Publications

07 Mar 2007
Research & Ideas

How Do You Value a “Free” Customer?

Businesspeople understand that not all customers are created equal—the 80-20 rule suggests that over time a small percentage of a company's customer base can generate a high percentage of its sales and profit. Models for calculating... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Web Services

Web

Middle East & North Africa - Global

built? May 2025 Case Boutiqaat: Influencing Retail in MENA By: Juan Alcacer and Noor Al Qadhi Boutiqaat, a Kuwait-based e-commerce platform, scaled an influencer-driven beauty retail model across MENA and now faces critical strategic... View Details

Web

Latin America - Global

Reskilling Model JUNE 2024 ALUMNI EVENT Alumni Event with HBS Club of Brazil The HBS Club of Brazil hosted a dedicated event for search funds in June 2024. Gustavo Vaz (MBA 2018), Marcos Noll Barboza (GMP), and Paulo Molinari (MBA 2020)... View Details

June 2012 (Revised August 2012)
Case

MF Global: Changing Stripes

By: Clayton Rose, Yasmin Dahya and Jenevieve Lee

Jon Corzine became the CEO of MF Global in March of 2010. Eighteen months later, and in the wake of a massive trade in European sovereign debt, the firm filed for bankruptcy, the 8th largest in U.S. history. As the firm failed it was discovered that over $1.6 billion... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Leadership; Governance; Bankruptcy; Financial Firms; Financial Crisis; Brokerage; Asset Management; Sovereign Finance; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Borrowing and Debt; Trade; Business Model

June 2024
Case

Arete Research on Unity Software

By: Joseph Pacelli and Tonia Labruyere

Richard Kramer had founded Arete Research, an independent financial research provider, in 2000 after a successful career as a sell-side analyst at Goldman Sachs. He reflects on his team's coverage of Unity Software, a U.S.-based mobile games software company, that... View Details

Keywords: Analysis; Initial Public Offering; Analytics and Data Science; Applications and Software; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Valuation; Value Creation; Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Model; Reports; Financial Services Industry; Video Game Industry; United Kingdom; United States

April 2013
Article

What Roger Fisher Got Profoundly Right: Five Enduring Lessons for Negotiators

By: James K. Sebenius

Roger Fisher, who died in 2012, enjoyed a remarkable career that modeled one way that an academic, especially in a professional school such as law or business, could make a significant, positive, and lasting difference in the world. Distinctive aspects of his career... View Details

Keywords: Bargaining; Conflict Resolution; Dealmaking; Negotiation; Personal Development and Career; Conflict and Resolution

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May 2023 (Revised June 2023)
Supplement

Novartis (C): Reimagining Medicine

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Claudio Feser, Karolin Frankenberger and David Redaschi

This case unfolds around the first-ever approved personalized cancer treatment, how Novartis wrapped it into a new business model design, and how Novartis scaled it. Novartis — one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world — is, among other ventures,... View Details

Keywords: Health Testing and Trials; Health Care and Treatment; Business Model; Problems and Challenges; Pharmaceutical Industry; Switzerland

17 May 2010
Research & Ideas

What Brazil Teaches About Investor Protection

The current debate in the United States about how to regulate Wall Street focuses on laws, regulations, and monitoring. But lawmakers may want to look to history for guidance, to Brazil 100 years ago, when transparent governance and investor protections came from... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Banking; Financial Services

Article

How Real Sales Learning Happens: In the Flow of Work

By: Yuchun Lee, Mark Magnacca and Frank V. Cespedes

Most learning in sales is through peer learning in task-specific contexts, and the effects are cumulative because modeling behavior is a big driver of how salespeople develop. This is very different from the experience in most training seminars, especially if the... View Details

Keywords: Sales; Learning; Training; Performance

May 2018
Case

Kaiser Permanente Colorado: Primary Care Plus

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Mahek A. Shah

A geriatrician in Kaiser Permanente’s Colorado region is concerned with the high and growing cost of treating the elderly population. She introduces a new care model, Primary Care Plus, using an interdisciplinary team of a primary care doctor, palliative care... View Details

Keywords: Primary Health Care; Elderly Patients; Integrated Practice Unit; Interdisciplinary Care; Health Care and Treatment; Age; Cost Management; Performance Improvement; Health Industry; United States; Colorado

2013
Working Paper

If Technology Has Arrived Everywhere, Why Has Income Diverged?

By: Diego A. Comin and Marti Mestieri Ferrer

We study the lags with which new technologies are adopted across countries, and their long-run penetration rates once they are adopted. Using data from the last two centuries, we document two new facts: there has been convergence in adoption lags between rich and poor... View Details

Keywords: Income Characteristics; Technology Adoption; Globalization

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October 2006 (Revised October 2007)
Case

Information Technology and Innovation at Shinsei Bank

Shinsei Bank was rebuilt from the ashes of a failed predecessor, and pioneered new levels of customer service in retail banking in Japan. The bank's information technology, however, was vestigial at best and not well suited to the new service models Shinsei was... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Banks and Banking; Innovation and Invention; Banking Industry; Japan

06 Aug 2020
News

Interview with Professor Regina Herzlinger on Balancing Entrepreneurship and Corporate Governance with a Prominent Academic Career

The Challenge of Digital Transformation

The ubiquity of digital technology and internet connectivity is driving both new and old players across all industries to invest in new capabilities, define new business models, and compete in new ways. From software to automobiles, from healthcare to financial... View Details

Web

Key Concepts - Institute For Strategy And Competitiveness

problems in the health care industry. It has been stuck in outdated management practices and payment models that made the problem progressively worse over the past 50 years despite tremendous advances in medical science. While medical... View Details

Research Summary

The Appropriability of Reputation in Franchises Selling Brands

We develop a multi-market model in which there are two kinds of firms: brands and small firms (or agents). Firms interact with short lived clients in the market for goods (or services) and with each other in the market for franchises. The model is one of adverse... View Details

2021
Working Paper

CRM and AI in Time of Crisis

By: Michelle Y. Lu and Navid Mojir

A crisis can affect the incentives of various players within a firm’s multi-layered sales and marketing organization (e.g., headquarters and branches of a bank). Such shifts can result in sales decisions against the firm’s best interests. Motivated by the backlash to... View Details

Keywords: CRM; Artificial Intelligence; AI; B2B Marketing; Decision Authority; Crisis Marketing; Intra-organizational Conflict; COVID-19 Pandemic; Customer Relationship Management; Technological Innovation; Decision Making; Strategy; Health Pandemics; Crisis Management; AI and Machine Learning

SSRN

February 2018
Article

Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective.

By: Eva Ascarza

Companies in a variety of sectors are increasingly managing customer churn proactively, generally by detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and targeting retention efforts towards them. While there is a vast literature on developing churn prediction models... View Details

Keywords: Retention/churn; Proactive Churn Management; Field Experiments; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Machine Learning; Customer Relationship Management; Risk Management

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February 2018 (Revised September 2018)
Case

Huawei: How Can We Lead the Way?

By: Elie Ofek, Tian Tao, Eden Yin and Nancy Hua Dai

On September 12, 2017, just as Apple’s Tim Cook was unveiling the iPhone X, Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group (CBG), and Glory Cheung, his Chief Marketing Officer, were discussing some key strategic issues regarding Huawei’s smartphone business.... View Details

Keywords: Product Launch; Product Positioning; Marketing Communications; Price; Competitive Strategy; Global Strategy