Categories - Publications - Faculty & Research

07 Apr 2021
Research & Ideas

How Teams Work: Lessons from the Pandemic

to chart teams’ interactions as they transitioned to remote work. The name of the firm and its industry are confidential, but its teams routinely traveled together to visit clients prior to the pandemic. Drawing on past research about collaboration, the study... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

11 Feb 2002
Research & Ideas

The Quiet Leader—and How to Be One

It's a perfectly natural thing. I think if a person working with and through other people has made the world a better place or avoided a problem for some organization, I'm willing to call him or her a leader. Whether they get a medal or an award or fit in a View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

Research Summary

Overview

Dr. Burch’s research focuses on capitalism, work, and gender in the twentieth-century United States. Her work reinterprets the history of direct selling by placing it at the center, rather than on the margins, of narratives about advanced capitalism. Examining the... View Details

Keywords: Business History; Political Economy; Labor History; Gender; Marketing; Sales Force Management; Direct Sales; United States

26 Oct 2021
Research & Ideas

What Companies Want Most in a CEO: A Good Listener

period. “The demand for social skills is increasing in every category of the economy,” says Sadun, the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at HBS. “[But] it’s not about schmoozing.” Instead,... View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald

08 Sep 2014
Research & Ideas

The Strategic Way To Hire a Sales Team

via one or two interviews. But studies across job categories indicate there is only about a 14 percent correlation between interview predictions and job success. This is especially true in sales. A job where individual performance can... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

19 Apr 2010
Research & Ideas

The History of Beauty

the consumer products giant Unilever, published some years ago. This company had a long-established business in soap and other toiletries, but spent decades after World War II striving without great success to expand its business into other View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Beauty & Cosmetics

28 Nov 2018
HBS Case

On Target: Rethinking the Retail Website

says. “I think that’s a big reason why Target’s adoption of a data-driven approach has been so successful.” Related Reading: Should Retailers Match Their Own Prices Online and in Stores? Retailing Revolution: Category Killers on the Brink... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Retail

22 Feb 2018
Book

The New History of American Capitalism

represents a distinctive departure. First—and most basically—the history of American capitalism, along with the essays gathered here, reinstalls political economy as a category for analysis. Economic life, all the authors agree, is... View Details

Keywords: Manufacturing

02 Jun 2020
Research & Ideas

Coronavirus Careers: Cloud Kitchens Are Now Serving

started out supplying a service to restaurants; now cloud kitchens are supplying a service to delivery firms. The appearance of cloud kitchens as suppliers for these delivery services has been sudden and dramatic, so much so that they are still an emergent View Details

Keywords: by Lena Ye and Geoffrey Jones; Food & Beverage

17 Oct 2019
Research & Ideas

‘Chick Beer’ for Women? Why Gender Marketing Repels More Than Sells

this feeling that just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I love pink! There’s something very off-putting about feeling like you’re being reduced to a single category of membership.” Tami Kim The study’s findings are detailed in the working... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Consumer Products

14 Dec 2007
Op-Ed

When Your Product Becomes a Commodity

offshoring are all squeezing margins, increasing customer price sensitivity, and making it harder to sustain inter-brand differentiation. The product life cycle suggests that, as product categories mature, they become more susceptible to... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch

19 Jan 2015
Research & Ideas

Is Wikipedia More Biased Than Encyclopædia Britannica?

on topics such as government (9 percent), education (4 percent), immigration (4 percent), and civil rights (3 percent). Other categories did not have enough data to significantly identify bias. Of course, those findings don't say which of... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Publishing

11 Apr 2022
Research & Ideas

A World of Difference: What Keeps Companies from Becoming More Inclusive

clear desire; the leaders are courageous enough to take action; they recognize there is messiness in doing it right; and they are okay with errors they and others will be making along the way. The number of places that don’t belong to any one of these three View Details

Keywords: by Jen McFarland Flint

09 Mar 2003
Research & Ideas

Six Keys to Building New Markets by Unleashing Disruptive Innovation

terms of product categories and demographics. We just don't live our lives in product categories or in demographics. When companies segment markets this way they often fail to connect with their customers.... View Details

Keywords: by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor & Scott D. Anthony

23 May 2018
Research & Ideas

How to Know If Your Neighborhood Is Being Gentrified

that are widely seen as measures of gentrification are accompanied by growth in the number of businesses in every category we examined.” Creating better public policy Gentrification has swept through some of America’s largest cities,... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

27 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

The Hidden Cost of a Product Recall

six months. Medtech product development teams typically focus on a single product category or line, allowing them to apply their expertise more efficiently. However, recalls force these teams to shift their attention from making... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost; Manufacturing; Consumer Products; Auto; Medical Devices & Supplies

12 Mar 2006
Research & Ideas

New Research Explores Multi-Sided Markets

there are interesting common threads that tie together markets which, on the face of it, have nothing to do with each other: credit cards, videogames, and dating clubs. It is also true that certain categories of two-sided markets have... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Technology

12 Sep 2022
Research & Ideas

When Experts Play It Too Safe: Innovation Lessons from a NASA Experiment

Lane and her colleagues sorted responses evaluating robot arm designs into three categories of evaluator: unscreened, screened through a human resources-like questionnaire examining their credentials, and those that took a robotics skills... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Aerospace

July–August 2021
Article

Surfacing the Submerged State: Operational Transparency Increases Trust in and Engagement with Government

By: Ryan W. Buell, Ethan Porter and Michael I. Norton

Problem definition: As trust in government reaches historic lows, frustration with government performance approaches record highs. Academic/practical relevance: We propose that in co-productive settings like government services, peoples’ trust and... View Details

Keywords: Government Services; Behavioral Operations; Operational Transparency; Government Administration; Service Operations; Programs; Perception; Attitudes; Behavior; Trust

2013
Working Paper

Clusters and the New Growth Path for Europe

By: Christian Ketels and Sergiy Protsiv

This paper outlines elements of a conceptual framework that clarifies the role that clusters play relative to government policies and actions of individual companies in supporting the emergence of "High Road" strategies that lead to better New Growth Path–related... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Competition; Industry Clusters; Globalization; Economic Growth; Europe