain both financial and social or environmental returns. Examination of every equity investment made by the International Finance Corporation, one of the largest and... View Details

05 Nov 2019
Blog Post

Environmental Change and Ground-level Impact

looking through their investment portfolios is an interesting way to find early-stage companies working in the clean energy space. It’s also easier to reach out and ask questions as a student—people are... View Details

October 20, 2020
Article

Expanding AI's Impact with Organizational Learning

By: Sam Ransbotham, Shervin Khodabandeh, David Kiron, François Candelon, Michael Chu and Burt LaFountain

Most companies developing AI capabilities have yet to gain significant financial benefits from their efforts. Only when organizations add the ability to learn with AI do significant benefits become likely. View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Learning; Adoption