Publications

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December 2001
Background Note

Reporting on Agribusiness in the 21st Century

By: Ray A. Goldberg and Anne M Fitzgerald

Agriculture is not what it used to be. Neither is coverage of the industry by news organizations. A century ago, about 40% of the U.S. population lived on the farm, and one in three U.S. jobs was tied to agriculture. It made sense for daily newspapers to cover farming... View Details

Keywords: Agribusiness; Newspapers; Media; Perception; Change; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; United States

January 2004 (Revised July 2007)
Case

Lumen and Absorb Teams at Crutchfield Chemical Engineering, The

By: Teresa M. Amabile and Elizabeth Schatzel

Large discrepancies have developed between two elite technology development teams at Crutchfield Chemical Engineering in terms of motivation and creativity. To investigate, Paul Burke, director of corporate technology development, commissioned a study of the day-by-day... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Managerial Roles; Projects; Groups and Teams; Behavior; Creativity; Motivation and Incentives

March 2017 (Revised September 2017)
Case

Facebook Fake News in the Post-Truth World

By: John R. Wells and Carole A. Winkler

In January 2017, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, was surrounded by controversy. The election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States in November 2016 had triggered a national storm of protests, and many attributed Trump’s victory to... View Details

January 1991 (Revised March 1996)
Case

Profiling at National Mutual (A)

This case series describes a company grappling with organizational change through information technology. National Mutual Life Association vies for Australian insurance industry leadership with its long-time competitor. It has purchased an expert system called Client... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Information Technology; Insurance Industry; Australia

22 Jul 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Business Model Innovation and Competitive Imitation

Keywords: by Ramon Casadesus-Masanell & Feng Zhu

April 2009 (Revised August 2009)
Case

Backchannelmedia: Making Television 'Clickable'

By: Sunil Gupta, Kavita Shukla and Zachary Scott Clayton

Backchannelmedia (BCM), a three-year-old start-up, intended to completely disrupt the world of advertising by transforming the way Americans watched television. BCM had developed a technology to make television "clickable," enabling viewers to interact with the content... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Investment; Disruptive Innovation; Technological Innovation; Marketing Strategy; Partners and Partnerships; Competition

August 2021 (Revised November 2024)
Case

Intenseye: Powering Workplace Health and Safety with AI (A)

By: Michael W. Toffel and Youssef Abdel Aal

Intenseye was a Turkey-based technology startup that deployed machine learning algorithms to workplace camera feeds in order to identify unsafe worker actions and unsafe working conditions, in order to help improve worker safety. The case describes how Intenseye’s... View Details

Keywords: Privacy; Product Development; Operations; Technological Innovation; Value Creation; Production; Distribution; Safety; Risk and Uncertainty; Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Turkey; Middle East; United States

September 2022
Article

Tone at the Bottom: Measuring Corporate Misconduct Risk from the Text of Employee Reviews

By: Dennis W. Campbell and Ruidi Shang

This paper examines whether information extracted via text-based statistical methods applied to employee reviews left on the website Glassdoor.com can be used to develop indicators of corporate misconduct risk. We argue that inside information on the incidence of... View Details

Keywords: Management Accounting; Management Control; Corporate Culture; Corporate Misconduct; Risk Measurement; Organizational Culture; Crime and Corruption; Risk and Uncertainty; Measurement and Metrics

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18 Sep 2008
Working Paper Summaries

The Internalization of Advertising Services: An Inter-Industry Analysis

Keywords: by Sharon Horsky, Steven C. Michael & Alvin J. Silk; Advertising

Ayelet Israeli

Ayelet Israeli is the Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School Marketing Unit. She is the co-founder of the Customer Intelligence Lab at the Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard Business School. She teaches... View Details

Keywords: e-commerce industry; e-commerce industry; e-commerce industry; e-commerce industry

August 1999 (Revised October 1999)
Case

RCA Records: The Digital Revolution

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Cate Reavis

In 1995, Bertelsmann-owned RCA Records was considered a "tired and old" record label. By 1999, the company represented a number of the "hottest" acts in the music industry. Nevertheless, the company's position (as well as that of the entire music industry) was under... View Details

Keywords: Brands and Branding; Business Model; Competition; Corporate Strategy; Internet and the Web; Change Management; Marketing Strategy; Music Industry; Music Industry; United States

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22 Jul 2002
Research & Ideas

Is Performance-Based Pricing the Right Price for You?

Other industries as diverse as consulting, trucking, and heavy industrial services are seeing the same trend. Before explaining the benefits, drawbacks, and application of performance-based pricing, let us... View Details

Keywords: by Benson Shapiro; Manufacturing

February 2012
Article

Americans Do IT Better: US Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle

By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

US productivity growth accelerated after 1995 (unlike Europe's), particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). Using two new micro panel datasets we show that US multinationals operating in Europe also experienced a "productivity miracle."... View Details

Keywords: IT Productivity; American IT Productivity; Information Technology; Performance Productivity; Multinational Firms and Management; Management Practices and Processes; United States; Europe

11 May 2016
Research & Ideas

Fix This! Why is it so Painful to Buy a New Car?

(Editor’s note: Fix This! is a series of occasional stories about industries that provide bad consumer experiences and how they can be fixed.) Consumers routinely list buying a car as the worst shopping experience imaginable. So it may be... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Auto

February 2011
Case

Chegg: Textbook Rental Takes Flight

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, William A. Sahlman and Evan W. Richardson

In late 2010, Silicon Valley-based Chegg, the leading online college textbook rental company, is scaling rapidly. The case recounts Chegg's history from its origins as a distant competitor to Craigslist in college classified listings through a pivot into textbook... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Higher Education; Entrepreneurship; Books; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Service Operations; Renting or Rental; Online Technology; Education Industry; Education Industry; California

May 2019 (Revised May 2020)
Case

fidentiaX: The Tradable Insurance Marketplace on Blockchain

By: Alexander Braun, Lauren H. Cohen and Jiahua Xu

Three years ago, Alvin Ang and his partner founded fidentiaX in Singapore, with the ambition to create the world’s first marketplace for tradable insurance policies on blockchain. With a 26-page white paper, the start-up closed a successful fundraising round through an... View Details

Keywords: Blockchain; Insurance; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Technology Adoption; Business Strategy; Insurance Industry; Insurance Industry; Singapore