Publications

December 2018
Case

Choosy

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Julia Kelley

Founded in 2017, Choosy is a data-driven fashion startup that uses algorithms to identify styles trending on social media. After manufacturing similar items using a China-based supply chain, Choosy sells them to consumers through its website and social media pages.... View Details

Career Coach

Ildi Nielsen

and consumer products companies. Ildi also spent 12 years as an Executive Search Consultant in New York and Chicago for financial services firms. She worked with senior executives to build their teams and... View Details

Keywords: Consulting; Commercial Banking; Financial Services (All); Consumer Finance; Financial Services (All); Corporate Finance; Financial Services (All); Investment Banking; Financial Services (All); Investment Management; Financial Services (All); Private Equity; Financial Services (All); Retail

Research Summary

Innovating in Energy: Learning from High-Potential Ventures

By: Joseph B. Lassiter

My work at HBS has always focused on high-potential ventures. Most recently, these have been professionally financed start-ups and buyouts in newly emerging energy and cleantech businesses. These ventures tend to be based on innovative insights into technology and... View Details

Program

Strategy for Health Care Delivery—Virtual

Summary When you improve value, everyone wins—your patients, your organization, and the global health care ecosystem. This live online program examines the latest strategies and organizational models for transforming the way health care is delivered, measured, and... View Details

Keywords: Health Care; Health Care

July 2024
Case

Living up to Purpose and Performance at Parker Hannifin

By: Hubert Joly, Alicia Dadlani and Martha Hostetter

In 2019, Parker Hannifin, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of motion and control technologies, did something unusual for an industrial company: it created a purpose statement. Even though it already had a clear business strategy and longstanding culture of... View Details

Keywords: Mission and Purpose; Health Pandemics; Leadership; Business or Company Management; Organizational Culture; Business Strategy; Communication Strategy; Manufacturing Industry; Industrial Products Industry; Cleveland; Ohio; United States

September 2023 (Revised August 2024)
Case

Avive: Resuscitating a Defibrillator from the Regulatory Brink

By: Satish Tadikonda and William Marks

Avive Solutions set out to create a better Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) that would solve many of the problems with existing solutions, including lack of connectivity, difficulty-of-use and requiring prior training for successful use of the device, data... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Product Development; Business and Government Relations; Research and Development; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; United States

September 2, 2020
Article

What Really Prevents Companies from Thriving in a Recession

By: Ranjay Gulati and Mark Wiedman

Even in the best of times, many companies fail to fund and staff new opportunities. As decades of research have shown, leaders fear threats to their status and power and so become attached to existing businesses and budgets, regarding them as entitlements and as a... View Details

Keywords: Recessions; Resource Allocation; Budgets and Budgeting

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November 2017
Case

Outrageous Ambition: Duke University

By: William C. Kirby and Yuanzhuo Wang

Duke University had grown from a one room schoolhouse in rural North Carolina in 1859 to one of the leading research universities in the U.S. and the world. Since the late 1950s, Duke’s leaders had consciously used the process of strategic planning to guide the... View Details

April 2016 (Revised March 2019)
Case

Moleskine (A)

By: Ryan Raffaelli, Raffaella Sadun and Kathy Qu

Describes the founding and growth challenges facing Moleskine, an Italian-based consumer products company known for its oilcloth-covered notebooks once used by Ernest Hemingway and Vincent van Gogh. CEO Arrigo Berni and co-founder Maria Sebregondi aim to transform the... View Details

Keywords: Creative Industries; Brand Building; Digital Innovation; Digital Services And Strategy; Process Improvement; Culture; Identity Construction; Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Leadership; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Innovation Strategy; Consumer Products Industry

April 2013
Article

An fMRI Investigation of Racial Paralysis

By: Michael I. Norton, Malia F. Mason, Joseph A. Vandello, Andrew Biga and Rebecca Dyer

We explore the existence and underlying neural mechanism of a new norm endorsed by both black and white Americans for managing interracial interactions: "racial paralysis," the tendency to opt out of decisions involving members of different races. We show that people... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Race; Judgments; Decision Choices and Conditions; Personal Characteristics; United States

TeachingInterests

Tuck MBA Program

VG is the most popular teacher in the Tuck MBA Program. VG has been named in BusinessWeek’s Guide to Best Business Schools as an outstanding teacher. His current courses focus on Implementing Strategy and his research on Global Leadership's research on... View Details

17 Sep 2024
Cold Call Podcast

Fawn Weaver’s Entrepreneurial Journey as an Outsider in the Spirits Industry

Keywords: Re: Hise O. Gibson; Food & Beverage; Tourism

Research Summary

Internet Auctions for Close Substitutes

Economists agree that eBays auction design is sensible and potentially welfare-maximizing for the trade of collectibles, which are unique and idiosyncratic. For mainstream goods, which have close but imperfect substitutes (cars, cameras, computers, clothes), the... View Details

Article

Targeting Weather Insurance Markets

By: Anita Mukherjee, Shawn Cole and Jeremy Tobacman

The suitability of insurance products often depends greatly on individual circumstances. This paper examines the challenges of heterogeneity in a relatively new product, weather‐indexed insurance. This index insurance product has been launched in over a dozen... View Details

Keywords: Index Insurance; Labor Markets; Self-insurance; Self-protection; Weather; Insurance; Markets; Household; Risk Management

Spring 2021
Article

Corporate Resilience and Response During COVID-19

By: Alex Cheema-Fox, Bridget LaPerla, George Serafeim and Hui (Stacie) Wang

The coronavirus pandemic caused a sharp market decline while raising heterogeneous responses across companies related to their employees, supply chain, and repurposing of operations to provide needed products and services. We study whether during the 2020 COVID-19... View Details

SSRN

Article

Undermining Value-Based Purchasing — Lessons from the Pharmaceutical Industry

By: Leemore S. Dafny, Christopher Ody and Matt Schmitt

The analogy between value-based purchasing in pharmaceuticals and the new frontier of alternative payment models for health care providers is relatively straightforward. Insurers are increasingly demanding steep discounts from providers in exchange for inclusion in... View Details

Keywords: Drug Copayment Coupons; Prescription Drug Policy; Health Care and Treatment; Insurance; Cost; Policy; Pharmaceutical Industry

2016
Working Paper

Immigrant Entrepreneurship

By: Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr

We examine immigrant entrepreneurship and the survival and growth of immigrant-founded businesses over time relative to native-founded companies. Our work quantifies immigrant contributions to new firm creation in a wide variety of fields using multiple definitions.... View Details

Keywords: Immigrants; Entrepreneurs; Entry; Firms; Growth; High-tech Marketing; Venture Capital; Entrepreneurship; Immigration; United States

2012
Teaching Note

UFIDA (F) (TN)

By: F. Warren McFarlan, Donghong Li and Guo Jia

As an extension of UFIDA (A-E), UFIDA (F), using early 2012 as the time node, looks at UFIDA's major steps taken during 2010-2011, accomplishments, and major future opportunities and challenges. The case focuses on the new market development of Cloud Computing and... View Details

Keywords: China; Strategy; China

May 2007
Article

Location Strategies and Knowledge Spillovers

By: Juan Alcacer and Wilbur Chung

Given the importance of proximity for knowledge spillovers, we examine firms' location choices expecting differences in firms' strategies. Firms will locate to maximize their net spillovers as a function of locations' knowledge activity, their own capabilities, and... View Details

Keywords: Business Strategy; Corporate Strategy; For-Profit Firms; Knowledge Management; Research and Development; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Disruptive Innovation; Five Forces Framework; Cost Management; Technology; Competition; United States