Publications
Publications
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- Faculty Publications (335)
- September 2013
- Case
Homestrings, Inc.: Diaspora-Based Financing and the Crowd Funding of Development
By: William R. Kerr and Alexis Brownell
Homestrings is an online investment platform for overseas diasporas to link financially with their home countries. The founder believes crowd-funding can become a pillar for development, but U.S. regulatory hurdles and resources constraints are substantial. The company... View Details
- August 2013 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
Amazon in 2024
By: Sunil Gupta and Margaret L. Rodriguez
Amazon launched its website in July 1995 to sell books online and by 2020 it has grown to become a digital giant with over $280 billion in annual sales. A large part of its growth came from expanding into a variety of businesses that some see as unrelated. Has it... View Details
- 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
- July 2013 (Revised January 2014)
- Case
Experience! The Finger Lakes: The Groupon Partnership Decision
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Chekitan S. Dev, Gabriele Piccoli and Arnold B. Peinado
In 2010, Experience! The Finger Lakes (ExperienceFLX), a tour operator offering guided tours and concierge services in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, was at a crossroads. The business was poised for growth, and its owners, Laura and Alan Falk, were... View Details
- 2013
- Chapter
The Most Successful CEOs Come from Within
By: Joseph L. Bower
The financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession caused a crisis of public confidence in business and American-style capitalism, with its focus on maximizing shareholder value. Corporate leaders understood that reform was needed and that they needed to commit... View Details
- June 2013 (Revised November 2013)
- Case
Bluefin Labs: The Acquisition by Twitter
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
What is the value of Bluefin Labs's social listening data to Twitter? Acquired by Twitter in 2013, Bluefin had built a system that gathered millions of online comments in an effort to develop new metrics for TV programs and brand advertising. With data from Twitter... View Details
- June 2013 (Revised August 2013)
- Case
AVA.ph: Growing a Filipino E-Commerce Company
By: William R. Kerr and Henry Motte-Munoz
AVA is a three-year old e-commerce company in the Philippines. From its early start mimicking the Gilt Groupe concept of online flash sales, the company has grown into a broader e-commerce platform for local fashion commerce. Oliver Segovia needs to evaluate where AVA... View Details
- February 2013
- Case
18 Months in a Startup: Zaggora.com
By: Tom Nicholas
The founders of Zaggora reflected back on a tumultuous year-and-a-half in which they had generated, from just $40,000 in personal savings, a multi-million dollar sportswear enterprise selling Hotpants to women. These were hotpants not of the 1960s hipster variety, but... View Details
- January 2013 (Revised April 2015)
- Case
Affinity Labs: Valuing Customer Growth
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Elizabeth Kind
In November 2006, Chris Michel left Military.com, which he founded in 1999, to start Affinity Labs, a global network of online communities. That month, Michel raised a Series A round of venture funding and established a partnership with Monster, which he had sold... View Details
- January 2013
- Case
Zappos.com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture (MM)
By: Frances X. Frei and Robin J. Ely
On July 17, 2009, Zappos.com, a privately-held online retailer of shoes, clothing, and other soft-line retail categories, learned that Amazon.com, a $19 billion multinational online retailer, had won its Board of Directors' approval to offer to merge the two companies.... View Details
- January 2013 (Revised June 2018)
- Case
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google 2018
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
Four businesses had, by 2012, grown to dominate the infrastructure that all firms rely on to reach online customers. Will the balance of power among the four persist, will one take command at the expense of the other three, or are all four more vulnerable than they... View Details
- 2013
- Case
Innovation and Development of China Machine Press in the New Century
By: F. Warren McFarlan, Ning Jia and Guo Jia
China Machine Press (CMP), founded in 1952, is a leading multi-field, multi-discipline and multimedia publishing group in China with large scale, comprehensive and specialized business that integrates paper media, audiovisual media and online media, and combines... View Details
- 2013
- Teaching Note
Innovation and Development of China Machine Press in the New Century (TN)
By: F. Warren McFarlan, Ning Jia and Guo Jia
China Machine Press (CMP), founded in 1952, is a leading multi-field, multi-discipline and multimedia publishing group in China with large scale, comprehensive and specialized business that integrates paper media, audiovisual media and online media, and combines... View Details
- December 2012 (Revised September 2022)
- Case
BabbaCo
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Gaurav Jain
Having just raised a Series B financing, the case protagonist is faced with a tough decision: should she "step on the gas" and scale the customer base, or continue focusing on fine-tuning the product and business model. The case describes the various marketing channels... View Details
- December 2012
- Background Note
Are Daily Deals Good for Merchants?
By: Sunil Gupta, Timothy Keiningham, Ray Weaver and Luke Williams
In the relatively short time since Groupon was founded, the response to "daily deals"—services that promote businesses by marketing deeply discounted, pre-paid vouchers to an online subscriber base—has by all accounts been spectacular. Our evaluation of daily deals is... View Details
- August 2012 (Revised July 2017)
- Case
Netflix: Valuing a New Business Model
By: Francois Brochet, Suraj Srinivasan and Michael Norris
In autumn 2011, Netflix was working to right the ship after publicly stumbling through a price hike and strategic shift and then retreat. The company was changing its business model to focus on streaming video service rather than the DVDs by mail that had brought the... View Details
- June 2012 (Revised August 2013)
- Case
Driving Towards a Disruption?
By: Willy Shih and William Noble
As Clayton Christensen drove to the studio to deliver an online executive education class, he pondered the future of management education. How big a threat did online degree programs, corporate universities, and other innovations in the delivery of management training... View Details
- February 2012 (Revised January 2013)
- Case
The New York Times Paywall
On March 28, 2011, The New York Times website became a restricted site where most of the content was protected behind a "paywall." Users who exceeded the limit of 20 free articles per month were required to pay for either a digital or print subscription. The newspaper... View Details
- December 2011 (Revised April 2013)
- Case
Akamai's Edge (A)
In 2009, Paul Sagan, CEO of Akamai, the leading online content delivery network with a 60% market share, needs to decide how to respond to aggressive entry in its market, whether and how to pursue the explosive growth in online video, and whether to stay with its... View Details
- November 2011 (Revised May 2012)
- Case
SecondMarket—Providing Liquidity for Shareholders of Privately Held iContact
By: William A. Sahlman, Ramana Nanda and James McQuade
In 2011, SecondMarket was an online platform that facilitated secondary transactions of illiquid assets, including private company stock. This case explores reasons for the decline in small-cap IPOs in the United States from the 1990s to the 2000s and how the emergence... View Details
Keywords: Business and Shareholder Relations