Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,479)
- Faculty Publications (643)
- 2017
- Working Paper
Innovation, Reallocation and Growth
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit, Harun Alp, Nicholas Bloom and William R. Kerr
We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the... View Details
- April 2013
- Case
Sterling Household Products Company
By: William E. Fruhan and Craig Stephenson
Sterling Household Products manufactures and markets a broad line of consumer goods from laundry soap and cosmetics to cleaning, disinfecting, and sanitizing products. The company has many highly regarded brand names and consistently reports impressive sales and... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Entrepreneurs, Firms and Global Wealth since 1850
By: G. Jones
This working paper integrates the role of entrepreneurship and firms into debates on why Asia, Latin America and Africa were slow to catch up with the West following the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern economic growth. It argues that the currently... View Details
Keywords: Institutional Change; Political Economy; Emerging Economies; Developing Countries; Industrial Development; Culture; Human Capital; Economic History; History; Wealth and Poverty; Business History; Emerging Markets; Globalization; Developing Countries and Economies; Manufacturing Industry; Mining Industry; Service Industry; Latin America; Asia; North and Central America; Africa; South America; Europe
- January 2013 (Revised April 2013)
- Case
Microsoft Server & Tools
By: Marco Iansiti and Alain Serels
In 2011, Microsoft's Server & Tools Business (STB) was large, fast growing and highly profitable on the strength of traditional packaged product lines led by the Windows Server operating system. Even as the current packaged business was performing exceptionally well,... View Details
- January 2013
- Case
Brannigan Foods: Strategic Marketing Planning
By: John A. Quelch and James T. Kindley
The soup division at Brannigan Foods contributes over 40% of the firm's revenue. The general manager is concerned that the soup industry is declining and that the soup division shows declining profits and market share, especially among the important baby boomer... View Details
Keywords: United States; Consumer Marketing; Acquisitions; Forecasting; Quantitative Analysis; Risk Management; Decision Making; Budgeting; Supermarkets; Strategic Planning; Demand and Consumers; Marketing Strategy; Food; Resource Allocation; Acquisition; Product Development; Retail Industry; Food and Beverage Industry
- 2013
- Working Paper
Managing Firms in an Emerging Economy: Evidence from the Time Use of Indian CEOs
By: Raffaella Sadun
The success or failure of a company is often ascribed to the behavior of its CEO. Yet little is known about what top managers actually do, whether this matters for firm performance, and why it differs across firms. We provide some answers by developing a new survey... View Details
- August 2012
- Article
Surviving the Global Financial Crisis: Foreign Ownership and Establishment Performance
By: Laura Alfaro and Maggie Chen
We examine the differential response of establishments to the recent global financial crisis with particular emphasis on the role of foreign ownership. Using a worldwide establishment panel dataset, we investigate how multinational subsidiaries around the world... View Details
- December 2012 (Revised April 2025)
- Case
AmTran Technology Ltd.
By: Willy Shih, Jyun-Cheng Wang and Karen E. Robinson
As an original design manufacturer (ODM) of television sets and leading supplier to Vizio, a market leader in the U.S. for LCD flat panel TVs, AmTran Technology Ltd. uses what founder Alpha Wu describes as a "WE" model in which western companies perform sales,... View Details
Keywords: Modularity; Technology Transitions; Analog; Digital; Television; TV; Flat-panel; ATSC; NTSC; Video; Global Strategy; Innovation and Management; Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Product Development; Product Design; Supply Chain; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Technology Adoption; Digital Platforms; Electronics Industry; Taiwan; United States; Japan
- November 2012
- Case
Teaming at GE Aviation
Describes the challenges and successes encountered by GE's Aviation business in implementing a teaming work structure and culture in plants across its supply chain. GE Aviation leadership had seen dramatic gains in productivity, quality, and worker satisfaction in... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Aviation And Aerospace; Capacity Management; Competitiveness; Corporate Culture; Corporate Structure; Labor Relations; Manufacturing; Production Planning; General Electric; Teaming; Managing Change; Transformation; Labor Unions; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Leading Change; Management Style; Job Design and Levels; Aerospace Industry; Manufacturing Industry; United States
- November 2012
- Case
New Balance Athletic Shoe, Inc. (Abridged)
By: H. Kent Bowen, Robert S. Huckman, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Matthew Preble
Considers whether New Balance, one of the world's five largest manufacturers of athletic footwear, should respond to Adidas' planned acquisition of Reebok—a transaction that would join the second- and third-largest companies in the industry. Highlights the unique... View Details
- November 2012 (Revised September 2013)
- Case
Learning Resources: A Hands-On Toy Company Deals with New Challenges and Opportunities
By: Boris Groysberg and Anahita Hashemi
Learning Resources is a family-owned educational toy company that, by late 2011, was facing a myriad of challenges, including increased competition, entry into new markets, new distribution methods, rising costs of production in China, and changing customer behavior.... View Details
Keywords: Leading Teams; Strategy Formulation; Strategy And Execution; Innovation; Corporate Culture; Industry Analysis; Organizational Alignment; Entrepreneurs; Sales Channels; Leadership; Strategy; Change Management; Innovation Leadership; Family Business; Entrepreneurship; Product Design; Sales; Retail Industry; United States
- November 2012
- Article
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local... View Details
Keywords: Decentralization; Social Capital; Theory Of The Firm; Firm Objectives, Organization, And Behavior; Business Economics; Management Of Technological Innovation And R＆D; Technological Change: Choices And Consequences; Diffusion Processes; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Trust; Technology Adoption; Multinational Firms and Management
- October 8, 2012
- Column
Henkel's Culture Shift
By: Robert Simons
This case descriibes a CEO-led organizational transformation driven by stretch goals, performance measurement, and accountability. When Kasper Rorsted became CEO of Henkel, a Germany-based producer of personal care, laundry, and adhesives products, in 2008, he was... View Details
- Article
Exploring the Duality Between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the 'Mirroring' Hypothesis
By: Alan MacCormack, Carliss Y. Baldwin and John Rusnak
A variety of academic studies argue that a relationship exists between the structure of an organization and the design of the products that the organization produces. Specifically, products tend to "mirror" the architectures of the organizations in which they are... View Details
- September 2012 (Revised May 2015)
- Case
Philips-Visicu
By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Natalie Kindred and Sara M. McKinley
Would the advent of global payment models and ACOs create sufficient demand for a telemedicine offering covering the care continuum, from hospitals to the home? This was the decision facing Royal Philips Electronics (Philips), the Netherlands-based producer of... View Details
Keywords: Health Care; Philips; Visicu; Telemedicine; eICU; Accountable Care Organization; ACO; Bundled Payment; Hospital To Home; Patient Monitoring Devices; Home Health Care; Health Care and Treatment; Communication Technology; Quality; Safety; Performance Productivity; Performance Capacity; Performance Efficiency; Consumer Behavior; Emerging Markets; Health Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Netherlands
- September 2012
- Supplement
Industrial Metrology: Getting In-Line? (B)
By: Willy Shih
Rainer Ohnheiser, the President of Carl Zeiss's Business Group Industrial Metrology (IMT), was focused on the threat that in-line metrology posed to Carl Zeiss IMT's core business. Historically, coordinate measurement machines (CMMs) that employed tactile measurement... View Details
- July 2012
- Case
Performance Management at Vitality Health Enterprises, Inc.
By: John Bingham and Michael Beer
Vitality Health Enterprises, a medium-sized firm that manufactures health and personal care products, has experienced six straight quarters of strong revenue growth. James Hoffman, the new Senior Vice President of Human Resources, fears that the chain of success is... View Details
- July 2012
- Class Lecture
The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work
What really makes people happy, motivated, productive, and creative at work? Professor Amabile's research, based on analyzing nearly 12,000 daily diaries of team members working on collaborative projects, reveals some surprising answers. Inner work life—a person's... View Details
- Article
Regulation and UK Retailing Productivity: Evidence from Microdata
By: Jonathan Haskel and Raffaella Sadun
We explore the effects of planning regulation on the UK retail sector between 1997 and 2003 using micro-data from the UK census. We document a shift to smaller shops following a 1996 regulatory change that increased the costs of opening large stores. Our analysis... View Details
- July–September 2012
- Article
The (Un)Hidden Turmoil of Language in Global Collaboration
By: Tsedal Neeley, Pamela J. Hinds and Catherine D. Cramton
Companies are increasingly relying on a lingua franca, or common language (usually English), to facilitate cross-border collaboration. Despite the numerous benefits of a lingua franca, our research reveals myriad challenges that disrupt collaboration and contribute to... View Details