Publications

July 2000 (Revised May 2002)
Case

Gateway: Moving Beyond the Box

By: Frances X. Frei, Youngme E. Moon and Hanna Rodriguez-Farrar

Gateway has opened retail stores to differentiate itself from its competitors (e.g., Dell). Describes how the company has created an excellent service experience, but has struggled financially as a result. View Details

Keywords: Transition; Change Management; Valuation; Service Operations; Service Delivery; Distribution Channels; Computer Industry; Electronics Industry; United States

June 1998 (Revised January 2000)
Case

Egghead.com

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport

Egghead Software, an entrenched traditional chain retailer specializing in computer software and peripherals, had established a nationwide chain of mall and shopping center stores and a well-organized national brand. In early 1998, management made a highly unusual, and... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Applications and Software; Information Technology Industry; Retail Industry

August 1994
Background Note

Note on Entering Foreign Markets: Opportunities for Smaller U.S. Companies

By: Norman A. Berg and James Weber

Designed specifically for the smaller U.S.-based company; provides a brief overview of the various means by which such companies can enter foreign markets and the sources of information and assistance, principally on exporting, available to them. View Details

Keywords: Trade; Information; Management; Market Entry and Exit; Distribution; United States

27 Jul 2023
Blog Post

Buy big, sell small

distribution model by providing a digital platform where shop owners can order fast-moving consumer goods online or by phone from local wholesalers who combine their orders with others from nearby kiranas. “We’re like a Costco or Sam’s... View Details

Article

Pattern Detection in the Activation Space for Identifying Synthesized Content

By: Celia Cintas, Skyler Speakman, Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Victor Akinwande, Edward McFowland III and Komminist Weldemariam

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved unprecedented success in photo-realistic image synthesis from low-dimensional random noise. The ability to synthesize high-quality content at a large scale brings potential risks as the generated samples may... View Details

Keywords: Subset Scanning; Generative Models; Synthetic Content Detection

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07 Jun 2004
What Do You Think?

How Important are Big Ideas?

Summing Up Judging from responses to the June column, big ideas rank high on a list including technology and intellectual property as sources of competitive advantage. But they are only a starting point, outweighed by methods and the... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

2012
Working Paper

Prominent Job Advertisements, Group Learning and Wage Dispersion

By: Julio J. Rotemberg

A model is presented in which people base their labor search strategy on the average wage and the average unemployment duration of people who belong to their peer group. It is shown that, if the distribution of wage offers is not stationary so lower wage offers tend to... View Details

Keywords: Wages; Job Offer; Job Search; Advertising

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02 Jan 2007
Research & Ideas

Most Popular Articles of 2006

mistake. Sandra Cha of McGill University and Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School discuss what to do when values backfire. Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation Borrowing a practice that is... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2007
Working Paper

How to Capture Value from Innovation: Shaping Intellectual Property and Industry Architecture

By: Gary P. Pisano and David J. Teece

In making strategic decisions about how to capture value from innovation, managers often look at two critical domains—the intellectual property environment and the architecture of the industry—as beyond their control. Yet, the intellectual property environment and the... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Management; Intellectual Property; Industry Structures; Value

03 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

Transforming Manufacturing Waste into Profit

It's been said that "one man's trash is another man's treasure." HBS Assistant Professor Deishin Lee, however, has taken that old adage a step further in her recent working paper Turning Waste into By-Product by showing how it's possible for companies to turn... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Manufacturing

Research Summary

Selling China: Foreign Direct Investment During the Reform Era

The aim of the book is to illustrate the dynamics of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China in the 1990s. The topic is important both because China is the world's second largest recipient of FDI and because there are substantial misconceptions about the drivers of... View Details

November 2003 (Revised February 2011)
Case

Sanford C. Bernstein: The Fork in the Road (A)

By: Boris Groysberg and Anahita Hashemi

Soon after the death of the firm's legendary founder, the individuals then serving as chairman and as president--Lewis A. Sanders and Roger Hertog, respectively--talked about the future of their firm. Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., a private investment firm, had grown... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Performance Expectations; Competitive Advantage; Valuation

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12 Mar 2018
Op-Ed

Op-Ed: Why BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Is Not a Socialist

pressures to distribute earnings, and, in the process, sacrifice investments in employee development, innovation, and capital expenditures that are necessary for long-term growth.” The great long-term value creators of the past 25 years... View Details

Keywords: by Bill George; Banking

25 Oct 2010
HBS Case

Tesco’s Stumble into the US Market

Tesco PLC is the third-largest retailer in the world, just behind Wal-Mart and Carrefour. But that didn't make the UK-based chain immune from many costly mistakes as it entered the US market in 2006. For example, it opened some of its... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

December 2018
Article

Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston's Walk Zones

By: Umut Dur, Scott Duke Kominers, Parag A. Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez

Admissions policies often use reserves to grant certain applicants higher priority for some (but not all) available seats. Boston’s school choice system, for example, reserved half of each school’s seats for local neighborhood applicants while leaving the other half... View Details

Keywords: Neighborhoods; Equal Access; School Choice; Affirmative Action; Desegregation; Marketplace Matching; Fairness; Local Range; Education; Policy

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June 2007 (Revised April 2009)
Case

Intel 2006: Rising to the Graphics Challenge

By: Willy C. Shih and Elie Ofek

Examines the evolution of the PC hardware industry over the span of two and a half decades. The open architecture design of the IBM Personal Computer followed by the rapid appearance of clones drove a high level of standardization and modularity in the industry, and... View Details

Keywords: History; Customer Value and Value Chain; Decision Choices and Conditions; Information Infrastructure; Competitive Strategy; Mergers and Acquisitions; Technology Industry

03 Apr 2019
Book

Fintech's Game-Changing Opportunities for Small Business

customers own their banking data and can designate it to be available to a third party. Open data and open banking are important so that data streams are available to multiple financial institutions and... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Banking; Financial Services

January 2016 (Revised January 2017)
Case

Rumie: Bringing Digital Education to the Underserved

By: John J-H Kim and Amram Migdal

In fall of 2015, the Toronto, Canada–based education technology nonprofit Rumie had distributed thousands of computer tablets preloaded with collections of thousands of pieces of curated educational content to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in some of the most... View Details

Keywords: Edtech; Education Technology; Social Enterprise; Nonprofit; Education Startup; Technological Innovation; Nonprofit Organizations; Social Entrepreneurship; Education; Business Startups; Education Industry; Canada; Africa