Small Business - Publications - Faculty & Research

Profile

Michael O. Braimah

marketability." After Amal Sale, Michael reached out to an HBS contact he met a few years earlier at the Africa Business Conference, joining him at his private-equity firm, Kaizen Venture Partners. There, Michael was part of a View Details

Web

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Secondary Credit Market

the aftermath of the Panic of 1893. 28 By 1909, there were fifteen such societies—backed by the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Percy A. Rockefeller—offering small chattel loans on a philanthropic or semi-philanthropic basis. To its... View Details

01 Feb 1997
News

Made, Not Born: HBS Courses and Entrepreneurial Management

students learn how to apply discipline to the inexact science of valuing private enterprises." Running and Growing the Small Company The dramatic beginnings of entrepreneurial businesses have been much... View Details

August 2019 (Revised October 2019)
Case

Amandla Capital: Real Estate in Côte d‘Ivoire

By: John D. Macomber, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Dilyana Botha

This case describes Amandla Capital, a fledgling company in Cote d’Ivoire, facing three opportunities in the real estate and hospitality industries in Africa. It introduces students to several concepts: decision-making and cost-benefit analysis in real estate,... View Details

Keywords: Small Business; Decision Making; Decision Choices and Conditions; Cost vs Benefits; Finance; Assets; Asset Management; Investment Portfolio; Investment Return; Project Finance; Relationships

Citation

Educators

Purchase

Lewis took the helm of his father’s small insurance business in the mid sixties when it was the 48th largest insurer in the nation. Over the course of the next two decades, Lewis built Progressive into one... View Details

Keywords: Finance

15 Nov 2020
News

Global Outposts Expand HBS’s Intellectual Footprint

of online events marking its 20th anniversary. In May, Senior Lecturer Michael Chu moderated an event that addressed financing small and medium-sized businesses during the pandemic, managing through crisis,... View Details

01 Jun 2014
News

Case Study: A Souped-Up Strategy

our business works very well in a particular kind of medium-sized city. And in those cities, we can invest in the market to bring it to saturation. But many would argue that we should tackle the biggest cities immediately, particularly... View Details

01 Aug 2001
News

Bert W.M. Twaalfhoven (MBA '54)

Twaalfhoven—brimming with energy—looks the part of a worldly and accomplished business leader. And well he should. He has founded and headed a wide assortment of small companies during a career of more than... View Details

Keywords: Georges F. Doriot; John G. McLean; Alumni Achievement Award; Management of Companies and Enterprises; Management

25 Feb 2020
News

The Influence of Geography on Work and Innovation

research and development centers fostered more patents than those who had not crossed borders. Since then, the geography of work and innovation has been the focus of his research. These days, Choudhury, the Lumry Family Associate Professor of View Details

Keywords: April White

Joe C. Thompson, Jr.

Though Southland was quite a successful block ice retailer in the 1920s, when home refrigerators became popular, the company suffered and was forced into bankruptcy in 1932. Seeing the budding success of the retail grocery store business... View Details

Keywords: Retail

Daniel F. Gerber, Jr.

Gerber took over his father’s small canning business in 1917 and refashioned it into a leading producer of baby food products. When Gerber introduced strained baby food in 1928, the market was virtually... View Details

Keywords: Food & Tobacco

01 Mar 2005
News

House of Bread on the Rise

operated by franchisees. Based on her Santa Cruz experience, McCann makes a point of telling her franchise owners that they need to live within a half-hour of the bakery. “In that first year, running a small View Details

Keywords: Margie Kelley; Food Services and Drinking Places; Hospitality

01 Sep 2010
News

Online Fashionistas

only a day or two) of a single designer’s clothing line or a small group of brands, all at discounts of up to 70 percent. Having “revolutionized the fashion world” (Forbes.com, June 15, 2010), the company is expecting revenues of $400 to... View Details

Keywords: Clothing and Clothing Accessories Stores; Retail Trade

02 Apr 2015
Research & Ideas

Digital Initiative Summit: Who Has the Power in the Music Industry?

be the business person and think about the nuances of that, but there's also a ton of traffic coming by and I don't have limitations on how much money I can make." In other words, musicians today have massive potential to reach an... View Details

Keywords: Re: Felix Oberholzer-Gee; Music

19 Jun 2014
News

Turning "Black Gold" to Green

two oil fields, have contracts to manage as much CO2 as is produced by a small city, and we have the financial backing to finish the job," Dawe says. "That's about as tangible as it gets." Dawe is the president and cofounder of Berkeley,... View Details

Keywords: Ralph Ranalli; Oil and Gas Extraction; Mining

Portrait Project

Keima Ueno

I stand with my mother in the doorway, as my father leaves for another day at the helm of the small family business. Life revolved around the business. My father frequently took me to his office and often hosted his employees in our home.... View Details

05 Jun 2017
News

Women on Boards: A Course Becomes a Movement

is filling a need in the market. That is due, in no small way, to the fact that top-performing senior executive women remain critically underrepresented in corporate governance across all industries. Currently only about 19 percent of... View Details

Keywords: Margaret Kelley

01 Dec 2020
News

The Camel and the Unicorn

an integral part of Silicon Valley culture, we first need to understand how Silicon Valley came to be. Nancy Koehn: My name is Nancy Koehn. I'm a historian at the Harvard Business School where I hold the James E. Robison Chair of View Details

18 Sep 2019
News

Buffett Protégé Britt Cool to Start Own Firm

Journal. “Anything I’ve assigned her she’s done a first-class job on.” As for her new firm, Britt Cool told the paper that there will be similarities to Berkshire Hathaway in its approach. “I want to build a long-term platform and a long-term vehicle to acquire and... View Details

22 Feb 2022
News

Launch Codes

away from you quickly. In the early days of WAVE, with a fairly small team, it was easy for me to model the expected behavior. But as we started to scale up, and our original culture ambassadors became the minority to the new hires, we... View Details

Keywords: Dan Morrell; illustrations by Alvaro Dominguez

Publications