Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(5,075)
- Faculty Publications (848)
- 2020
- Working Paper
Determinants of Early-Stage Startup Performance: Survey Results
To explore determinants of new venture performance, the CEOs of 470 early-stage startups were surveyed regarding a broad range of factors related to their venture’s customer value proposition, product management, marketing, technology and operations, financial... View Details
- November–December 2020
- Article
Rethinking the On-Demand Workforce
By: Joseph B. Fuller, Manjari Raman, Allison Bailey and Nithya Vaduganathan
As companies struggle with chronic skills shortages and changing labor demographics, a new generation of talent platforms, offering on-demand access to highly trained workers, has begun to help. These platforms include marketplaces for premium expertise (such as Toptal... View Details
- October 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
AfricInvest: A Pan-African Investment Platform
By: Victoria Ivashina and Youssef Abdel Aal
The case is set in December 2018, when Ziad Oueslati, co-managing director and co-founder of AfricInvest, a leading pan-African private equity firm headquartered in Tunisia, was reflecting on the future direction of his firm. AfricInvest started as a traditional small... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Private Equity and COVID-19
By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
We survey more than 200 private equity (PE) managers from firms with $1.9 trillion of assets under management (AUM) about their portfolio performance, decisionmaking and activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that PE managers have significant incentives to... View Details
- September 2020
- Case
True North: Pioneering Analytics, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Kairavi Dey and Hannah Mayer
True North was a private equity fund that specialized in the growth and buyout of mid-market, India-centric companies. The leadership team initially believed that technology was not core to traditional businesses and steered clear of new age technology-oriented... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 5 Ecosystems and Complementarities
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce two new building blocks to the theory of how technology shapes organizations. The first is a new layer of organization structure: a business “ecosystem.” The second is the economic concept of “complementarity.” Ecosystems are... View Details
- September 2020
- Article
The Rise of the Investor State: State Capital in the Chinese Economy
By: Meg Rithmire and Hao Chen
The nature and extent of the role of the Chinese state in the economy is fundamental to many empirical and theoretical debates about that country’s political economy. We document and explain the rise of a novel form of intervention on the part of the Chinese state: the... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Venture Capitalists and COVID-19
By: Paul A. Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven N. Kaplan and Ilya A. Strebulaev
We survey over 1,000 institutional and corporate venture capitalists (VCs) at more than 900 different firms to learn how their decisions and investments have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We compare their survey answers to those provided by a large sample of... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Time and the Value of Data
By: Ehsan Valavi, Joel Hestness, Newsha Ardalani and Marco Iansiti
Managers often believe that collecting more data will continually improve the accuracy of their machine learning models. However, we argue in this paper that when data lose relevance over time, it may be optimal to collect a limited amount of recent data instead of... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
NextView Ventures
By: Jo Tango and Nori Gerardo Lietz
David Beisel, Rob Go, and Lee Hower are non-partners at different-and-established venture capital (VC) firms. They decide to leave their positions to start a new seed-stage VC firm. The case covers the genesis of the firm, the formulation of its strategy and... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
Satrix: Competing in the Passive Asset Management Industry in South Africa
By: Mark Egan, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Dilyana Karadzhova Botha
In late 2017, Satrix, one of the largest passive asset management firms in South Africa and a pioneer in the industry since 2000, had to decide its strategy going forward in a market where passive asset management had become increasingly commoditized and... View Details
- July 2020
- Background Note
Gender Diversity on Boards: Views from Norway
By: Aiyesha Dey
The issue of gender diversity on boards has received increased attention in U.S markets over the past few years. In 2018, California introduced a law which required boards of U.S-listed firms with headquarters in California to include at least one female director by... View Details
- July 2020 (Revised November 2020)
- Case
Gera Developments: Leadership at a Crossroads
By: Christina R. Wing and John Masko
For decades, Gera Developments (Gera) was a boutique family-owned real estate development firm in Pune, India. But since 2000, managing director Rohit Gera had turned the company into a dynamic innovator in housing solutions for urban Indian families. Over the 2010s,... View Details
Keywords: Buildings and Facilities; Business Growth and Maturation; Construction; Geographic Location; Global Strategy; Globalized Firms and Management; Housing; Leadership Style; Management Succession; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Family Ownership; Family and Family Relationships; Urban Development; Customization and Personalization; Real Estate Industry; Maharashtra; India; United States
- June 2020
- Article
Start-up Inertia versus Flexibility: The Role of Founder Identity in a Nascent Industry
By: Tiona Zuzul and Mary Tripsas
Through an inductive, comparative study of four early entrants in the nascent air taxi market, we examine why start-ups, generally characterized as flexible, malleable entities, might instead exhibit inertial behavior. While two of the firms engaged in ongoing... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Iterative Coordination and Innovation
By: Sourobh Ghosh and Andy Wu
Agile management practices from the software industry continue to transform the way organizations innovate across industries, yet they remain understudied in the organizations literature. We investigate the widespread Agile practice of iterative coordination: frequent... View Details
- May 2020
- Case
M-Lab: Enabling Innovation at Mitsubishi Corporation
By: Krishna Palepu and Allison M. Ciechanover
M-Lab’s founding goals were to infuse an innovation mindset into Mitsubishi Corporation; to catalyze new business opportunities; and to enable a dialogue between Japanese business and Silicon Valley. M-Lab housed representatives from each of Mitsubishi Corporation’s... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Project on Impact Investments' Impact Investment Database
By: M. Diane Burton, Shawn Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Josh Lerner, Fanele Mashwama, Yue (Cynthia) Xu and T. Robert Zochowski
Impact investing has grown significantly over the past 15 years. From a niche investing segment with only $25 billion AUM in 2013 (WEF 2013), it experienced double-digit growth and developed into a market with an estimated $502 billion AUM (Mudaliapar and Dithrich... View Details
- April 2020
- Supplement
Cisco Systems and OpenDNS: Strategic Integration (B)
By: Andy Wu and David Wang
With more than 72,000 employees and revenues approaching the $50B mark, Cisco Systems is one of the largest information technology and networking firms globally. As the company grew and expanded into different lines of businesses, Cisco consistently looked outwards for... View Details
- April 2020 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
Oriental Land Co., Ltd.—Tokyo Disney Resort
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Akiko Kanno
This case describes the history of Oriental Land Co. Ltd.’s (OLC's) Tokyo Disney Resort (TDR), its operations, the extent of vertical integration, and the challenges it faced in 2018 as OLC's chairman and CEO, Toshio Kagami, contemplated how best to deal with... View Details
Keywords: Strategy For Multi-business Firm; Business Models; Growth; Theme Parks; Disney; Disney Parks; Licensing; Royalties; Two-part Tariffs; Oriental Land Co.; Tokyo Disneyland; Tokyo DisneySea; Tokyo Disney Resort; Tokyo Disney; Growth Strategy; Hotels; Hotel Industry; Partnership; Development; Attractions; Rides; Urayasu; Kagami; Congestion; Pricing; Amusement Parks; Amusement Park Industry; Brand; Branding; History; OLC; Corporate Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Business History; Price; Retention; Growth and Development; Growth and Development Strategy; Brands and Branding; Agreements and Arrangements; Contracts; Operations; Vertical Integration; Problems and Challenges; Partners and Partnerships; Business Strategy; Expansion; Rail Transportation; Transportation Networks; Accommodations Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Tourism Industry; Asia; Japan; Tokyo; United States
- 2021
- Working Paper
Elusive Safety: The New Geography of Capital Flows and Risk
By: Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Ruth Judson and Tim Schmidt-Eisenlohr
A confidential dataset with industry-level disaggregation of U.S. cross-border claims and liabilities, shows U.S. securities to be increasingly intermediated by tax-haven-financial-centers (THFC) and less regulated funds. These securities are risky, in... View Details