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21 Nov 2015
HBS Case

HBS Cases: Stella McCartney Combines High Fashion with Environmental Values

Many people equate luxury with excess and folly. Stella McCartney is not one of those people. A lifelong vegetarian and prominent player in the green fashion movement, the designer has shown that luxury and sustainability need not be... View Details

Keywords: by Brian Kenny; Fashion

12 Dec 2011
HBS Case

HBS Cases: Clocky, the Runaway Alarm Clock

that Clocky wouldn't even hit the market until 2007. “I would kill Clocky in about two days." —Diane Sawyer At that point, the device was just a project that Gauri Nanda, a graduate student at MIT's Media Lab, had developed for an industrial View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Consumer Products

17 Dec 2012
Research & Ideas

Teaming in the Twenty-First Century

she says. "When I think about my research, it doesn't necessarily organize itself into a clear narrative from point A to point B." Edmondson's career hasn't followed a clear narrative either. After earning her undergraduate degree in engineering and View Details

Keywords: by Maggie Starvish

2019
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 13 Platform Systems vs. Step Processes—The Value of Options and the Power of Modularity

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

This is the first chapter in Part 3. Its purpose is to contrast the value structure of platform systems with step processes from a technological perspective. I first review the basic technical architecture of computers and argue that every computer is inherently a... View Details

Keywords: Platform Systems; Step Processes; Computer Architecture; Modularity; Information Technology; Digital Platforms

SSRN

17 Jun 2015
Lessons from the Classroom

Excellence Comes From Saying No

School Professor Frances Frei has explored that question for years in the retail realm, culminating in her 2012 book, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business. This past semester at HBS, the UPS... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

March 2017 (Revised May 2017)
Teaching Note

The Strategy Execution Series

By: Robert Simons and Jennifer Packard

This is the teaching note for the 15-module Strategy Execution series. New management tools and techniques are needed to implement strategy in the 21st century. Rapid innovation, entrepreneurial competitors, and increasingly demanding customers have radically altered... View Details

Keywords: Management Control Systems; Implementing Strategy; Strategy Execution; Performance Measurement; Profit Planning; Organization Design; Profitable Growth; Management Attention; Organizational Conflict; Job Design; Business Strategy; Management Systems; Entrepreneurship; Competition; Organizational Design; Performance Evaluation; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques

January 2022 (Revised August 2022)
Case

Geely SEA: New Electric Vehicle Platforms

By: Willy C. Shih and Shu Lin

Kent Bovellan, the Chief Engineer and Head of the Vehicle Architecture Center for Geely Holding, the Hangzhou, China headquartered global automotive group, was debating the platform choice for an upcoming "D" segment midsized battery electric vehicle (BEV). He had led... View Details

Keywords: Product Innovation; Product Architecture; Product Engineering; Platform Design; Platform Strategy; Information Infrastructure; Digital Platforms; Information Technology; Product Design; Product Development; Cost Management; Decision Making; Competitive Strategy; Industry Structures; Auto Industry; China; Sweden

Educators

October 2023
Article

Coordination and Bandwagon Effects: How Past Rankings Shape the Behavior of Voters and Candidates

By: Riako Granzier, Vincent Pons and Clémence Tricaud

Candidates’ placements in polls or past elections can be powerful coordination devices for both parties and voters. Using a regression discontinuity design in French elections, we show that candidates who place first by only a small margin in the first round are more... View Details

Keywords: Strategic Voting; Coordination; Bandwagon Effect; Regression Discontinuity Design; French Elections; Voting; Political Elections; Behavior; France

09 Apr 2024
Research & Ideas

When Climate Goals, Housing Policy, and Corporate R&D Collide, Social Good Can Emerge

For almost four years, Omar Asensio and his colleagues have been studying the impact of federal energy programs on low-income neighborhoods. The intersection of technology—artificial intelligence, in particular—and public policy has long been an area of focus for... View Details

Keywords: by Glen Justice

Article

The Similarity Heuristic

By: Daniel Read and Yael Grushka-Cockayne

Decision makers often make snap judgments using fast‐and‐frugal decision rules called cognitive heuristics. Research into cognitive heuristics has been divided into two camps. One camp has emphasized the limitations and biases produced by the heuristics; another has... View Details

Keywords: Heuristics And Biases; Fast-and-frugal Heuristics; Similarity; Representative Design

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June 2012
Case

Buro Happold (Abridged)

By: Robert G. Eccles and Ryan Johnson

In 1996, Ted Happold, the founder of the engineering services firm Buro Happold, passed away, and Padraic Kelly became the firm's new managing director (MD). One of his first initiatives was "Aim for Growth," which was intended to help the firm grow beyond its current... View Details

Keywords: Learning And Development; Managing Growth; Organizational Design; Diversification; Client Management; Leadership Skills; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Leadership Development; Management Skills; Training; Programs; Customer Relationship Management

Educators

2015
Working Paper

Corporate Sponsorship in Culture—A Case of Partnership in Relationship Building and Collaborative Marketing by a Global Financial Institution and a Major Art Museum

By: Ragnar Lund and Stephen A. Greyser

Purpose: This paper examines cultural sponsorship from a partnership and relationship marketing perspective. It studies a case of how a partnership between two international institutions, a bank and a museum, adds value to both in terms of interaction with... View Details

Keywords: Value Creation; Partners and Partnerships; Marketing Strategy; Culture; Banks and Banking

04 Oct 2004
What Do You Think?

Does Speed Trump Intellectual Property?

minimized. Clearly, speed can be used to enhance product development and innovation, providing faster responses to customer needs. But it can also be used effectively by fast imitators, like Fox, to both save View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

February 2021
Tutorial

Getting Started in RStudio Cloud

By: Chiara Farronato and Caleb Kwon

This video provides an introduction to the free programming language R using an online cloud version of RStudio, which is the most popular editor and interface for writing and executing R code. The video begins by providing a brief background of R and RStudio and... View Details

Keywords: Data Analysis; Data Analytics; Experiment; Experimental Design; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Applications and Software

01 May 2017
Research & Ideas

Bad At Your Job? Maybe It's the Job’s Fault

Source: Geber86 When a worker struggles to meet the demands of a particular position, the problem may not be with the employee—maybe it’s the job’s design that is wrong. A poorly designed job can work... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2021
Article

To Thine Own Self Be True? Incentive Problems in Personalized Law

By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

Recent years have seen an explosion of scholarship on “personalized law.” Commentators foresee a world in which regulators armed with big data and machine learning techniques determine the optimal legal rule for every regulated party, then instantaneously disseminate... View Details

Keywords: Personalized Law; Regulation; Regulatory Avoidance; Regulatory Arbitrage; Law And Economics; Law And Technology; Law And Artificial Intelligence; Futurism; Moral Hazard; Elicitation; Signaling; Privacy; Law; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Information Technology; AI and Machine Learning

SSRN

February 2015
Case

TouchTunes and the Connected Digital Jukebox Platform

By: Alan MacCormack and Noah Fisher

The case describes innovation and new product development at TouchTunes, the leader in the Digital Jukebox market. In March 2013, after releasing its innovative "Virtuo" jukebox developed in collaboration with frog design, TouchTunes was at a crossroads. Having... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Design; R＆D; Outsourcing; Platform Strategy; Digital Media; Digital Platforms; Growth and Development Strategy; Innovation and Invention; Product Development; Music Industry

Educators

September 2018
Article

Expressive Voting and Its Cost: Evidence from Runoffs with Two or Three Candidates

By: Vincent Pons and Clémence Tricaud

In French parliamentary and local elections, candidates ranked first and second in the first round automatically qualify for the second round, while a third candidate qualifies only when selected by more than 12.5 percent of registered citizens. Using a fuzzy RDD... View Details

Keywords: Expressive Voting; Strategic Voting; Regression Discontinuity Design; French Elections; Voting; Political Elections; France

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