Publications

February 2016 (Revised February 2017)
Case

Greening Walmart: Progress and Controversy

By: Rebecca Henderson and James Weber

In 2005, Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, launched a sustainability initiative aimed at reducing waste and making the company more environmentally and socially conscious. By 2015, the company had made progress on multiple dimensions: energy efficiency in its... View Details

Keywords: Sustainability; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Business or Company Management; Motivation and Incentives; Reputation; Environmental Sustainability; Retail Industry; United States

January 1993 (Revised April 1993)
Case

Chadwick, Inc.: The Balanced Scorecard

By: Robert S. Kaplan

The pharmaceutical division of a diversified company has been asked to develop a Balanced Scorecard. Research and development projects take about ten years to bring a new product to the marketplace and the division depends on good relations and active feedback from its... View Details

Keywords: Balanced Scorecard; Performance Evaluation; Customer Relationship Management; Goals and Objectives; Customer Satisfaction; Research and Development; Marketplace Matching; Financial Condition; Product Launch; Pharmaceutical Industry

Rebecca Karp is an Assistant Professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches Strategy in the MBA required curriculum. Professor Karp is a field researcher and ethnographer. Her research examines how companies formulate and... View Details

March 2021
Article

International Trade and Social Connectedness

By: Michael Bailey, Abhinav Gupta, Sebastian Hillenbrand, Theresa Kuchler, Robert J. Richmond and Johannes Stroebel

We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more when they are more socially connected, especially for... View Details

Keywords: Social Connections; International Trade; Trade; Social Media

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February 2001 (Revised November 2009)
Case

Amazon.com (C)

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport

At the end of 1998, Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos ponders the next moves for his company. Having secured the leadership position as the leading online book seller in the United States, Amazon.com has now moved into the product categories of CDs and videos by... View Details

Keywords: Expansion; Internet and the Web; Business Growth and Maturation; Books; Growth and Development Strategy; Retail Industry; Germany; United Kingdom; United States

08 May 2019
HBS Seminar

Mara Lederman, University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management

August 2001 (Revised June 2002)
Case

IBM Software Solutions (A)

By: Michael L. Tushman, Charles A. O'Reilly III and Robert Chapman Wood

Executives and managers of key IBM software units struggle to make IBM a top player in the post-mainframe era. When one software unit introduces a visionary product with potential to create a new leadership position for the firm, the result is an epic conflict in the... View Details

Keywords: Business Units; Leadership Style; Leading Change; Managerial Roles; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Conflict Management; Information Technology Industry

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27 Sep 2021
News

Managing Through Crunch time—Without Burning Out Your Team

25 Aug 2011
News

Without Its Master of Design, Apple Will Face Many Challenges

09 Apr 2008
Research & Ideas

The Matchmaker of the Modern Economy

manufacturing new mechanical or scientific instruments. And the city has always had a revolutionary streak, with movements for women's suffrage, antislavery, and the American Revolution itself all being View Details

Keywords: by Spencer E. Ante

13 Feb 2024
HBS Seminar

Stijn van Osselaer, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business

June 2024
Article

Real Growth in Space Manufacturing Output Substantially Exceeds Growth in the Overall Space Economy

By: Tina Highfill and Matthew Weinzierl

Accurately measuring real economic output in the space economy is made difficult by the rapid increase in capabilities and decrease in prices of launch and satellite technologies achieved over the past two decades. Nominal measures of output in space will tend to... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Economic Growth; Price; Production; Aerospace Industry

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January 2020 (Revised March 2020)
Case

LOLA: Do You Know What's in Your Tampon?

By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Aldo Sesia

LOLA is a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business launched in 2015. What started as a company to provide women with organic and transparent material-labeled tampons via a subscription model, had, by 2019 evolved to include additional menstrual and sexual wellness products.... View Details

Keywords: Direct-to-consumer; Channels; Disruption; Business Model; Brands and Branding; Internet and the Web; Strategy; Retail Industry; United States; Canada

David Thomas is H. Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. His research addresses issues related to executive development, cultural diversity in organizations, leadership and organizational change. He recently served as a... View Details

Keywords: consumer products; consumer products; consumer products; consumer products; consumer products; consumer products

December 2006 (Revised March 2008)
Case

The European Union in the 21st Century

By: J. Gunnar Trumbull

Focuses on the challenges facing the European Union in 2006. Following the French and Dutch referendums in 2005, the fate of the European Constitution is in jeopardy. Ten new accession countries have just joined the EU, with Turkey in the beginning stages of the... View Details

Keywords: Economic Growth; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Policy; Government Administration; European Union

2021
Working Paper

Which Markets (Don't) Drive Pharmaceutical Innovation? Evidence From U.S. Medicaid Expansions

By: Craig Garthwaite, Rebecca Sachs and Ariel Dora Stern

Pharmaceutical innovation policy involves managing a tradeoff between high prices for new products in the short-term and stronger incentives to develop products for the future. Prior research has documented a causal relationship between market size and pharmaceutical... View Details

Keywords: Pharmaceuticals; Medicaid; Innovation and Invention; Policy; Markets; Research and Development; Pharmaceutical Industry

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April 2017
Case

Yushan Bicycles: Learning to Ride Abroad

By: Christopher A. Bartlett and Paul S. Myers

Yushan Bicycles, one of Taiwan's leading bicycle manufacturers, is pursuing an international expansion strategy by increasing demand for its range of traditional and electric bicycles and shifting its product mix toward higher-margin models sold through specialty... View Details

Keywords: Globalized Firms and Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Conflict Management; Learning; Bicycle Industry; Taiwan; Australia

October 2006
Case

Lean at Wipro Technologies

Wipro Technologies, a rapidly growing software services firm based in India, decided to use principles from the Toyota Production System (also known as lean) to fundamentally change their operating model. Looks at why Wipro chose to use lean and how they went about... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Competitive Advantage; Applications and Software; Operations; Information Technology Industry; India

January 1996 (Revised February 1997)
Case

Exploring Brand-Person Relationships: Three Life Histories

The idea that "relationships" exist between consumers and products has implicitly occupied a central place in brand marketing thought and practice. Now as relational (one-on-one) marketing is said to be replacing transactional (mass) marketing as the dominant paradigm... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Relationships; Brands and Branding