Publications

March 2016 (Revised March 2022)
Teaching Note

Evive Health and Workplace Influenza Vaccinations

By: John Beshears

Evive Health is a company that manages communication campaigns on behalf of health insurance plans and large employers. Using big data techniques and insights from behavioral economics, Evive deploys targeted and effective messages that improve individuals' health... View Details

October 2021 (Revised February 2022)
Case

upGrad: Delivering Career Outcomes Online: Degree by Degree

By: John J-H Kim, Anjali Raina and Rachna Chawla

In August 2021, the founders of upGrad, the latest unicorn in the Indian higher education online space, were deciding how to best use the funds to execute on their ambitious growth plans. Ronnie Screwvala, Mayank Kumar and Phalgun Kompalli had envisioned upGrad as an... View Details

Keywords: Unicorns; COVID-19 Pandemic; Higher Education; Internet and the Web; Spending; Growth and Development Strategy; Education Industry; India

28 Nov 2018
HBS Case

On Target: Rethinking the Retail Website

past. Measure success in narrow terms A successful customer interaction on Target.com was narrowly defined: Only when a customer searched for a product, received recommendations, and actually purchased the product would the company bother to drill deeper to View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Retail

July–August 2018
Article

Learning by Contributing: Gaining Competitive Advantage Through Contribution to Crowdsourced Public Goods

By: Frank Nagle

As the economy becomes more information based, firms are increasingly using crowdsourced public goods as inputs for innovation and production. Counterintuitively, some firms pay their employees to contribute to the creation of these goods, which can be used freely by... View Details

Keywords: Open Source Distribution; Applications and Software; Competitive Strategy; Learning; Competitive Advantage

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March 2011 (Revised October 2011)
Case

If We Ran the World

By: Hanna Halaburda, Radka Dohnalova and Aldo Sesia

Cindy Gallop launched IfWeRanTheWorld (IWRTW) in February 2010, as what the tech world called minimum viable product, in order to real-world test Gallop's "business of the future" concept while development was ongoing. IWRTW was conceived to bring together human good... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Outcome or Result; Growth and Development Strategy; Decision Choices and Conditions; Network Effects

04 Sep 2013
What Do You Think?

How Relevant is Long-Range Strategic Planning?

the pace of change it can also be cleverly leveraged to facilitate an iterative, evergreen process of strategy formulation and implementation." David Wittenberg added, "Strategic planning, especially long-term strategic... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

01 May 2012
First Look

First Look: May 1

Good News: CSR Strategy and Newspaper Coverage of Negative Firm Events Authors: Jiao Luo, Stephan Meier, and Felix Oberholzer-Gee Abstract One of the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, it has been argued, is that... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

23 Nov 2021
Book

What It Takes to Build an Organizational Culture That Wins

pandemic, for which no plan could be made. Agility, not long-range planning, is the answer to hard-to-predict events. Finally, effective culture is especially important for organizations in the start-up phase of their development in which several business models or... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

03 May 2016
First Look

First Look, May 3, 2016

employee perceptions of employment security. In particular, we exploit exogenous state-level changes in unemployment insurance benefits and test for partial unwinding of prior upward earnings management when benefits increase. An increase... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

06 Mar 2007
First Look

First Look: March 6, 2007

growth without undermining the progress achieved in reducing inequality and poverty. Can the Brazilian government reverse inequality and grow at the same time? What development strategy should Lula follow in his second term? Does Brazil... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

05 Jun 2007
First Look

First Look: June 5, 2007

supplement: http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=807158 Westin Hotels and Resorts: Operations of a Lifestyle Experience Harvard Business School Case 607-129 Westin Hotels and Resorts adopted a new "lifestyle" brand View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

16 May 2023
HBS Case

How KKR Got More by Giving Ownership to the Factory Floor: ‘My Kids Are Going to College!’

road.” When KKR bought CHI Overhead Doors in 2015, it offered a test case for an idea Stavros had been toying with since he was a student at HBS. He made every employee an owner, promising each a payout of at least $15,000 if the company... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

August 2018
Case

Four Products: Predicting Diffusion (2018)

By: John Gourville

One job of product managers, marketers, strategic planners, and other corporate executives is to predict what the demand will be for a new product. This task is easier for certain classes of new products than for others. For new consumer package goods, for instance,... View Details

Keywords: Diffusion Processes; Product Adoption; Marketing; Forecasting and Prediction; Demand and Consumers; Adoption; Product Launch

June 2017
Article

When Novel Rituals Lead to Intergroup Bias: Evidence from Economic Games and Neurophysiology

By: Nicholas M. Hobson, Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton and Michael Inzlicht

Long-established rituals in pre-existing cultural groups have been linked to the cultural evolution of large-scale group cooperation. Here we test the prediction that novel rituals—arbitrary hand and body gestures enacted in a stereotypical and repeated fashion—can... View Details

Keywords: Ritual; Intergroup Dynamics; Intergroup Bias; Neural Reward Processing; Open Data; Open Materials; Preregistered; Groups and Teams; Behavior; Prejudice and Bias; Cooperation

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Read Now

2012
Article

The Internalization of Advertising Services: An Inter-Industry Analysis

By: Sharon Horsky, Steven C. Michael and Alvin J. Silk

This study investigates the extent to which U.S. advertisers use in-house rather than independent advertising agencies and examines inter-industry variation in such internalization. Contrary to the widely held impression that use of an in-house advertising agency is... View Details

Keywords: Advertisers; In-house Advertising; Inter-industry Variation; Internalization; Scale Economies; Transaction Costs; Vertical Integration; Advertising Costs; Creative Industries; Marketing Strategy; Advertising Industry; Europe; North and Central America

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13 Jul 2010
First Look

First Look: July 13

their distribution activities. After beta testing the TSCC for one year, VM's Daniel Borunda and O&M's Michael Stefanic believed that TSCC was a better and more cost-effective pricing model, but could they convince their companies to... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

April 2024 (Revised August 2024)
Case

The Engine

By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Jim Matheson, Fiona Murray and Nicholas Christman

The Engine, a venture capital firm founded by MIT to fill a gap in the technology funding landscape by commercializing breakthrough science and technology. Led by managing partner and CEO Katie Rae, the Engine's unique approach involved an unusually longer fund life,... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Mission and Purpose; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Entrepreneurial Finance; Financial Services Industry