Publications

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June 2010 (Revised August 2011)
Case

Tennant Company: Innovating Within and Beyond the Core

By: Lynda M. Applegate, Toby E. Stuart and James Weber

Tennant, a leading producer of floor cleaning equipment, must determine the business model to use for its new chemical-free cleaning technology. In 2005, Tennant Company had developed an innovative, environmentally friendly cleaning technology that could potentially... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Business Startups; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Disruptive Innovation; Organizational Structure; Business Strategy; Value Creation; Consumer Products Industry; Industrial Products Industry

March 2017 (Revised November 2021)
Case

Floodgate: On the Hunt for Thunder Lizards

By: Rory McDonald, Alix Burke, Emma Franking and Nicole Tempest

Founded in 2008, Floodgate pioneered the “micro-VC” category, a new type of investment firm that raised smaller funds and made earlier, smaller investments in technology startups than traditional venture-capital firms. By 2015, Floodgate had raised three funds totaling... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Business Models; Angel Investors; Crowdfunding; Incubators; Accelerators; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Information Technology; Business Model; Innovation and Invention; Competitive Strategy

2002
Report

Technology Strategy: The Theory and Application of the Christensen Model

By: C. M. Christensen and Steven Milunovich

Keywords: Technology; Business Strategy; Disruptive Innovation

23 Mar 2021
News

Managing Future Growth at an Innovative Workforce Education Start-up

May 2024
Article

Design of Off-Grid Lighting Business Models to Serve the Poor: Field Experiments and Structural Analysis

By: Bhavani Shanker Uppari, Serguei Netessine, Ioanna Popescu and Rowan P. Clarke

A significant proportion of the world's population has no access to grid-based electricity and so relies on off-grid lighting solutions. Rechargeable lamp technology is gaining popularity as an alternative off-grid lighting model in developing countries. In this paper,... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Developing Countries and Economies; Consumer Behavior; Poverty; Logistics; Business Model; Utilities Industry

01 Sep 2006
News

Innovative Loan Fund Yields Big Returns

Through its use of Harvard’s innovative Green Campus Loan Fund, HBS has cut energy expenditures and provided a model for conservation-minded schools around the University to follow. The loan fund provides... View Details

Keywords: Paul Massari; Construction of Buildings; Construction; Business Schools & Computer & Management Training; Educational Services

24 Apr 2014
News

Growing a new model for the forestry industry in Chile

Michele Golodetz (MBA 1977) discusses her innovations in the forestry industry in Chile and how this helps small farmers become self-supporting. (Published April 2014) View Details

Web

Online Entrepreneurship & Innovation Courses | HBS Online

New Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy Build the skill set and strategic acumen to compete in the digital world through a combination of forward-looking coursework, unique team activities with a diverse global network, and a... View Details

May 2022
Case

Timnit Gebru: 'SILENCED No More' on AI Bias and The Harms of Large Language Models

By: Tsedal Neeley and Stefani Ruper

Dr. Timnit Gebru—a leading artificial intelligence (AI) computer scientist and co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team—was messaging with one of her colleagues when she saw the words: “Did you resign?? Megan sent an email saying that she accepted your resignation.” Heart... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Employment; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Technological Innovation

2006
Article

Exploring the Tail of Creativity: An Evolutionary Model of Breakthrough Invention

Keywords: Creativity; Innovation and Invention

Find at Harvard

February 2019 (Revised November 2021)
Case

MoviePass

By: Willy Shih

Mitch Lowe, the CEO of MoviePass, was having trouble convincing people of the viability of the company's business model. The company was building a multi-sided platform and was planning to extract value from increasing traffic to movie theaters through a number of... View Details

Keywords: Start-up; Start-up Growth; Start-ups; Business Model Innovation; Business Model; Innovation and Invention; Multi-Sided Platforms; Business Startups; Planning; Motion Pictures and Video Industry; United States

18 Jun 2014
Research & Ideas

Leading Innovation is the Art of Creating ‘Collective Genius’

sustaining an innovative organization? A new book written with three coauthors attempts to answer the question of why some companies, such as Pixar, are able to invent continuously, while others aren't. “Conventional leadership won't get... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard

2012
Teaching Note

Zhejiang Semir Garment Co., Ltd. (TN)

By: F. Warren McFarlan, Jie Jiao and Yuren Fang

With the rapid growth of China's economy and China's increasing integration into the global economy in the past two decades, China's leisure clothing and garment enterprises achieved a rapid rise and became an important competitive force confronting the foreign brands... View Details

Keywords: Business Model Innovation; Competitive Strategy; Management Controls; China; China

August 2015 (Revised February 2020)
Teaching Note

Qihoo

By: Feng Zhu

Keywords: Platform Strategy; Business Model Innovation; Chinese Internet Market; Competitive Strategy; Information Technology; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Information Technology Industry; China

26 Jan 2004
Research & Ideas

What Developing-World Companies Teach Us About Innovation

businesses looks very different. In general, the innovations come not from product technology but from all the elements of the business model that surround the product technology, including manufacturing,... View Details

Keywords: by Donald N. Sull, Alejandro Ruelas-Gossi & Martin Escobari

August 2013 (Revised September 2015)
Case

Coursera

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Hyunjin Kim

By providing free and open-access online courses at a large scale, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms seek to innovate the business models of the traditional higher education industry. In a little over a year, Coursera had grown at a rapid rate to emerge as a... View Details

Keywords: Business Models; Strategy; Competition; Business Model; Internet and the Web; Higher Education; Competitive Advantage; Education Industry

01 Jun 2017
News

Drawing on the Crowd for Innovative Problem-Solving

problem-solving challenges. “I became a professor to understand why communities, like those that create open-source software, were innovating. It did not correlate with my intuition about the best ways to incentivize innovation and... View Details

29 Sep 2003
Research & Ideas

Why Managing Innovation is Like Theater

capacity for innovation, can and often should be structured as artists structure their work. Managers should look to collaborative artists rather than to more traditional management models if they want to create economic value in this new... View Details

Keywords: by Rob Austin & Lee Devin

October 2003 (Revised April 2005)
Case

Innovation Corrupted: The Rise and Fall of Enron

By: Malcolm S. Salter

Presents an historical overview of Enron's rise and fall and summarizes what is currently known about (1) the evolution of Enron's business model, (2) the organizational processes Enron officials relied on to drive and monitor the business, (3) emergent behavior... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Behavior; Governing and Advisory Boards; Success; Transformation; Failure; Business Processes; Energy Industry; United States