Publications
Publications
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- Faculty Publications (4,706)
- October 2023
- Case
Shredder Setups or Straightlining into Risk?: Investing in What You Love
By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger
Bob Hall, President of Green Gables Partners, evaluated whether to angel invest into an up-and-coming ski brand. As the son-in-law of the founder of Vera Bradley and having retired from a lengthy career on Wall Street, Hall was well-versed in both direct investing and... View Details
Keywords: Family Office; Angel Investors; Direct Investment; Family Business; Business Growth and Maturation; Small Business; Financial Strategy; Personal Finance; Investment Portfolio; Private Equity; Decision Choices and Conditions; Risk and Uncertainty; Consumer Products Industry; Montana; United States
- October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Fantuan
By: Feng Zhu and David Lane
In 2023, CEO Randy Wu was considering the optimal growth strategy for Fantuan, a restaurant food delivery platform that had expanded from its 2014 founding in Vancouver, Canada to serve the Chinese demand for Asian cuisine in urban markets across Australia, Canada, the... View Details
Keywords: Business Startups; Customer Focus and Relationships; Diasporas; Entrepreneurship; Digital Platforms; Growth Management; Business Strategy; Diversification; Expansion; Growth and Development Strategy; Service Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; Canada; United Kingdom; Australia
- October 2023 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Thermo Fisher Scientific: Foray into Contract Research
By: Satish Tadikonda, William Marks and Kevin Emancipator
After publicly declaring that they would not enter the contract research organization (CRO) business in 2017, Thermo Fisher purchased Pharmaceutical Product Development (PPD), one of the biggest players in the CRO space, in 2021. Much had changed in the intervening... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Fixie and Conversational AI Sidekicks
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Carin-Isabel Knoop
In March 2023, Fixie Co-Founder and Chief Architect Matt Welsh and co-founders had the kind of meeting no founders want to have. The president of leading artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment firm OpenAI, which had catapulted into fame with its ChatGPT... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
SEK: Reimagining Spanish Higher Education at Universidad Camilo José Cela (UCJC)
By: John J-H Kim, Mary C. Sauer and Emilie Billaud
In 2023, Nieves Segovia, President of the SEK Education Group in Spain, contemplates the future of her family's for-profit education company, which includes K-12 schools and the newly established UCJC university. Renowned for its innovation in education, SEK faces... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Fortinet: Cybersecurity Pioneer Ken Xie Considers the Long Game
By: Tsedal Neeley, Jeff Huizinga and Emily Grandjean
Ken Xie, cofounder of cybersecurity giant Fortinet, faced a critical decision that would validate his leadership. Fortinet became the industry’s second-largest pureplay cybersecurity firm by developing differentiated hardware and investing in R&D. However, after a... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Vida Health: Transforming Chronic Disease Treatment
By: William Sahlman and Nicole Tempest Keller
San Francisco based Vida Health, founded by Stephanie Tilenius, former vice president of Commerce and Payments at Google, was a B2B digital health startup focused on the treatment of cardiometabolic conditions, such as diabetes and obesity. Its innovative digital... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Sprout Solutions
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Bonnie Yining Cao and Dawn H. Lau
Husband-and-wife co-founders Patrick and Alexandria Gentry had built Sprout Solutions to be one of the biggest Software-as-a-Service human resources management platforms in the Philippines, guided by the mission to "impact the life of every Filipino by improving... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Loris
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Das Narayandas, Stacy Straaberg and David Lane
In December 2022, Loris’s executive team considered their go-to-market strategy. Loris was an artificial intelligence (AI) software startup for the customer service industry with two products on the market: 1) Agent Assist which provided customer service agents (CSAs)... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Recycle & Re-Match: The Future of Soccer Turfs
By: George Serafeim, Lena Duchene and Carlota Moniz
By August 2023, Re-Match, an artificial turf waste-to-value company, had operations in Denmark and the Netherlands and had recycled over 160,000 tons of waste and plastic fiber. With recent capital injection from the VC firm Verdane and a dual revenue business model,... View Details
Keywords: Carbon Emissions; Carbon Abatement; Sustainability; Recycling; Waste Management; Technology; Entrepreneurial Management; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Model; Decisions; Energy Conservation; Investment Return; Profit; Technological Innovation; Patents; Growth and Development Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Digital Platforms; Wastes and Waste Processing; Business Strategy; Competition; Expansion; Technology Adoption; Sports; Environmental Sustainability; Entrepreneurship; Green Technology Industry; Service Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Rubber Industry; Sports Industry; Denmark; Netherlands; France; United States; Pennsylvania; Europe
- October 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
FARM Rio: Bringing a Brazilian Fashion Brand to the World
By: Isamar Troncoso and Jill Avery
FARM Rio, a twenty-six year old Brazilian fashion brand, had recently put down roots in the U.S. The brand, known for its bold, colorful, nature-inspired tropical prints, was testing the waters in Europe to assess if and how the brand should further expand globally.... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
JSW Steel: Balancing Growth While Decarbonizing
By: Vikram S Gandhi and Radhika Kak
Sajjan Jindal, Chairman & Managing Director of JSW Steel, India's largest steel producer by market capitalization, was facing a dilemma. Steel demand in India was expected to grow exponentially over the next decade. However, given its traditional reliance on carbon,... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Finding New Business and Developing Relevant Sales Capabilities
There are few alternatives to growth for most companies. It’s the rare firm whose goal involves getting smaller and, for employees, there is a strong correlation between their company’s growth rate, promotion opportunities, and job satisfaction. But a growth strategy... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Innovation on Wings: When Do Nonstop Flights Matter for Global Innovation?
By: Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, Do Yoon Kim and Wesley Koo
We study whether, when, and how better connectivity through nonstop flights leads to positive innovation outcomes for firms in the global context. Using unique data of all flights emanating from 5,015 airports around the globe from 2005 to 2015 and exploiting a... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised June 2024)
- Case
Kaspi.kz: Building Trust through Innovation
By: Sandra J. Sucher, Fares Khrais and Marilyn Morgan Westner
This case is written to help students explore how companies can maintain and develop trust while innovating, how to identify and respond effectively to warning signs that they may not be as trusted as they believe, and how being trusted can aid in expanding and growing... View Details
- September 2023
- Technical Note
Free and Open Source Software and Hardware
By: Frank Nagle
This technical note surveys the concepts of free and open source software and hardware. It introduces the concepts in general, providing a brief history of their development and numerous examples of how companies employ them in practice. Further, it identifies various... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Seeds of Innovation: GALY's Quest to Cultivate the Future of Agriculture in the Lab
By: George Serafeim and Michael Norris
In 2023, Luciano Bueno, CEO and founder of plant cell culture agriculture company GALY, was considering the best path forward for his company as he planned to pitch Series B investors. GALY, founded in 2019, aimed to produce cotton and other crops from cells grown in... View Details
Keywords: Business Model; Green Technology; Goods and Commodities; Growth and Development Strategy; Science-Based Business; Entrepreneurship; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Business Startups; Decisions; Technological Innovation; Production; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Technology Industry; Boston; Sao Paulo
- September 26, 2023
- Article
10 Signs Your Company Is Resistant to Change
By: Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss
In their new book, Move Fast and Fix Things, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss outline five strategies to help leaders tackle their hardest problems and quickly make change. The first step is to identify the real problem you need to solve. Often that’s not clear... View Details
- September 2023
- Teaching Note
Roche: ESG and Access to Healthcare
By: George Serafeim
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 123-075. In May 2022, Roche Group, one of the largest healthcare companies in the world, hosted its first ESG investor event focused exclusively on its efforts to impact access to healthcare. While Roche had recently set an ambitious goal... View Details
- September 22, 2023
- Article
How Software Companies Can Avoid the Trap of Product-Led Growth
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Oliver Jay
Companies like Slack and Dropbox have pioneered the use of Product-Led Growth (PLG). They start by building a product that’s indispensable for small teams, then count on low friction and customer advocates to expand throughout the organization. PLG works, at least at... View Details