Publications

September 2011 (Revised January 2012)
Case

Telemonitoring at Visiting Nurse Health System

By: F. Warren McFarlan, Mark Keil and Mala Kaul

The Telemonitoring at Visiting Nurse Health System case presents one home healthcare organization's efforts to use telemonitoring to improve the quality of care provided to at-risk patients who were discharged from hospitals and needed home care. After two years of... View Details

Keywords: Capital Budgeting; Cost vs Benefits; Risk Management; Technology Adoption; Technological Innovation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Competitive Strategy; Technology Industry; Technology Industry

December 2017
Article

Is There a Doctor in the House? Expert Product Users, Organizational Roles, and Innovation

By: Riitta Katila, Sruthi Thatchenkery, Michael Christensen and Stefanos A. Zenios

We explore the impact on innovation that professional end-users of a product have as inventors, executives, and board members in a young firm. In contrast to prior literature, which has emphasized technology roles, we put the spotlight on the executive and governance... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; User Innovation; Healthcare; Innovation and Management; Entrepreneurship; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry

August 2007 (Revised July 2008)
Case

HCL Technologies (A)

By: Linda A. Hill, Tarun Khanna and Emily Stecker

When Vineet Nayar became president of HCL Technologies, a global IT services business, in April 2005, he knew the company needed drastic change. Since its founding as a hardware company in the 1970s, HCL had grown into an enterprise with $3.7 billion in revenues and a... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Multinational Firms and Management; Employee Relationship Management; Leading Change; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Competition; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; India

March 2016
Article

Environmental Demands and the Emergence of Social Structure: Technological Dynamism and Interorganizational Network Forms

By: Adam Tatarynowicz, Maxim Sytch and Ranjay Gulati

This study investigates the origins of variation in the structures of interorganizational networks across industries. We combine empirical analyses of existing interorganizational networks in six industries with an agent-based simulation model of network emergence.... View Details

Keywords: Interorganizatonal Relationships; Social Networks; Network Emergence; Interorganizational Networks; Information Technology; Networks; Organizational Structure; Social and Collaborative Networks; Social Media

2019
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 16 Capturing Value by Controlling Bottlenecks in Open Platform Systems

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the means by which firms capture value in open platform systems. I begin by arguing that the surplus value created by complementarities within a technical system will be split among the owners of the unique and essential... View Details

Keywords: Open Platforms; Bottlenecks; Flow Production; Value Capture; Disintermediation; Production; Management; Digital Platforms

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2010
Working Paper

Employee Selection as a Control System

By: Dennis Campbell

Theories from the economics, management control, and organizational behavior literatures predict that when it is difficult to align incentives by contracting on output, aligning preferences via employee selection may provide a useful alternative. This study... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Decision Making; Governance Controls; Employees; Selection and Staffing; Management Systems; Financial Services Industry

July 1995 (Revised April 1996)
Case

Cambridge Technology Partners (A)

By: Teresa M. Amabile, George P. Baker III and Michael Beer

Cambridge Technology Partners uses a highly innovative product strategy, supported by a human resources strategy, that has been very successful. However, high growth rates jeopardize product quality while tension about relative compensation levels between sales and... View Details

Keywords: Growth Management; Compensation and Benefits; Organizational Culture; Quality; Human Resources; Relationships; Innovation and Invention; Consulting Industry; Massachusetts

2024
Working Paper

Demographically Biased Technological Change

By: Victor Manuel Bennett, John-Paul Ferguson, Masoomeh Kalantari and Rembrand Koning

Who gets the jobs that automation creates? A consensus has begun to emerge that said technologies complement rather than substitute for labor. However, they also shift the demand for specific types of skills and other worker competencies. Such shifts imply unequal... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Employment; Equality and Inequality; Demographics

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29 May 2001
Research & Ideas

How Technological Disruption Changes Everything

Word, for example? The problem: Overshooting the market can open the way for disruptive technologies that are cheaper and simpler to take root. So Xerox was eventually disrupted by less expensive copiers... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Health

1970
Book

DYNFOR: A General Business and Economic Systems Simulator

By: R. L. Nolan

Keywords: Information Technology

1991
Chapter

Improving the Acceptance and Use of New Technology: Organizational and Inter-organizational Challenges

By: R. M. Kanter

Keywords: Technology Adoption; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Attitudes

January 2023 (Revised August 2023)
Case

Veeva Systems and the Transformation to a Public Benefit Corporation

By: Ranjay Gulati and Allison M. Ciechanover

Peter Gassner, the co-founder and CEO of Veeva Systems, steered the company through rapid scaling from its launch in 2007 to 2022. Year after year, the company had exceeded expectations, with its market capitalization reaching $50 billion at its peak. By 2022, the... View Details

Keywords: Transformation; Corporate Governance; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Culture; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States; California

September 2001
Teaching Note

Cisco Systems Architecture: ERP and Web-enabled IT TN

By: F. Warren McFarlan

Teaching Note for (9-301-099). View Details

Keywords: Information Technology Industry

Summer 2021
Article

The World Management Survey at 18: lessons and the way forward

By: Daniela Scur, Raffaella Sadun, John Van Reenen, Renata Lemos and Nicholas Bloom

Understanding how differences in management ‘best practices’ affect organizational outcomes has been a focus of both theoretical and empirical work in the fields of management, sociology, economics, and public policy. The World Management Survey (WMS) project was born... View Details

Keywords: Firm Objectives, Organization, And Behavior; Business Economics; Choice Of Technology; Management Of Technological Innovation And R＆D; Technological Change: Choices And Consequences; Management Practices and Processes

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September 1994
Case

American Airlines: Object Oriented Flight Dispatching Systems

By: F. Warren McFarlan and Espen Andersen

American Airlines Describes has organized and developed their Systems Operation Control (SOC) center in Dallas, from which the day-to-day running of the airline takes place. This case details the decision support system used by the flight dispatchers, and the... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Product Development; Programs; Complexity; Technology Adoption; Air Transportation; Air Transportation Industry; United States

Web

Organizational Leadership Course | HBS Online

This course is part of the CLIMB program and Leadership & Management track. Introduction to Organizational Leadership ENROLL NOW No application needed for our certificate programs. Start your journey today!... View Details

2019
Working Paper

‘Organizing’, ‘Innovating’ and ‘Managing’ in Complexity Space

By: Michael C. Moldoveanu

We two-dimensional measure of organizational complexity that distinguishes between the informational and computational dimensions of complexity and aims to function as a maximally context-invariant environment for posing fundamental questions about organizational... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Dynamics; Organizations; Complexity; Adaptation; Innovation and Invention

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January 2002 (Revised October 2005)
Case

General Electric Medical Systems 2002

By: Tarun Khanna and James Weber

Discusses one of General Electric's flagship divisions--the world's leading provider of medical diagnostic imaging equipment. Provides an opportunity to examine a multinational confronting massive technological and demographic changes around the world. Genomics has... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Business Model; Change Management; Multinational Firms and Management; Genetics; Customer Value and Value Chain; Age; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; China; United States

June 2018
Teaching Note

Meridian Systems (Brief Case)

By: Frank V. Cespedes and Michael J. Roberts

Teaching Note for HBS No. 918-533. The key issues discussed in the Meridian teaching note concern sales force deployment: decisions about how to focus sales efforts with respect to territories, customers, and products. The teaching note explains the strengths and... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Sales; Strategy; Salesforce Management; Organizational Structure; Technological Innovation; Marketing Strategy