Publications

March–April 2021
Article

Network-biased Technical Change: How Information Management Tools Overcome Some Biases but Exacerbate Others.

By: Gerald C. Kane and Lynn Wu

Organizations have long sought to improve employee performance by managing knowledge more effectively. In this paper, we test whether the adoption of digital tools for expertise search and access within an organization, often referred to as a support to an... View Details

Keywords: Digital Tools; Social Media; Social Networks; Transactive Memory Systems; Augmented Intelligence; Artificial Intelligence; Social and Collaborative Networks; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Technology Adoption; Knowledge Management; Performance Improvement; Power and Influence; Organizational Change and Adaptation

June 2011 (Revised September 2011)
Case

Exchange-Traded Funds at Vanguard (A)

By: Robert C. Pozen and Steven Vickers

Vanguard Group management, led by CEO John Brennan, was considering whether to launch exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in early 2000. ETFs, first created in the early 1990s, combined aspects of traditional mutual funds and closed-end funds. The US ETF industry had reached... View Details

Keywords: Investment Funds; Managerial Roles; Growth and Development Strategy; Experience and Expertise; Market Entry and Exit; Network Effects; Profit; Business and Shareholder Relations; Product Launch; Asset Management; Distribution Channels; Ownership; Financial Services Industry; United States

Gerald Chertavian is the Founder of Year Up, one of the nation’s largest and most effective youth workforce development programs. Chertavian was a successful technology entrepreneur and Wall Street banker, but it was through his many years as a Big Brother... View Details

Mihir A. Desai

Mihir A. Desai is the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School and a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He received his Ph.D. in political economy from Harvard... View Details

February 2021
Teaching Plan

Soofa: Displaying the Right Path?

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Amy Klopfenstein

This teaching plan serves as a supplement to the case “Soofa: Displaying the Right Path?” HBS 820-098. The case explores the tension between two different financing and expansion plans for a startup, and explores issues related to business model pivots and industry... View Details

June 2016
Article

Wicked Problem Solvers: Lessons from Successful Cross-industry Teams

By: Amy C. Edmondson

Companies today increasingly rely on teams that span many industries for radical innovation, especially to solve “wicked problems.” So leaders have to understand how to promote collaboration when roles are uncertain, goals are shifting, expertise and organizational... View Details

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Leadership Style; Collaborative Innovation and Invention

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15 Nov 2018
News

HBS's Rock Center for Entrepreneurship Announces Rock Venture Capital Partners

2012
Book

Producing Prosperity: Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaissance

By: Gary P. Pisano and Willy Shih

For years—even decades—in response to intensifying global competition, American companies decided to outsource their manufacturing operations in order to reduce costs. But we are now seeing the alarming long-term effect of those choices: in many cases, once... View Details

Keywords: Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Production; Competitive Advantage; Transformation; Innovation and Invention; Manufacturing Industry; United States

April 2012
Article

Corporate Ownership Structure and Bank Loan Syndicate Structure

By: Chen Lin, Yue Ma, Paul Malatesta and Yuhai Xuan

Using a novel data set on corporate ownership and control, we show that the divergence between the control rights and cash-flow rights of a borrowing firm's largest ultimate owner has a significant impact on the concentration and composition of the firm's loan... View Details

Keywords: Ownership; Financing and Loans; Cash Flow; Borrowing and Debt; Accounting; Crisis Management; Relationships; Law; Contracts; Banking Industry

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May 1999 (Revised March 2001)
Case

Marshall Industries

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport

Confounding predictions that the Internet would "disintermediate" commerce, making "middle man" companies all but obsolete, Marshall Industries, a leading electronics distributor, used the Internet and digital technologies to reinvent itself. Marshall continued to sell... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Supply Chain; Emerging Markets; Customer Focus and Relationships; Distribution Industry; Electronics Industry

January 1995 (Revised June 1995)
Case

Cybertech Project (A), The

Describes the development and exploitation of a radical new computer-integrated technology in the largely manual meat-processing industry. The technology has been developed by the meat industry's research organization over a period of 15 years and is now ready for... View Details

Keywords: Production; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Information Technology; Product Marketing; Manufacturing Industry; Information Technology Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry

Suraj Srinivasan is the Philip J. Stomberg Professor of Business Administration, a member of the Accounting and Management faculty unit, and chair of the View Details

Keywords: accounting industry; financial services

2024
Working Paper

Private Equity and Digital Transformation

By: Brian K. Baik, Wilbur Chen and Suraj Srinivasan

We study the role which private equity (PE) plays in digital transformation. We find that PE investment is associated with greater investments into portfolio firm’s digital technologies, as measured by IT expenditures and the hiring demand for AI skills. This... View Details

Keywords: Digital Transformation; Private Equity; Selection and Staffing; Investment Portfolio; Value Creation

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Article

Incorporating Interpretable Output Constraints in Bayesian Neural Networks

By: Wanqian Yang, Lars Lorch, Moritz Graule, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Finale Doshi-Velez

Domains where supervised models are deployed often come with task-specific constraints, such as prior expert knowledge on the ground-truth function, or desiderata like safety and fairness. We introduce a novel probabilistic framework for reasoning with such constraints... View Details

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15 Apr 2015
News

2015 Best 40 Under 40 Professors: Francesca Gino, Harvard Business School

January 2008 (Revised May 2011)
Case

Cognizant Technology Solutions

By: Robert G. Eccles, David Lane and Prabakar 'PK' Kothandaraman

In the highly competitive information technology outsourcing industry, Cognizant Technology Solutions has developed a strategy to differentiate itself by emphasizing building very close client relationships through its "Two-in-a-box" (TIB) model. This model is based on... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Knowledge Sharing; Resource Allocation; Competitive Advantage; Information Technology; Information Technology Industry

May 2021
Article

The Firm Next Door: Using Satellite Images to Study Local Information Advantage

By: Jung Koo Kang, Lorien Stice-Lawrence and Forester Wong

We use novel satellite data that track the number of cars in the parking lots of 92,668 stores for 71 publicly listed U.S. retailers to study the local information advantage of institutional investors. We establish car counts as a timely measure of store-level... View Details

Keywords: Satellite Images; Store-level Performance; Institutional Investors; Local Advantage; Overweighting; Processing Costs; Alternative Data; Big Data; Emerging Technologies; Information; Quality; Institutional Investing; Decision Making; Behavioral Finance; Analytics and Data Science

May 2020
Article

Identifying Sources of Inefficiency in Health Care

By: Amitabh Chandra and Douglas O. Staiger

In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. However, an... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Performance Efficiency; Performance Productivity; Mathematical Methods