Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(120,193)
- Faculty Publications (639)
- January 2021
- Article
Commuting and Innovation: Are Closer Inventors More Productive?
By: Hongyu Xiao, Andy Wu and Jaeho Kim
We estimate the causal effect of workplace–home commuting distance on inventor productivity. We construct a novel panel of U.S. inventors with precisely measured workplace–home distances and inventor-level productivity. Our identification strategy exploits firm office... View Details
- 2021
- Book
We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems
By: Mitchell Weiss
The huge public challenges we face are daunting. At the same time, many of us have come to accept the notion that government can't do new things or solve tough challenges—it's too big and slow and bureaucratic. Not so. Entrepreneurial savvy in government is growing,... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Evolutionary Nature of Breakthrough Innovation: Re-Evaluating the Exploration vs. Exploitation Dichotomy
By: Dominika K. Sarnecka and Gary P. Pisano
Over the past few decades, a consensus has emerged that breakthrough innovations emerge from exploration of novel terrain while more routine innovations are the product of exploitation. In this paper, we revisit this explore versus exploit dichotomy with an analysis... View Details
- December 2020
- Other Article
Digital Health Care: Empowering Consumers: Q&A with Professor Regina Herzlinger
Regina Herzlinger, the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration, has been studying the health care sector for nearly half a century. In that time, she has seen significant innovation in the field—and she has also seen the powerful sway of the status quo,... View Details
- Article
Soul and Machine (Learning)
By: Davide Proserpio, John R. Hauser, Xiao Liu, Tomomichi Amano, Burnap Alex, Tong Guo, Dokyun (DK) Lee, Randall Lewis, Kanishka Misra, Eric Schwarz, Artem Timoshenko, Lilei Xu and Hema Yoganarasimhan
Machine learning is bringing us self-driving cars, medical diagnoses, and language translation, but how can machine learning help marketers improve marketing decisions? Machine learning models predict extremely well, are scalable to “big data,” and are a natural fit to... View Details
- November 2020
- Case
The Rise and Fall of Nokia (Abridged)
By: Juan Alcácer and Tarun Khanna
In 2013, Nokia sold its Device and Services business to Microsoft for €5.4 billion. For decades Nokia had led the telecommunications (telecom) industry in handsets and networking. By the late 2000s, however, Nokia's position as market leader in mobile devices was... View Details
- November 2020 (Revised July 2022)
- Case
Dell Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to the Ground
By: Navid Mojir and V. Kasturi Rangan
The case tells the story of Dell Technologies and its efforts to revitalize its value proposition and escape a commodity trap by acquiring EMC for $67 billion—the largest tech acquisition in history. It also shows the deeply intertwined connections between a company’s... View Details
- November 2020
- Article
Disrupting the Disruptors or Enhancing Them? How Blockchain Re‐Shapes Two‐Sided Platforms
By: Daniel Trabucchi, Antonella Moretto, Tommaso Buganza and Alan MacCormack
The importance of platform‐based businesses in the modern economy is growing continuously and becoming increasingly relevant. Specifically, the deployment of digital technologies has enhanced the applicability of two‐sided business models, enabling companies to act not... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The ESG-Innovation Disconnect: Evidence from Green Patenting
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun and Quoc H. Nguyen
No firm or sector of the global economy is untouched by innovation. In equilibrium, innovators will flock to (and innovation will occur where) the returns to innovative capital are the highest. In this paper, we document a strong empirical pattern in green patent... View Details
- September 2020 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Hot Wheels: Launching The Mixed Play Experience
By: Elie Ofek, Andres Terech and Nicole Tempest Keller
Chris Down, Global Brand General Manager for Hot Wheels, and his team from the Advanced Play Group within Mattel, Inc., had developed an entirely new “mixed play” product experience that blended familiar Hot Wheels play in the physical world with breakthrough play in... View Details
- September 2020
- Case
Merck: COVID-19 Vaccines
By: Willy C. Shih
COVID-19 infections were still climbing across the U.S. and many other parts of the world in September 2020, and it seemed that every time Ken Frazier, the CEO of Merck & Co. consented to an interview in recent months he always seemed to hear the same question,... View Details
- September 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
Hot Wheels at Mattel: Reinventing the Wheel
By: Elie Ofek, Andres Terech and Nicole Tempest Keller
In 2017, Chris Down, Global Brand General Manager for Hot Wheels, and his team from the Advanced Play Group within Mattel, Inc., were considering which innovation path to pursue in order to "future proof" the Hot Wheels franchise going forward. Hot Wheels was the... View Details
- September 2020 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Gong: Resonating Conversational Insights
By: Alison Wood Brooks and Trevor Spelman
In 2015, Amit Bendov was struck by a realization about a new technology that might be able to transcribe musical notation in real-time, which eventually became known as Gong. Gong’s business proposition was simple: provide software that automatically captures,... View Details
- September 2020
- Case
Drinkworks: Home Bar by Keurig
By: Sunil Gupta, Jonathan Levav and Julia Kelley
In the summer of 2018, Drinkworks CEO Nathaniel Davis needed to make a number of go-to-market decisions ahead of his company’s upcoming product launch. Formed through a joint venture between Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch InBev, Drinkworks had developed an... View Details
Keywords: Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Markets; Bids and Bidding; Demand and Consumers; Consumer Behavior; Market Design; Distribution; Distribution Channels; Product; Product Design; Product Development; Business Model; Customers; Customer Value and Value Chain; Decision Making; Decisions; Goods and Commodities; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Business or Company Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Research; Research and Development; Strategy; Adoption; Competitive Advantage; Segmentation; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Value; Value Creation; Food and Beverage Industry; Consumer Products Industry; North and Central America; United States
- September 2020
- Article
Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, and a World of Surprises
In recent years, progress has been made toward AI Creativity, which I define as the production of highly novel, yet appropriate, ideas, problem solutions, or other outputs by autonomous machines. I argue that organizational researchers of creativity and innovation... View Details
- September 2020
- Article
Regulatory Sandboxes: A Cure for mHealth Pilotitis?
By: Abhishek Bhatia, Rahul Matthan, Tarun Khanna and Satchit Balsari
Mobile health (mHealth) and related digital health interventions in the past decade have not always scaled globally as anticipated earlier despite large investments by governments and philanthropic foundations. The implementation of digital health tools has suffered... View Details
- September–October 2020
- Article
The Past, Present, and (Near) Future of Gene Therapy and Gene Editing
By: Julia Pian, Amitabh Chandra and Ariel Dora Stern
Emerging gene therapy and gene-editing technologies will have a growing impact on patient lives and health-care delivery. We analyzed a decade of data on clinical trials and venture capital investments to understand the likely trajectory of genetically focused... View Details
- August 2020
- Case
Zoom Video Communications: Eric Yuan's Leadership During COVID-19
In the first half of 2020, worldwide lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic brought explosive growth to the Zoom Video Communications platform, as people replaced in-person work and social events with videoconferencing. Months into the pandemic, CEO Eric Yuan... View Details
Keywords: Transformation; Communication Technology; Customer Value and Value Chain; Values and Beliefs; Technological Innovation; Leadership; Crisis Management; Organizational Culture; Working Conditions; Strategy; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Technology Adoption; Health Pandemics; Technology Industry; United States; California
- July 2020
- Technical Note
Digital Natives Growing Without a Sales Force
By: Das Narayandas, Michael Norris and Amram Migdal
This brief case describes the rise of so-called digital natives (also called born-in-digital) in the 2000s and 2010s that successfully grew without a sales force. The case highlights the emergence of business-to-business Internet and cloud-based companies and their... View Details
Keywords: Government Administration; Crisis Management; Health; Health Pandemics; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Social Issues; Information Technology; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Applications and Software; Technology Adoption; Information Technology Industry; Australia; North and Central America; United States; Illinois; Chicago; California; San Francisco
- Summer 2020
- Article
Venture Capital's Role in Financing Innovation: What We Know and How Much We Still Need to Learn
By: Josh Lerner and Ramana Nanda
Venture capital is associated with some of the most high-growth and influential firms in the world. Academics and practitioners have effectively articulated the strengths of the venture model. At the same time, venture capital financing also has real limitations in its... View Details