Publications
Publications
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(1,529)
- Faculty Publications (410)
- January 2010 (Revised March 2013)
- Case
HubSpot: Lower Churn through Greater CHI
By: F. Asis Martinez Jerez, Thomas Steenburgh, Jill Avery and Lisa Brem
HubSpot, a web marketing startup is under pressure from VCs to rapidly acquire new customers and to maintain a low level of customer churn. In the case, students explore the drivers of customer churn and uncover opportunities to increase customer retention across the... View Details
- December 2009 (Revised March 2025)
- Case
Phreesia: The Patient Intake Company
By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Sunaina Yarlagadda and Brian L. Walker
How should the co-founders of an organization that provides patient sign-in and billing services scale their company after five years of successfully targeting small private physician practices? Phreesia had deployed a direct mail and sales force strategy that resulted... View Details
- October 2009 (Revised July 2012)
- Case
Emotiv Systems Inc.: It's the Thoughts that Count
By: Elie Ofek, Jason Riis and Paul Hamilton
Emotiv is getting ready to launch its innovative brain-computer interfacing (BCI) technology. The company has developed a special headset, called EPOC, and highly sophisticated software that can translate a person's emotions, cognitive thoughts, and facial expressions... View Details
- Article
Local Industrial Conditions and Entrepreneurship: How Much of the Spatial Distribution Can We Explain?
By: Edward L. Glaeser and William R. Kerr
Why are some places more entrepreneurial than others? We use Census Bureau data to study local determinants of manufacturing startups across cities and industries. Demographics have limited explanatory power. Overall levels of local customers and suppliers are only... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Banking Deregulations, Financing Constraints and Firm Entry Size
By: William R. Kerr and Ramana Nanda
We examine the effect of US branch banking deregulations on the entry size of new firms using micro-data from the US Census Bureau. We find that the average entry size for startups did not change following the deregulations. However, among firms that survived at least... View Details
- April 2009 (Revised December 2015)
- Case
Dot.com: Online Pet Retailing
By: Tom Nicholas and David Chen
From 1995 to 1999, the U.S. experienced a period of tremendous growth in its information technology (IT) sector. The IT industry, although it accounted for less than 10% of the U.S. economy's total output, contributed disproportionately to economic growth. One market... View Details
- April 2009 (Revised May 2017)
- Case
Skyhook Wireless
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Thomas R. Eisenmann
Ted Morgan, the founder of Skyhook Wireless just received a call from Steve Jobs of Apple asking for a meeting. Ted must decide how to prepare for a meeting that could finally give Skyhook an anchor customer. Ted and his team have worked for three years to build a new... View Details
- December 2008 (Revised January 2011)
- Case
Arcadia Biosciences: Seeds of Change
By: Arthur A. Daemmrich, Forest L. Reinhardt and Mary Louise Shelman
Arcadia Biosciences is an entrepreneurial California agricultural biotech company seeking to earn carbon credits by modifying commodity crops for use in China and India. Eric Rey, Arcadia's CEO, faced a strategic inflection point in early September 2008. The company... View Details
- October 2008 (Revised October 2009)
- Case
Blink: The European Air-Taxi Service
By: William A. Sahlman and Jackie Donnelly Russell
This case describes a new venture that is about to launch a Pan-European air-taxi service in 2008. View Details
- July 2008 (Revised January 2010)
- Case
Affinity Labs, Inc.
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Elizabeth Kind
In November 2006, Chris Michel left Military.com, which he founded in 1999, to start Affinity Labs, a global network of online communities. That month, Michel raised a Series A round of venture funding and established a partnership with Monster, which he had sold... View Details
- June 2008
- Case
From xiaonei to hainei: The Quest for the Social Networking Service Market in China
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, Michael Shih-Ta Chen and Keith Chi-ho Wong
Wang Xing, the founder of Hainei.com, one of the fastest growing social networking service (SNS) providers in China, was preparing to raise funds from venture capitalists. Since late 2003, Wang had established several Internet startups in China. Xiaonei.com, which he... View Details
- June 2008
- Teaching Note
Transparent Value LLC (TN)
By: Sharon P. Katz and Krishna G. Palepu
Teaching Note for [108098]. View Details
- May 2008 (Revised August 2009)
- Case
Intel NBI: Handheld Graphics Organization
By: Willy C. Shih and Thomas Thurston
The Handheld Graphics Organization (HGO) was an internal start-up under Intel's New Business Incubator program. The unit designed a graphics co-processor for the handheld PDA market, to be sold with Intel's Xscale processor. Though NBI ventures were designed for a high... View Details
- May 2008
- Case
Sensors Unlimited: Bringing InGaAs Technology to the Market
By: Willy C. Shih
Sensors Unlimited was a small start-up in short-wavelength infrared imaging. Its learning base came out of Bell Labs, RCA's Sarnoff Lab, and the Rockwell Science Center, and as it built its capabilities and ventured into new application areas, it discovered a “killer... View Details
- February 2008 (Revised August 2014)
- Case
MedVal Ventures
Is medical travel a viable business opportunity? A group of MBA students consider the pros and cons of starting a business that would send people from the U.S. to India for elective non-emergency surgeries. View Details
- August 2007 (Revised July 2008)
- Background Note
Take Advantage of Your Diaspora Network
By: William R. Kerr and Daniel J. Isenberg
Diaspora networks (DNs) are an important resource for global entrepreneurs. Discusses several features of DNs, combining both academic and practitioner perspectives. Describes the history and prevalence of DNs in many ethnicities, documents the broad resources DNs can... View Details
- March 2007 (Revised March 2009)
- Case
Cherrypicks
By: William R. Kerr
Cherrypicks is a Hong Kong communications start-up approaching a large Korean mobile operator for a partnership to take the operator's products to markets outside of Korea. SK Telecom's (SKT) Ring Back Tones (RBT) product is a spectacular success in South Korea, but... View Details
- January 2007 (Revised May 2008)
- Case
Henry Luce and the American Century
By: Nitin Nohria, Anthony Mayo and Logan Wilcox
Henry Luce, founder of the publishing company which produced Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, created the largest media company in the world by the mid-20th century. Luce's flagship magazine, Time, was able to gross over $20 million in sales during its... View Details
- January 2007 (Revised May 2008)
- Case
National Logistics Management: Founder Decisions
By: Lynda M. Applegate and Elizabeth Collins
Scott Taylor, CEO & founder of NLM, is a serial entrepreneur faced with an important decision. As his industry consolidates, he knows that his company must grow quickly, yet he believes he has reached the limit of what organic growth can achieve. Should he accept the... View Details
- January 2007 (Revised December 2008)
- Case
The Challenges of Launching a Start-Up in China: Dorm99.com
By: William C. Kirby, F. Warren McFarlan and Tracy Manty
After graduating from Harvard Business School in June 2006, Ken Pao and Bill Li were ready to fully commit to the Internet start-up they had been working on since they first stepped foot on the business school campus. They moved to Beijing, rounded out their management... View Details