Output - Publications - Faculty & Research

November 2019 (Revised April 2021)
Technical Note

Rechargeable Batteries, 2017: Gigafactory Wars in the Offing?

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In 2017, the global market for rechargeable lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries was 126 gigawatt-hours (GWh) valued at $37 billion, growing by $10 billion in two years. Once confined largely to consumer electronics and appliances, the rapid increase in demand was spurred by... View Details

Citation

Educators

Purchase

21 Sep 2020
Research & Ideas

Are You Sabotaging Your Own Company?

it says, people can cause time-sucking distractions that stall an organization’s output by doing physical damage to equipment, buildings, and methods of transportation using everyday items found in a home or workplace. This involves petty... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

05 Jun 2023
What Do You Think?

Is the Anxious Achiever a Post-Pandemic Relic?

infrastructure (support systems).” They have accounted for a substantial portion of the output and productivity of the world’s most developed economies. Now the anxious achievers occupying many leadership positions are confronted with a... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

01 Dec 2006
What Do You Think?

How Important Is Quality of Labor? And How Is It Achieved?

is to assume that quality of labor is genetic ." Flavius Chircu said, "I would simplify the analysis by substituting 'quality of labor' with 'quality of output,' be that output a product, service, or mix thereof." In Sneh... View Details

Keywords: by by Jim Heskett

08 Mar 2022
Research & Ideas

Representation Matters: Building Case Studies That Empower Women Leaders

classroom. Understanding the elusive female protagonist Knowing this, we wanted to look at the HBS case output and curricula through a gender lens. We first took a deep dive into the cases published between 2008 and 2015 and found that 20... View Details

Keywords: by Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg

01 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

A Penny for Your Thoughts? For Big-Picture Ideas, the Right Pay Structure Matters

employees to propose new ideas when it came to “narrow-scope innovations” having to do with their particular task, the authors find. For example, a machine operator might suggest ways to limit mechanical breakdowns that are lowering View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

Research Summary

Social Innovation

My intellectual agenda addresses this question: How to innovate to solve the world’s toughest challenges? Out of the earth’s population, about 2 billion can afford good products whereas the remaining 5 billion are poor and therefore are nonconsumers.... View Details

09 Jan 2006
Research & Ideas

When Benchmarks Don’t Work

Benchmarking certainly has its virtues. Comparing production time or the cost of a standard process to that of peer companies can yield important insights about your own efficiencies—and ultimately, competitiveness. But benchmarking also has its limits. When you ignore... View Details

Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan; Service

04 Mar 2019
What Do You Think?

What’s the Antidote to Surveillance Capitalism?

implement safeguards against uses of their output intended to degrade privacy, the reliability of information, independent thought, and user behaviors. Shareholders would step forward to demand changes in the way information is deployed... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Advertising; Consumer Products

03 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

Transforming Manufacturing Waste into Profit

It's been said that "one man's trash is another man's treasure." HBS Assistant Professor Deishin Lee, however, has taken that old adage a step further in her recent working paper Turning Waste into By-Product by showing how it's possible for companies to turn... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Manufacturing

14 Jun 2010
Research & Ideas

The Hard Work of Measuring Social Impact

and the length of their involvement in the same communities." A Matter Of Resources So, if an organization has a focused, or linear, theory of change and a tightly focused operational strategy, measuring results is much easier. But these are likely to be short-term... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

07 Jul 2003
What Do You Think?

Can We Have Too Much Productivity Improvement?

had risen to the highest rate in nine years. Economists assure us that productivity (the ratio of product and service outputs to labor and capital inputs) improvements are good for all of us, whether we are employed (and thus factored... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

30 Jul 2012
Research & Ideas

How Technology Adoption Affects Global Economies

the date when cell phone technology first entered a country. But the intensive margin would measure the number of cell phones in a country relative to that country's population. When applicable, the intensive margin also takes into account the amount of View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

28 Apr 2022
Research & Ideas

Can You Buy Creativity in the Gig Economy?

e-book market. New regulations have shaken up the e-book landscape in China, intensifying competition and prompting writers to work harder, according to research by Harvard Business School Professor Feng Zhu. Book contracts that give authors a share of sales rather... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

Research Summary

Overview

By: Vincent Pons

Professor Pons studies questions in political economy and development with the goal of understanding how democratic systems function, and how they can be improved.

He decomposes the electoral cycle into four essential steps: the factors affecting voter... View Details

07 Jan 2002
Research & Ideas

How Marketing Can Reduce Worldwide Poverty

farmer. They already decided that what's good for the farmer is these kinds of implements, these kinds of equipment, this kind of loan. In fact, the farmer may say, "Given everything else, that's not exactly the kind of output that... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

25 Mar 2019
Research & Ideas

The Secret Life of Supply Chains

versus to consumer households. They grouped industries into supply chain versus business-to-consumer (B2C), to find the percentage of outputs in each of these areas. “We find that the supply chain economy is a distinct and large segment... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Manufacturing; Service

10 Jul 2007
What Do You Think?

How Much of Leadership Is About Control, Delegation, or Theater?

excites, and pushes the team or, you could say, choreographs an output that (moves) the company towards the vision." The mix of control, delegation, and theater employed by successful leaders depends on the timing and circumstances... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

21 Feb 2005
Op-Ed

Is Business Management a Profession?

such as Michael Jensen and Oliver Williamson began, in the 1970s, to develop a new theory of the firm that treated it not as a "black box" that converted inputs into outputs but rather as an institution requiring and rewarding... View Details

Keywords: by Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria & Daniel Penrice

17 Dec 2007
Research & Ideas

The Rise of Medical Tourism

the output or the input," explains Khanna. "Applying this idea to human health care sounds a bit crude, but the output is the patient, the input is the doctor. We used to move the input around, and... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Health; Medical Devices & Supplies

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