Publications
Publications
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(2,732)
- Faculty Publications (516)
- February 2010 (Revised October 2010)
- Case
Re-THINK-ing THINK: The Electric Car Company
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and David Kiron
On January 5, 2010, 48-year-old Richard Canny was on his way to meet the governor of Indiana. He was reading his newly issued press release announcing that THINK planned to start automobile production in Elkhart County, Indiana to launch its THINK City battery-operated... View Details
- February 2010 (Revised June 2010)
- Case
Arup: Building the Water Cube
By: Robert G. Eccles, Amy C. Edmondson and Dilyana Karadzhova
Arup, an engineering firm, collaborated with PTW Architects and China Construction Design Institute to develop a design for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics Aquatics Center design competition. Their winning concept for the Water Cube combined elements of Chinese... View Details
- February 2010 (Revised December 2011)
- Case
Ricoh Company, Ltd.
By: Robert G. Eccles, Amy C. Edmondson, Marco Iansiti and Akiko Kanno
Ricoh, the Japanese copier manufacturer, is committed to reducing its environmental impact to one-eighth of its 2000 levels by 2050. It has already introduced three stages of environmental awareness to its operations, and its recycled copier business broke even in... View Details
- February 2010 (Revised April 2011)
- Case
The Political Economy of Carbon Trading
By: Forest L. Reinhardt, J. Gunnar Trumbull, Mikell Hyman, Patia McGrath and Nazli Zeynep Uludere
Global climate change is an increasingly prominent political and business problem. Design of market-based systems to reduce carbon emissions has proven difficult. More broadly, national attempts to comply with the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol present both... View Details
- February 2010 (Revised November 2013)
- Case
Living PlanIT
By: Robert G. Eccles, Amy C. Edmondson, Susan Thyne and Tiona Zuzul
Living PlanIT is a start-up company that has developed a new, innovative business model for sustainable urbanization. This model reflects the software and technology backgrounds of its founders, Steve Lewis and Malcolm Hutchinson, and is in vivid contrast to other... View Details
- February 2010 (Revised June 2011)
- Case
SEWA Trade Facilitation Center: Changing the Spool
By: Mukti Khaire and Kathleen L. McGinn
The case is about the decision to convert a not-for-profit organization into a for-profit company. SEWA Trade Facilitation Center (STFC), which is part of a larger non-profit organization—the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA)—works to improve the livelihoods of... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Negotiating the Path of Abraham
By: Kimberlyn Leary, James K. Sebenius and Joshua Weiss
In the face of daunting barriers, the Abraham Path Initiative envisions uncovering and revitalizing a route of cultural tourism that follows the path of Abraham and his family some 4,000 years ago across the Middle East. It begins in the ancient ruins of Harran, in... View Details
- November 2009 (Revised April 2010)
- Case
Rose Smart Growth Investment Fund
By: Arthur I Segel and Justin Seth Ginsburgh
The Jonathan Rose Companies must decide how to design and launch an innovative new real estate fund focused on green and transit oriented properties. JRC seeks to show through the fund that smart growth and green buildings provide superior economic returns to sprawl... View Details
- September 2009 (Revised August 2011)
- Case
Root Capital
By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Katharine Lee
Founded in 1999, Root Capital had loaned $150 million to nearly 250 small and growing businesses, mainly in Latin America. In 2009, as the organization launched a five-year, $55 million capital campaign, it had to determine a strategic path going forward in keeping... View Details
- September 2009 (Revised April 2020)
- Case
VIZIO, Inc.
By: Krishna G. Palepu and Elizabeth A. Kind
William Wang, CEO of VIZIO, Inc., was proud of his company's success in providing affordable flat screen TVs. Since its founding in 2002, VIZIO had grown to over $2 billion in revenue and was one of the top three flat panel TV brands, along with Samsung and Sony. Faced... View Details
- August 2009 (Revised August 2010)
- Case
Calera Corporation
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, Thomas J. Steenburgh and Lauren Barley
Brent Constantz, founder, CEO, and president of Calera Corporation, felt a surge of optimism as he gazed at the recently commissioned prototype flue gas processing line at Calera's R&D facility in Moss Landing, California. It was late May 2009, and Calera was an... View Details
- July 2009 (Revised January 2014)
- Case
Sustainability at Millipore
By: Michael W. Toffel and Katharine Lee
This case describes Millipore Corporation's approach to becoming a more environmentally sustainable company. As he prepared for his quarterly meeting with the CEO, the Director of Sustainability needed to develop positions on several issues. Tactically, he needed to... View Details
- June 2009 (Revised February 2010)
- Case
Cirque du Soleil -- The High-Wire Act of Building Sustainable Partnerships
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Maxime Aucoin
The case describes the history and business model of Cirque du Soleil (CdS). The case allows for a rich discussion and analysis of Cirque du Soleil's business model with an emphasis on how it interacts with that of MGM Mirage. Le Cirque and MGM's business models... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Principles that Matter: Sustaining Software Innovation from the Client to the Web
By: Marco Iansiti
Economic analysis often reviews the role of principles—such as respect for intellectual property rights—in driving innovation. Given the interdependent nature of innovation in information technology, three core principles have emerged that work together to ensure that... View Details
- April 2009 (Revised August 2009)
- Case
Linden Lab: Crossing the Chasm
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld
In early 2008, managers at Linden Lab, creator of the virtual world Second Life, faced decisions about the company's growth strategy. Despite profound initial skepticism about demand for a user-generated virtual world that was not a traditional game, Second Life had... View Details
- February 2009 (Revised April 2011)
- Supplement
Mistry Architects (C)
By: Amy C. Edmondson, Robert G. Eccles and Mona Sinha
This case is a follow-up to "Mistry Architects: Innovating for Sustainability (A)" (Case 609-044) and (B) (Case 609-064). In Case (A) Sharukh and Renu Mistry founded and run an architectural firm dedicated to being both client-oriented and environmentally responsible.... View Details
- January 2009 (Revised June 2010)
- Case
Cisco Systems (2001): Building and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture
By: Ranjay Gulati
Customer centricity has been an important part of the culture at Cisco Systems since its inception. While part of this is attributable to values put in place by the founders and retained by subsequent management, it is also closely interwoven with its organizational... View Details
- December 2008 (Revised January 2011)
- Case
Arcadia Biosciences: Seeds of Change
By: Arthur A. Daemmrich, Forest L. Reinhardt and Mary Louise Shelman
Arcadia Biosciences is an entrepreneurial California agricultural biotech company seeking to earn carbon credits by modifying commodity crops for use in China and India. Eric Rey, Arcadia's CEO, faced a strategic inflection point in early September 2008. The company... View Details
- 2008
- Book
On Competition
By: M. E. Porter
Competition is one of society's most powerful forces for making things better in many fields of human endeavor. The study of competition and the creation of value, in their full richness, have preoccupied me for several decades. Competition is pervasive, whether it... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Resolving Information Asymmetries in Markets: The Role of Certified Management Programs
Firms and regulators are increasingly relying on voluntary mechanisms to signal and infer quality of difficult-to-observe management practices. Prior evaluations of voluntary management programs have focused on those that lack verification mechanisms and have found... View Details