Publications

23 Sep 2022
Research & Ideas

8 Strategies to Sustain Business Innovation

Sooner or later, every company runs into challenges that force them to make tough trade-offs during the innovation process. Harvard Business School associate professor Rory McDonald calls these moments “tensions.” The streaming service Netflix, for instance, has faced... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

1997
Book

Winning through Innovation: A Practical Guide to Leading Organizational Change and Renewal

By: Michael Tushman and C. O'Reilly

Keywords: Leading Change; Innovation and Management

Find at Harvard

May 2017 (Revised June 2017)
Case

ATH Technologies (A): Making the Numbers

By: Robert Simons and Jennifer Packard

An exercise that takes students through five stages of growth in an entrepreneurial start-up in the medical devices industry: 1) founding, 2) growth, 3) push to profitability, 4) refocusing process, and 5) takeover by new management. At each stage, students must... View Details

Keywords: Strategy And Execution; Management Control Systems; Balancing Innovation And Control; Performance Management; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Profit; Geographic Location; Governance Controls; Innovation and Invention; Management Succession; Performance Evaluation; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry

28 Nov 2018
HBS Case

On Target: Rethinking the Retail Website

jimkruger In the mid-1990s, Target was a discount superstore behemoth. The retailer had set itself apart from chief rival Walmart with a focus on more upscale but wallet-friendly fashion and lifestyle lines, spurring double-digit growth by double-digits each year for... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Retail

04 Feb 2019
Book

Green Businesses Are Incredibly Difficult to Make Profitable. Try It Anyway

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Green Technology; Energy

August 2014
Case

Opening the Valve: From Software to Hardware (A)

By: Ethan Bernstein, Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats

Valve, one of the world's top video game software companies, has also become an iconic example of an organization with virtually no hierarchy. A 400-person organization, Valve's unique organizational form (described in detail in the case and accompanying employee... View Details

2022
Book

The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI

By: Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley

The pressure to "be digital" has never been greater, but you can meet the challenge. The digital revolution is here, changing how work gets done, how industries are structured, and how people from all walks of life work, behave, and relate to each other. To thrive... View Details

Keywords: Digital; Artificial Intelligence; Big Data; Digital Transformation; Technological Innovation; Transformation; Learning; Competency and Skills

April 2021 (Revised June 2021)
Case

IBM: Design Thinking

By: Srikant M. Datar, Amram Migdal and Paul Hamilton

This case describes the 2012-2020 effort at IBM to implement design thinking throughout the company and hire thousands of designers to serve on every product team alongside technical engineers and developers and product managers. IBM’s design transformation is told... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Business Divisions; Business Units; Business Organization; Change; Change Management; Transformation; Competency and Skills; Talent and Talent Management; Design; Human Resources; Recruitment; Selection and Staffing; Innovation and Invention; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Jobs and Positions; Job Design and Levels; Leading Change; Management; Business or Company Management; Goals and Objectives; Management Practices and Processes; Operations; Product; Product Design; Product Development; Organizations; Business Processes; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Strategy; Adaptation; Adoption; Technological Innovation; Information Infrastructure; Information Technology; Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States

14 Jul 2014
Research & Ideas

Pay Attention To Your ‘Extreme Consumers’

What do Porsche fanatics, a video game hater, and a person who cooked two weeks' worth of meals in a rice cooker have in common? They are all "extreme consumers"—those whose tastes are so out there that mainstream market researchers tend to dismiss them as "noise" when... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

04 May 2015
Research & Ideas

Need to Solve a Problem? Take a Break From Collaborating

Got a problem? Throw some collaboration software at it. It's a common strategy among today's managers: Organizations spend a lot of money on technology that enables employees to tackle problems collectively. Hence, the market is rife with connectivity tools and... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Video Game; Web Services

January 2014 (Revised July 2016)
Case

Samuel Slater & Francis Cabot Lowell: The Factory System in U.S. Cotton Manufacturing

By: Tom Nicholas and Matthew Guilford

At the time of the American War of Independence (1776-1783) and for several decades after it, Great Britain dominated the global production of cotton textiles. In fact, Britain became so dominant in textile manufacturing and trading that Manchester, its industrial... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Production; Business History; Manufacturing Industry; Great Britain; Massachusetts

February 2023
Case

Roblox: Virtual Commerce in the Metaverse

By: Ayelet Israeli and Nicole Tempest Keller

In 2022, Roblox had 58.8 million daily active users, including over half of all children and teens under the age of 16 in the United States. Roblox, a free-to-use “co-experience platform”, allowed users to come together in immersive 3D experiences to socialize, work,... View Details

May 2017 (Revised September 2018)
Case

Hilti Fleet Management (A): Turning a Successful Business Model on Its Head

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Oliver Gassmann and Roman Sauer

This case explores the introduction of fleet management in the construction industry by the premium power tools manufacturer Hilti in 2000. Following its customers’ needs, Hilti moved from selling power tools to leasing them as a service. The introduction of the new... View Details

October 2018
Case

Booking.com

By: Stefan Thomke and Daniela Beyersdorfer

The case reveals how Booking.com has become the world's leading travel accommodation platform. The company has put online experimentation at the heart of how it designs digital experiences for its customers and partners. To unlock the potential of large-scale testing,... View Details

Keywords: Travel; Product Innovation; Experimentation; A/B Testing; User Experience Design; Product Development; Product Design; Innovation and Management; Transformation; Information Technology; Digital Transformation; Travel Industry

April 2010 (Revised March 2011)
Case

Tata Nano The People's Car

By: Krishna G. Palepu, Bharat N. Anand and Rachna Tahilyani

The case explores how Tata Motors, India's largest automobile company, developed the Nano, the world's cheapest car. The case focuses on the translation of Ratan Tata's (chairman of Tata Motors) vision of a safe affordable car for the masses by Ravi Kant, managing... View Details

Keywords: Price; Globalized Firms and Management; Disruptive Innovation; Emerging Markets; Business Processes; Quality; Competition; Auto Industry; Manufacturing Industry; India

01 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

A Penny for Your Thoughts? For Big-Picture Ideas, the Right Pay Structure Matters

Want employees to think outside the box? Start by taking a good, hard look at how you’re paying them. That’s the implication of new research examining the impact of different compensation structures on employee innovation. While there is endless handwringing about what... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

October 2021 (Revised December 2021)
Case

Customer-Centric Design with Artificial Intelligence: Commonwealth Bank

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Jin Hyun Paik and Steven Randazzo

As Commonwealth Bank (CommBank) CEO Matt Comyn delivered the full financial year results in August 2021 over videoconference, it took less than two minutes for him to make his first mention of the organization's Customer Engagement Engine (CEE), the AI-driven customer... View Details

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Customer-centricity; Banks and Banking; Customer Focus and Relationships; Technological Innovation; Transformation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance; AI and Machine Learning; Financial Services Industry; Australia

03 May 2023
Research & Ideas

Why Confronting Racism in AI 'Creates a Better Future for All of Us'

During his recent standing-room-only seminar about artificial intelligence (AI) and race at Harvard Business School recently, marketing professor Broderick Turner displayed a slide showing several white blob-like characters that resembled the tubby mascot of French... View Details

Keywords: by Barbara DeLollis

May 2018 (Revised February 2020)
Case

Jason Blum's Blumhouse Productions

By: Anita Elberse

In March 2017, Jason Blum, the founder and chief executive officer of film and television production company Blumhouse Productions, has another blockbuster on his hands with the movie Get Out, produced for just $4.5 million. Remarkable returns for its micro-budget... View Details