Publications

11 Jan 2021
Working Paper Summaries

Accounting for Product Impact in the Airlines Industry

Keywords: by George Serafeim and Katie Trinh; Air Transportation; Transportation

August 2022 (Revised November 2024)
Case

Boston Impact Initiative: Investing in Local Change

By: Emily R. McComb, Amy Klopfenstein and Mel Martin

In fall 2021, Aliana Piñeiro, impact director at Boston Impact Initiative (BII) discovered that an entrepreneur the organization was considering for an investment had failed to disclose pre-existing debt with another lender. Although the business scored highly on BII’s... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Finance; Investment; Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Relationships; Business and Community Relations; Society; Social Issues; Wealth and Poverty; Wealth; Poverty; Risk Management; Financial Services Industry; North and Central America; United States; Massachusetts; Boston

September 2011 (Revised February 2013)
Case

Trucost: Valuing Corporate Environmental Impacts

By: Michael W. Toffel and Stephanie van Sice

Trucost provided corporate environmental performance data and analysis to institutional investors and corporate managers, but after operating for a decade had yet to achieve profitability. Trucost was struggling to effectively differentiate its high quality products... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Strategy; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Distribution Channels; Investment; Measurement and Metrics; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Information; Value; Environmental Sustainability; Financial Services Industry

16 Jan 2018
News

Celebrating the Impact of Nonprofits

participants develop a network of support for their organizations, the reunion at the Social Enterprise Greenhouse in Providence included a social hour and a panel featuring the club’s four 2017 SPNM... View Details

Keywords: Margie Kelley

14 Sep 2015
News

Helping Investors Have an Impact

getting people to cross-connect and cross-pollinate our ideas. It enables philanthropic funders, whether they are philanthropists giving money or they are institutional investors who want to actually deploy their assets via venture philanthropy or View Details

February 2020
Teaching Note

Ariadne Labs: Building Impactful Partnerships

By: Ariel D. Stern and Sarah Mehta

Teaching Note for HBS No. 619-017. View Details

Keywords: Health; Health Care and Treatment; Innovation and Invention; Social Enterprise; Nonprofit Organizations; Health Industry; Boston

April 14, 2015
Article

The Type of Socially Responsible Investments That Make Firms More Profitable

By: George Serafeim

Keywords: Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility; Corporate Sustainability; Investing; Investment Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Profit; Investment; Environmental Sustainability

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September 2018
Teaching Note

City Year at 30: Toward Long-Term Impact

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Jonathan Cohen

This teaching note assists in the classroom instruction of the HBS No. 318-089, “City Year at 30: Toward Long-Term Impact.” It offers to instructors a case summary and analysis, along with student preparation questions and a guide for classroom discussion of the case.... View Details

Article

The Impact of the 'Open' Workspace on Human Collaboration

By: Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban

Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into “open,” transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors, and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on... View Details

Find at Harvard

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January 2025
Case

PayJoy: Financing for the Next Billion

By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott

PayJoy, an impact-driven financial technology company founded in 2015, provides smartphone financing and other financial products to customers who lack access to traditional credit products. As of early 2025, PayJoy had issued $2.5 billion in loans to 13 million... View Details

22 Mar 2017
Blog Post

3 Lessons I Learned as a Social Enterprise Summer Fellow

I came to HBS with an interest in social impact but without any specific career convictions. Over the past year, the Social Enterprise Initiative (SEI) has been especially... View Details

2018
Working Paper

Do We See the Same Hierarchy? Status Disagreement in Multicultural Teams and Its Impact on Team Performance

By: Catarina Fernandes and Sujin Jang

This paper develops and tests a theory of status disagreement in multicultural teams. We posit that, in multicultural teams, the diversity of members’ cultural backgrounds will lead to implicit disagreements about who has how much status in the team. More specifically,... View Details

Keywords: Status; Social Hierarchies; Multicultural Teams; Team Performance; Team Diversity; Status and Position; Groups and Teams; Diversity; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Performance

22 Apr 2019
Working Paper Summaries

Government Technology Policy, Social Value, and National Competitiveness

Keywords: by Frank Nagle

23 Aug 2010
Research & Ideas

The Drive to Acquire’s Impact on Globalization

are happier, more tolerant, and more willing to settle disputes peacefully and democratically. Stagnating or declining economic growth is associated with intolerance, ethnic strife, and dictatorship. But here Friedman adds an important conditional factor. The View Details

Keywords: by Paul R. Lawrence

March 2018 (Revised June 2018)
Case

City Year at 30: Toward Long-Term Impact

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and James Weber

In 2018, City Year was a 30-year-old nonprofit that recruited and organized teams of young-adult “volunteers” (corps teams) to provide a year of citizen service. It had 3,100 corps members serving in 327 schools located in 28 U.S. cities. In its early decades, City... View Details

Keywords: Education; Service Operations; Nonprofit Organizations; Growth and Development Strategy; Performance Efficiency; Resource Allocation; Change Management; Social Entrepreneurship; Middle School Education; Secondary Education; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Human Capital; Growth Management; Service Delivery; Organizational Design; Social Enterprise; Poverty; United States