Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(120,121)
- Faculty Publications (102)
- January 2014 (Revised July 2016)
- Case
Samuel Slater & Francis Cabot Lowell: The Factory System in U.S. Cotton Manufacturing
By: Tom Nicholas and Matthew Guilford
At the time of the American War of Independence (1776-1783) and for several decades after it, Great Britain dominated the global production of cotton textiles. In fact, Britain became so dominant in textile manufacturing and trading that Manchester, its industrial... View Details
- September 2013
- Article
Prizes, Publicity, and Patents: Non-Monetary Awards as a Mechanism to Encourage Innovation
By: Petra Moser and Tom Nicholas
This paper exploits the selection of prize-winning technologies among exhibitors at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851 to examine whether—and how—ex post prizes that are awarded to high-quality innovations may encourage future innovation. U.S. patent data... 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
- May 2013
- Article
Hybrid Innovation in Meiji Japan
By: Tom Nicholas
Japan's hybrid innovation system during the Meiji era of technological modernization provides a useful laboratory for examining the effectiveness of complementary mechanisms to patents. Patents were introduced in 1885, and by 1911, 1.2 million mostly non-pecuniary... View Details
- Article
Intermediary Functions and the Market for Innovation in Meiji and Taisho Japan
By: Tom Nicholas and Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan experienced a transformational phase of technological development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that an important, but so far neglected, factor was a developing market for innovation and a patent attorney system that was... View Details
- February 2013
- Case
18 Months in a Startup: Zaggora.com
By: Tom Nicholas
The founders of Zaggora reflected back on a tumultuous year-and-a-half in which they had generated, from just $40,000 in personal savings, a multi-million dollar sportswear enterprise selling Hotpants to women. These were hotpants not of the 1960s hipster variety, but... View Details
- February 2013
- Case
New Enterprise Associates
By: Felda Hardymon and Tom Nicholas
NEA was established in 1977 and it subsequently morphed into one of the largest venture capital firms in the world. Despite its size and significance, some other firms established during the same era such as Kleiner-Perkins and Sequoia (both were established in 1972),... View Details
- January 2013 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
The Origins and Development of Silicon Valley
By: Tom Nicholas and James Lee
On October 1, 1891, as Senator Leland Stanford cut the ribbon at the ceremony gifting 8,000-acres of his Palo Alto, California, stock farm to a new, 559-student university bearing his name and seeking to produce "useful" in addition to "cultured" graduates, the... View Details
- January 2013 (Revised April 2013)
- Case
Greylock Partners
By: Felda Hardymon, Tom Nicholas and David Lane
- January 2013
- Case
Arthur Rock
By: Felda Hardymon, Tom Nicholas and Liz Kind
Arthur Rock was known as one of the country's first venture capitalists and was instrumental in launching major Silicon Valley firms, such as Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel Corporation, Apple Computer, Inc., Scientific Data Systems and Teledyne Incorporated. He was the... View Details
- December 2012
- Article
Inducement Prizes and Innovation
By: Liam Brunt, Josh Lerner and Tom Nicholas
We examine the effect of prizes on innovation using data on awards for technological development offered by the Royal Agricultural Society of England at annual competitions between 1839 and 1939. We find that the effects of prizes on competitive entry are large, and we... View Details
- October 2012 (Revised July 2014)
- Background Note
The Role of the Government in the Early Development of American Venture Capital
By: Josh Lerner and Tom Nicholas
Whether the government or markets, or a mixture of both, can provide efficient and effective incentives for encouraging entrepreneurial activity and new venture financing is an age-old question. Public promotion efforts are controversial and in most cases they tend to... View Details
- October 2012 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Kleiner-Perkins and Genentech: When Venture Capital Met Science
By: Felda Hardymon and Tom Nicholas
Genentech is a rare success story in the biotechnology industry. Hundreds of billions of dollars of venture capital have been invested without the expected transformational effects. Established in 1976, Genentech was to develop the new science of recombinant DNA into... View Details
- October 2012 (Revised February 2019)
- Case
Whaling Ventures
By: Tom Nicholas and Jonas Peter Akins
Whaling was a prominent global industry in the nineteenth century and the United States was dominant. By 1850 there were about 900 whaling ships in the world and 700 of these were American. Rates of return on capital were high compared to benchmark investments, at... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Did Bank Distress Stifle Innovation During the Great Depression?
By: Ramana Nanda and Tom Nicholas
We find a negative relationship between bank distress and the level, quality and trajectory of firm-level innovation during the Great Depression, particularly for R&D firms operating in capital intensive industries. However, we also show that because a sufficient... View Details
- January 2012 (Revised August 2015)
- Case
Georges Doriot and American Venture Capital
By: Tom Nicholas and David Chen
- December 2011 (Revised February 2019)
- Case
The Indian Removal Act and the 'Trail of Tears'
By: Tom Nicholas, Ari Medoff, Raven Smith and Sam Subramanian
Native Americans were subjected to a protracted and painful process of forced removal from their land. The case provides "first hand" evidence on the debate over Indian removal as it took place during the early nineteenth century. The first document is excerpted from... View Details
- December 2011
- Article
Did R&D Firms Used to Patent? Evidence from the First Innovation Surveys
By: Tom Nicholas
Matching 2,777 R&D firms in surveys conducted by the National Research Council between 1921 and 1938 with U.S. patents reveals that 59 percent of all firms and 88 percent of publicly-traded firms patented. These shares are much higher than those observed for modern R&D... View Details
- September 2011
- Article
What Drives Innovation?
By: Tom Nicholas
The idea that innovation drives economic growth is incontrovertible, but the factors that, in turn, drive innovation are not fully understood. This paper surveys the recent literature, focusing on three main drivers: intellectual property rights institutions, the... View Details
- August 2011
- Article
Independent Invention During the Rise of the Corporate Economy in Britain and Japan
By: Tom Nicholas
Independent inventors accounted for approximately half of all patents in Britain and Japan by 1930, despite the rise of the corporate economy and the spread of industrial R&D. A mixture of patent renewal and historical citations data reveals that the quality of... View Details