Publications

Independent inventors accounted for approximately half of all patents in Britain and Japan by 1930, despite the rise of the corporate economy and the spread of industrial R&D. A mixture of patent renewal and historical citations data reveals that the quality of... View Details

Keywords: Independent Innovation and Invention; Development Economics; Research and Development; Patents; System; Motivation and Incentives; Tokyo; London; United States

Web

ARD - Georges F. Doriot : Educating Leaders, Building Companies, Baker Library, Harvard Business School

in the development of new technologies and industries during the war, the US government had assumed significant risk," HBS Professor Tom Nicholas asserts. "The fact that several of these risks paid off–in ways that Doriot had seen... View Details

July 2003 (Revised February 2004)
Background Note

M&A Legal Context: Standards Related to the Sale or Purchase of a Company

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin, Constance E. Bagley and James Quinn

Introduces students to the legal standards affecting officers and directors when selling or purchasing a company. Provides a practical understanding of the Revlon Standard, the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, Rule 10b-5, and the legal criteria for a cause of... View Details

Keywords: Laws and Statutes; Law Enforcement; Government Legislation; Acquisition; Business Exit or Shutdown; Corporate Governance; Going Public; Courts and Trials

Article

A Field Experiment on Search Costs and the Formation of Scientific Collaborations

By: Kevin Boudreau, Tom Brady, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan, Anthony Hollenberg and Karim R. Lakhani

We present the results of a field experiment conducted at Harvard Medical School to understand the extent to which search costs affect matching among scientific collaborators. We generated exogenous variation in search costs for pairs of potential collaborators by... View Details

Keywords: Search Costs; Cost; Marketplace Matching; Groups and Teams; Science; Collaborative Innovation and Invention

25 May 2010
First Look

First Look: May 25

attempting the transformation required to embrace a new, dominant technology—the choice to maintain focus on the old technology. In considering this choice we distinguish between "racing" strategies, which attempt to fight off the rise of the new technology... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

Article

Clogs to Clogs in Three Generations? Explaining Entrepreneurial Performance in Britain Since 1850

Research into culture and entrepreneurship in Britain has been dominated by casual empiricism. This article shows the benefits of using a new method. Lifetime wealth accumulation is specified as a measure of entrepreneurial performance, and applied to data collected... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Performance Evaluation; Biography; Culture; Education; Wealth; Research; Great Britain

Profile

Kiran Gandhi

by using both my drumming and business skills to ensure that images released are sex-positive and authentic to a wide array of female experiences. How are you pushing yourself? We had to take TOM [Technology... View Details

Keywords: Entertainment/Media

Web

Team - Institute For Strategy And Competitiveness

by Professor Michael E. Porter and is based in the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School. Faculty and staff engaged in research and education in value based health care form the core team at HBS. In... View Details

March 2010
Article

The Role of Independent Invention in U.S. Technological Development, 1880-1930

Why did independent inventors account for over half of US patents by 1930 and more than three times the number granted to R&D firms? Using new data on patents and historical patent citations, I show that independents supplied high quality innovations to a... View Details

Keywords: History; Technological Innovation; Patents; Urban Scope; Independent Innovation and Invention; Research and Development; United States

02 Oct 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, October 2, 2018

forthcoming Annual Review of Economics History, Micro Data and Endogenous Growth By: Akcigit, Ufuk, and Tom Nicholas Abstract—Economic growth is concerned with long-run changes, and as a result historical data should be especially... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

September 2023 (Revised December 2023)
Case

Twiddy & Company: Trust in a Chaotic Environment

By: Sandra J. Sucher, Shalene Gupta and Tom Quinn

Twiddy & Company, known for Southern hospitality rooted in personal interactions, needed to adjust to contactless remote customer service as fear of the contagious virus prevented person-to-person contact. Local elected officials, in a bid to stop tourists from... View Details

Keywords: Trust; Health Pandemics; Organizational Culture; Disruption; Government Legislation; Transportation; Tourism Industry; North Carolina; United States

January 2018 (Revised August 2018)
Supplement

Fair Value Accounting at Noble Group (B)

By: Siko Sikochi, Suraj Srinivasan and Quinn Pitcher

Following a series of reports by Iceberg Research alleging that Noble Group was too aggressive in its fair value accounting for contracts and investments in producers, Noble’s stock price continued to fall and stakeholders began to call for improved transparency in... View Details

Keywords: Fair Value Accounting; Contracts; Valuation

December 2011 (Revised February 2019)
Case

The Indian Removal Act and the 'Trail of Tears'

By: Tom Nicholas, Ari Medoff, Raven Smith and Sam Subramanian

Native Americans were subjected to a protracted and painful process of forced removal from their land. The case provides "first hand" evidence on the debate over Indian removal as it took place during the early nineteenth century. The first document is excerpted from... View Details

Keywords: Native Americans; History; Laws and Statutes; United States

2019
Book

VC: An American History

An exploration of venture financing in America, from its origins in the whaling industry to the rise of Silicon Valley, that shows how venture capital (VC) created an epicenter for the development of high-tech innovation. The VC industry arose from the United States’... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Venture Capital; Innovation and Invention; Entrepreneurship; History; United States

September 1994 (Revised September 1994)
Case

Acer Group, The: Vision for the Year 2000

By: D. Quinn Mills and Richard C. Wei

In the early 1990s, Acer, Inc. set two goals: to be a top-five PC company worldwide in 1995 and to be a global consortium of companies by the year 2000. The company identified potential obstacles concerning capital, image, number of experienced international managers,... View Details

Keywords: Mission and Purpose; Goals and Objectives; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Organizational Structure; Global Strategy; Multinational Firms and Management; Experience and Expertise; Marketing Strategy; Production; Rank and Position; Business Strategy; Capital; Computer Industry; Japan

25 Apr 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research, April 25

2017 CA: BVT Publishing Global Marketing Management: A Casebook By: Quelch, John A. Abstract—During the last quarter century, international business was shaken by a revolution in global competition unlike any previously experienced. As... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

November 2017
Case

The 'Wonder Drug' That Killed Babies

By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Tom Nicholas and Matthew Preble

In the early 1960s, a popular drug taken by patients worldwide for a range of maladies was found to cause severe birth defects and other health problems in babies born to mothers who had taken it during a certain stage of fetal development. As many as 10,000 children... View Details

Keywords: Regulation; Business and Government Relations; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Product Marketing; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business History; Health; Government Legislation; Corporate Accountability; Ethics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Pharmaceutical Industry; Public Administration Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Australia; Germany; Europe