Publications

30 Nov 2016
Blog Post

Why I Didn’t Think I’d Get in to HBS

Let’s face it, folks, when you’re an upper middle class white male from suburban New Jersey who worked at a bulge bracket bank following your college graduation, only speaks one language, has no patents to your name, and hasn’t even... View Details

27 Aug 2013
First Look

First Look: August 27

firm's business rather than the scale of the firm's prior lobbying efforts. These results support the existence of significant barriers to entry in the lobbying process. Download working paper: http://www.people.hbs.edu/wkerr/DynamicsOfFirmLobbying.pdf The Impact of... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

04 Apr 2016
HBS Seminar

Ariel Stern, Harvard Business School

01 Aug 2011
Research & Ideas

Immigrant Innovators: Job Stealers or Job Creators?

Kerr says. Patent Effects To determine whether an increase in H-1B visas led to an increase in innovation, the researchers looked at data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, examining View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Technology

November 2006 (Revised November 2007)
Case

Strategy in the Twenty First Century Pharmaceutical Industry: Merck & Co. and Pfizer Inc.

By: David J. Collis and Troy Smith

The global pharmaceutical industry has gone through substantial changes in the last few decades and pharmaceutical firms face major challenges including headline-grabbing litigation, imminent patent expirations, new technologies, rising drug development costs, generic... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Growth and Development Strategy; Product Development; Research and Development; Corporate Strategy; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States

29 Jan 2021
News

Half of New Orleans City Hall employees to work remote in move to Municipal Auditorium

17 Jun 2021
News

Too Few Women Get to Invent – That’s a Problem for Women’s Health

February 1994
Case

Alpha-Beta Technology, Inc.: Pioneering Carbohydrate Technology

Alpha-Beta was founded in 1988 by two scientist-entrepreneurs with ten patents on carbohydrate technology. In 1991, the company faces critical questions about how to focus its product definition from among several promising, but risky, choices. How should they analyze... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Product Design; Entrepreneurship; Product Development; Biotechnology Industry

05 May 2020
News

What if You Don’t Want to Go Back to the Office?

April 2006 (Revised March 2007)
Case

Southern States Communications

By: Constance E. Bagley and Michael B. Keating

Managers receiving letters claiming that their products or services violate the intellectual property rights of another sometimes have a tendency to ignore them after their technical staff advises them that the claims have no merit. Illustrates the perils of that... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation

May 2014 (Revised June 2014)
Case

Intellectual Property Strategy at North Technology Group—Sailing Downwind

By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and William W. Fisher III

North Sails is the world's leading sailmaker. The company commands a global market share of more than 50% and is largely responsible for the rapid technological progress in the sailmaking industry over the past 30 years. CEO Tom Whidden needs to consider how to best... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Information Technology; Competitive Advantage; Intellectual Property

2021
Working Paper

The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States

By: Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, Timothy McQuade and Beatriz Pousada

We characterize the contribution of immigrants to US innovation, both through their direct productivity as well as through their indirect spillover effects on their native collaborators. To do so, we link patent records to a database containing the first five digits of... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Economic Growth; Immigrants; Innovation and Invention; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Patents; Innovation Strategy

Read Now

January 1996
Case

Palm Computing, Inc. (A)

By: Myra M. Hart

Discusses patents, licenses, and deal making in a start-up venture. The entrepreneur, Jeff Hawkins, holds a patent on Palm Print, a pattern recognition algorithm. After licensing Palm Print to his employer, he led three years of development of commercial products for... View Details

Keywords: Intellectual Property; Patents; Agreements and Arrangements; Negotiation Deal; Business Startups; Management Teams

2025
Working Paper

Transferability MATTRs: Towards Understanding Antecedents of Strategic Licensing

By: Dafna F. Bearson and Maria P. Roche

This paper examines the antecedents of firms’ decisions to license intellectual property (IP). We propose a conceptual framework emphasizing two critical factors: (1) transferability, which we define as the ease of moving knowledge embodied in inventions across firm... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Intellectual Property; Value Creation

Read Now

February 2016
Article

Bridging Science and Technology Through Academic-Industry Partnerships

By: Sen Chai and Willy C. Shih

Partnerships that foster the translation of scientific advances emerging from academic research organizations into commercialized products at private firms are a policy tool that has attracted increased interest. This paper examines empirical data from the Danish... View Details

Keywords: Economic Development; Technological Change; Government Policy; Technological Innovation; Research and Development; Information Technology; Policy; Technology Industry; Denmark

Juan Alcacer is the James J. Hill Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He joined HBS in 2007 and has taught the required MBA strategy course, an elective on Global Strategy and PhD courses in Strategy and International Business. Within... View Details

Keywords: consulting; management consulting; telecommunications

11 Apr 2016
HBS Seminar

Pian Shu, Harvard Business School

July 2022
Article

Estimating Spillovers from Publicly Funded R&D: Evidence from the US Department of Energy

By: Kyle Myers and Lauren Lanahan

We quantify the magnitude of R&D spillovers created by grants to small firms from the US Department of Energy. Our empirical strategy leverages variation due to state-specific matching policies, and we develop a new approach to measuring both geographic and... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Energy; R＆D; Grants; Innovation and Invention; Research and Development; Patents; Performance; United States