Publications

September 2021 (Revised March 2024)
Case

Tesla in 2023: 'Electrified' Competition

By: Eric Van den Steen, Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman

Over its 17 years in existence, Tesla had redefined people’s view of electric cars, and in 2020, the company saw its stock rise by more than 700% to became the most valuable carmaker in the world. In December 2020, Tesla celebrated its fifth consecutive quarter of... View Details

Keywords: Barrier To Entry; Competitive Advantage; Innovation; Tesla; Automotive Industry; Sustainable Competitive Advantage; Values; Vision; Learning By Doing; Economies Of Scale; Electric Vehicle; Scenario Planning; Batteries; Competitive Strategy; Product Positioning; Profit; Competition; Industry Growth; Auto Industry

September 2021 (Revised February 2022)
Case

Sawiris Foundation: Elevating Education in Egypt

By: Brian Trelstad and Alpana Thapar

Founded in 2001 by the Sawiris family, one of the wealthiest families in Egypt, the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development (SFSD) invested in human capital and provision of basic social services for the most marginalized Egyptians. In 2015, Noura Selim’s (MBA 2013)... View Details

Keywords: Sustainable Development; Social Enterprise; Education; Social Issues; Partners and Partnerships; Growth and Development Strategy; Education Industry; Egypt

September 17, 2021
Article

AI Can Help Address Inequity—If Companies Earn Users' Trust

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kannan Srinivasan, Param Singh and Nitin Mehta

While companies may spend a lot of time testing models before launch, many spend too little time considering how they will work in the wild. In particular, they fail to fully consider how rates of adoption can warp developers’ intent. For instance, Airbnb launched a... View Details

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Algorithmic Bias; Technological Innovation; Perception; Diversity; Equality and Inequality; Trust; AI and Machine Learning

September 15, 2021
Article

Improving Deconvolution Methods in Biology Through Open Innovation Competitions: An Application to the Connectivity Map

By: Andrea Blasco, Ted Natoli, Michael G. Endres, Rinat A. Sergeev, Steven Randazzo, Jin Hyun Paik, N.J. Maximilian Macaluso, Rajiv Narayan, Xiaodong Lu, David Peck, Karim R. Lakhani and Aravind Subramanian

A recurring problem in biomedical research is how to isolate signals of distinct populations (cell types, tissues, and genes) from composite measures obtained by a single analyte or sensor. Existing computational deconvolution approaches work well in many specific... View Details

Keywords: Deconvolution; Methods; Open Innovation Competition; Genomics; Research; Innovation and Invention

2 Sep 2021
Interview

Amy Edmondson

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Deepak Jayaraman

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Amy has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked #3 in 2019. She studies teaming,... View Details

Keywords: Psychological Safety; Organizational Culture; Communication; Performance Effectiveness

September 2021
Article

Diagnostic Bubbles

By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer

We introduce diagnostic expectations into a standard setting of price formation in which investors learn about the fundamental value of an asset and trade it. We study the interaction of diagnostic expectations with two well-known mechanisms: learning from prices and... View Details

Keywords: Bubble; Speculation; Diagnostic Expectations; Price Bubble; Mathematical Methods

August 2021 (Revised November 2024)
Case

Intenseye: Powering Workplace Health and Safety with AI (A)

By: Michael W. Toffel and Youssef Abdel Aal

Intenseye was a Turkey-based technology startup that deployed machine learning algorithms to workplace camera feeds in order to identify unsafe worker actions and unsafe working conditions, in order to help improve worker safety. The case describes how Intenseye’s... View Details

Keywords: Privacy; Product Development; Operations; Technological Innovation; Value Creation; Production; Distribution; Safety; Risk and Uncertainty; Technology Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Distribution Industry; Turkey; Middle East; United States

August 2021
Case

Andreessen Horowitz’s Cultural Leadership Fund (A)

By: Anita Elberse, Briana Richardson and Cydni Williams

In May 2020, Chris Lyons, a partner at leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz receives the news that his company has reached a verbal agreement with one of Silicon Valley’s hottest social-media startups to lead its ‘Series A’ funding round, in a deal that... View Details

Keywords: Entertainment; Talent Management; General Management; Inclusion; Talent and Talent Management; Diversity; Venture Capital; Entrepreneurship; Networks; Nonprofit Organizations

August 2021
Article

Crowdsourcing Memories: Mixed Methods Research by Cultural Insiders-Epistemological Outsiders

By: Tarun Khanna, Karim R. Lakhani, Shubhangi Bhadada, Nabil Khan, Saba Kohli Davé, Rasim Alam and Meena Hewett

This paper examines the role that the two lead authors’ personal connections played in the research methodology and data collection for the Partition Stories Project—a mixed-methods approach to revisiting the much-studied historical trauma of the Partition of British... View Details

Keywords: Mixed Methods; Insider-outsiders; Myth Of Informed Objectivity; Hybrid Research; Oral Narratives; Research; Analysis; India

Article

The Harmonization of Lending Standards within Banks through Mandated Loan-Level Transparency

By: Jung Koo Kang, Maria Loumioti and Regina Wittenberg-Moerman

We explore whether the introduction of transparent reporting rules increases credit standard harmonization within a bank. We exploit the new loan-level reporting rules imposed on banks that borrow from the European Central Bank using repurchase agreements... View Details

Keywords: Transparency; External And Internal Reporting; Credit Term Harmonization; Regulatory Scrutiny; Banks and Banking; Credit; Financial Reporting; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Learning

9 Jul 2021
Interview

Matthew Barzun and Amy Edmondson

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Matthew Barzun

Writer Matthew Barzun speaks with Harvard Professor and author Amy Edmondson about Barzun's book, "The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go". Matthew Barzun has served as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom and Sweden. He served as... View Details

Article

Learning Models for Actionable Recourse

By: Alexis Ross, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Osbert Bastani

As machine learning models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as legal and financial decision-making, there has been growing interest in post-hoc methods for generating counterfactual explanations. Such explanations provide individuals adversely... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning Models; Recourse; Algorithm; Mathematical Methods

2021
Chapter

Towards a Unified Framework for Fair and Stable Graph Representation Learning

By: Chirag Agarwal, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Marinka Zitnik

As the representations output by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, it becomes important to ensure that these representations are fair and stable. In this work, we establish a key connection between counterfactual... View Details

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks; AI and Machine Learning; Prejudice and Bias

Article

Towards the Unification and Robustness of Perturbation and Gradient Based Explanations

By: Sushant Agarwal, Shahin Jabbari, Chirag Agarwal, Sohini Upadhyay, Steven Wu and Himabindu Lakkaraju

As machine learning black boxes are increasingly being deployed in critical domains such as healthcare and criminal justice, there has been a growing emphasis on developing techniques for explaining these black boxes in a post hoc manner. In this work, we analyze two... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Black Box Explanations; Decision Making; Forecasting and Prediction; Information Technology

June 18, 2021
Article

Research: What Inclusive Companies Have in Common

By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng and Boris Groysberg

A survey of more than 19,000 HBR readers found that one particular culture style differentiated the diverse and inclusive organizations from those that were not: a learning-oriented culture that emphasizes flexibility, open-mindedness, and exploration, and can equip... View Details

Keywords: Inclusion; Diversity; Organizational Culture; Learning; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leading Change