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- Article
The Perils of Excellence: Barriers to Effective Process Improvement in Product-Driven Firms
By: Rebecca M. Henderson, Jesus del Alamo, Todd Becker, James Lawton, Peter Moran, Saul Shapiro and Dean Vlasak
- February 1998 (Revised May 1998)
- Case
SITEL Corporation
By: Howard H. Stevenson and Martha Gershun
SITEL has grown extremely rapidly and is now operating worldwide with operations in more than 30 countries. Since many of its locations serve the same customers, the officers are debating the costs and benefits of additional centralization. Some feel that the autonomy... View Details
- January 1998 (Revised February 1998)
- Case
Timberjack Parts: Packaged Software Selection Project
By: F. Warren McFarlan, Mark Keil and Darryl S. Romanow
This case provides a realistic, current, and detailed view of software procurement in an international business environment where the competition in enterprise-wide software solutions is growing. Focuses on the selection of packaged software to serve multiple sites... View Details
- January 1998 (Revised February 2006)
- Background Note
Creating Competitive Advantage
By: Pankaj Ghemawat and Jan W. Rivkin
A firm such as Schering-Plough that earns superior, long-run financial returns within its industry is said to enjoy a competitive advantage over its rivals. This note examines the logic of how firms create competitive advantage. It emphasizes two themes: First, to... View Details
- January 1998
- Case
Connecticut Spring and Stamping Corp. (C)
By: H. Kent Bowen, Massimo Russo and Steven J. Spear
Andy Youmans, executive vice president of CSSC, joins a group of U.S. executives on a tour of Japanese factories that practice the TPS. Three of the factories produce products similar to CSSC's, and even though they use similar equipment, they are significantly more... View Details
- January 1998 (Revised May 1999)
- Case
General Scanning, Inc. (A)
By: H. Kent Bowen, Sean McClenaghan and Charles Tillen
General Scanning, Inc. was founded by Jean Montagu and Pierre Brosens, two MIT mechanical engineers with an interest in developing innovative products based on the early application of lasers. They invented proprietary technology for laser beam positioning and scanning... View Details
- January 1998 (Revised April 2001)
- Case
Acer America: Development of the Aspire
By: Christopher A. Bartlett and Anthony St. George
Follows the development, national launch, and global rollout of the Aspire, Acer's first new product developed outside of Taiwan. Implementing a very promising new PC concept proves challenging to Mike Culver and his U.S. team, who are plagued by coordination problems... View Details
- January 1998 (Revised November 2003)
- Case
Morgan Stanley and S.G. Warburg: Investment Bank of the Future (A)
By: James K. Sebenius and David T. Kotchen
Describes secretive negotiations that took place between the top executives of Morgan Stanley and S.G. Warburg in the fall of 1994, when the two firms were contemplating a merger that would create one of the world's most powerful investment banks. By December, in order... View Details
- January 1998 (Revised December 1998)
- Case
NSK Software Technologies Ltd.
By: Paul A. Gompers and Jeffrey M. Anapolsky
Discusses the efforts of three Israeli software engineers' efforts to bring a network security software product to market. The firm needs an investment to complete programming and start marketing. View Details
- 1998
- Journal Article
Ford's Model-T: Pricing over the Product Life Cycle
The pricing decisions monopolistic firms make over time are determined to a large extent by the complex interplay of two distinct sets of elements: demand- and supply-based considerations. Demand factors include the possibilities of (a) exercising dynamic price... View Details
- Article
Industrial Ecology and Competitiveness
By: Daniel Esty and Michael E. Porter
In the emerging field of industrial ecology one of the unsettled questions is the degree to which design for the environment, closing energy and materials loops, and other industrial ecology concepts apply at the firm level. In this article we examine this issue with a... View Details
Keywords: Competition
- 1998
- Conference Presentation
Network Location and Learning: The Influence of Network Resources and Firm Capabilities on Alliance Formation
By: Ranjay Gulati
- December 1997
- Case
Intercontinental Breweries (Abridged)
By: Thomas R. Piper
A senior executive of a U.S. multinational is attempting to develop a set of financial, operating, and ownership arrangements that will be acceptable to the management and employees of a major Polish company and to the Ministry of Privatization. The arrangements must... View Details
- December 1997 (Revised May 1998)
- Case
CUC and HFS: Corporate Identity for a "Merger of Equals"
By: Stephen A. Greyser and Robert J. Crawford
In the wake of a major $20 billion market capitalization "merger of equals," two large consumer service firms must determine a new name for the new entity. Neither CUC nor HFS is well known among consumers. The CUC Services (e.g., shopping, travel, credit card... View Details
- 1997
- Working Paper
Designs and the Structure of Firms and Industries - Chapter 1
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim Clark
- November 1997 (Revised December 2000)
- Case
Corn Products International, Inc.
By: Ray A. Goldberg and Tom Clay
A firm that started in corn processing and moved up the value-added food chain decides to spin-off the original commodity part of the business. How does the new spin-off survive and how does it develop a strategy? Firms in the food system are separating out their... View Details
- November 1997 (Revised October 2000)
- Case
Interactive Minds (A)
By: William A. Sahlman, Michael J. Roberts and Christina L. Darwall
The efforts of two recent Harvard Business School graduates to start a venture capital/consulting firm focused on opportunities related to the Internet are recounted. Raises the question of what the nature of this opportunity is, how well-positioned the protagonists... View Details