Sophistication - Publications - Faculty & Research

07 Jun 2021
Book

9 Tips from an Expert Fundraiser: Help Donors 'Invest in Their Passion'

Harvard’s and the Metropolitan Museum’s seven-digit-or-more gifts tend to be handled by the CEO and professional development staff. These organizations have large staffs of major gifts officers, sophisticated databases, and computer... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

13 Apr 2009
Research & Ideas

Kind of Blue: Pushing Boundaries with Miles Davis

Ask jazz fans the world over to name their favorite compilation, and chances are their response is Kind of Blue. With music that is sophisticated and sublime, spare yet complex, trumpeter and composer Miles Davis (1926-1991) reached... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Music

04 Apr 2018
Research & Ideas

Smart Cities are Complicated and Costly: Here's How to Build Them

Chombosan Much promotion of smart cities assumes that municipalities will take a proactive, top-down, technology-first approach to urban progress. Thus far, these initiatives look for some forward-thinking city official (or immensely deep-pocketed private investor) to... View Details

Keywords: by John Macomber; Construction; Green Technology

10 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

New Medical Devices Get To Patients Too Slowly

Delicate Balance For nearly 80 years, the FDA has performed a delicate balancing act between getting life-saving drugs to market, and ensuring that those drugs will be safe when taken by patients. In order to serve that dual function, the FDA has drawn up View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Health; Technology

15 Nov 2018
Book

Can the Global Food Industry Overcome Public Distrust?

JamesBrey Food is the largest segment of the global economy. It is also widely recognized as more critical for human health than any pharmaceutical drug on the planet. But significant changes in the industry are making people lose trust in many institutions involved in... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Agriculture & Agribusiness

02 Jun 2021
Research & Ideas

A Rare Find in Health Care: A Simple Solution to Racial Inequity

sophisticated interventions, such as cardiac catheterization and bypass surgery. Big problems with meaningful solutions While the study couldn’t determine why Black patients ended up at lower-quality hospitals, Chandra is investigating... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Health

15 Dec 2003
Research & Ideas

The New Global Business Manager

ask, "What is it that we could learn from the leading-edge environmental trends in Germany? Or the more sophisticated consumers in Japan? Or from our toughest competitor who happens to be coming at us out of India?" Having that... View Details

Keywords: by Cynthia Churchwell

07 Jun 2004
Research & Ideas

What Drives Supply Chain Behavior?

provide prescriptive recommendations, many of these papers pursue an optimizing approach given the assumption of a completely rational decision maker. Testament to the complexity of these activities is the high level of mathematical View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Johnston

24 Nov 2003
Research & Ideas

Boards and Corporate Governance: A Balanced Scorecard Approach

framework can serve as the cornerstone of both effective management and sound governance. Key Learnings · A sophisticated governance system is necessary in a complex capitalistic economy to ensure that capital funds the best ideas. The... View Details

Keywords: Re: Robert S. Kaplan & Krishna G. Palepu

15 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

Remembering Alfred Chandler

network of individual contracts or the vision of its entrepreneur. The people inside firms learned, developed effective routines, and innovated. While we have sophisticated theories of competition in economics, the cooperative teamwork... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

22 Jul 2019
Book

How to Be a Digital Platform Leader

members of the platform community policing themselves? Facebook, for example, has about 30,000 people working on curation of the Facebook platform. The problem is there are more than 2.5 billion users. Thirty thousand people, even with the help of AI and View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

17 Dec 2001
Research & Ideas

Venture Capital: Hot Markets and Current Industry Trends

sophisticated understanding of that market, said Wiersma. One reason the TV recorder company TiVo ran into difficulty, she said, was the company didn't understand that consumers don't want to have to get another box for their television.... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

29 Oct 2008
Research & Ideas

The Next Marketing Challenge: Selling to ’Simplifiers’

their stuff embarrasses them. Their Range Rovers no longer tell the world that they are sophisticated town and country socialites. There are simply too many of them on the road to offer much social status. Worse, they now signal the... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch; Retail; Consumer Products; Entertainment & Recreation

17 Feb 2003
Research & Ideas

Rating Fund Managers by the Company They Keep

testing and implementing quantitative strategies could become much easier. That could make it tougher for quant managers by introducing more competition, or it could help them by introducing less sophisticated competition. It's too soon... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen

29 Aug 2024
Research & Ideas

Shoot for the Stars: What to Know About the Space Economy

they lend themselves to the risk of hype behind their projections. Most space SPACs crashed in value as soon as they went public, so many investors got a real sense that space is a dangerous place to invest. But, when you talk to people who are View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin; Aerospace

19 Aug 2002
Research & Ideas

Here Comes Internet2—Time to Shed Dot Vertigo

Internet2 was born. Today, sophisticated networks are being hooked up today among Europe, North and South America, and the Asia-Pacific region. Cisco and Microsoft are involved "in a big way," Nolan said. Right now, Internet2 is... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

05 May 2003
Research & Ideas

How Bank of America Turned Branches into Service-Development Laboratories

deposits and withdrawals. Five were turned into "financial centers," spacious, relaxed outlets where customers would have access to the trained staff and advanced technologies required for sophisticated services such as stock... View Details

Keywords: by Stefan Thomke; Banking; Financial Services

17 Feb 2016
Research & Ideas

Man vs. Machine: Which Makes Better Hires?

popular in the 1950s and ’60s as a way of sifting through bulging applicant pools. After researchers questioned its reliability, testing fell out of use in favor of personal interviews. Now, with the emergence of big data, machine testing has come back in View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Employment

10 Apr 2014
Research & Ideas

Book Excerpt--‘Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World’

year 1900 to fully grasp. Our sophisticated modern-day management processes did not exist in or prior to the nineteenth century because they simply weren't needed. After the Civil War in the United States, for example, there were only a... View Details

Keywords: Re: John P. Kotter

03 Mar 2014
Research & Ideas

Facebook’s Future

soar. While all this is happening, Facebook's marketing influence will accelerate dramatically, providing a growing revenue stream for the company. When Facebook first started it was no more than a mechanism to attract eyeballs for businesses. Since then it has evolved... View Details

Keywords: by Mikolaj Piskorski

Publications