Publications

February 2024 (Revised July 2024)
Case

Taffi: Entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia

By: Paul A. Gompers and Fares Khrais

Taffi was a tech-enabled fashion styling startup founded by Shahad Geoffrey in Saudi Arabia in 2020. Within three years of operating, Geoffrey had pivoted the business multiple times. In 2023, Geoffrey was attempting the business’s most ambitious pivot yet, shifting... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Disruption; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Investment; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Strategy; AI and Machine Learning; Fashion Industry; Technology Industry; Saudi Arabia; Arabian Peninsula

Educators

Forthcoming
Article

No Line Left Behind: Assortative Matching Inside the Firm

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Vittorio Bassi, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

How do firms pair workers with managers, and which constraints affect the allocation of labor within the firm? We characterize the sorting pattern of managers to workers in a large readymade garment manufacturer in India and then explore potential drivers of the... View Details

Keywords: Assortative Matching; Productivity; Global Buyers; Readymade Garments; Labor; Organizational Design; Performance Productivity; Fashion Industry

Find at Harvard

2021
Article

Venture Capital Booms and Startup Financing

By: William Janeway, Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf

We review the growing literature on the relationship between venture capital booms and startup financing, focusing on three broad areas: First, we discuss the drivers of large inflows into the venture capital asset class, particularly in recent years—which are related... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Business Startups; Innovation and Invention; Policy

2021
Working Paper

Caccia Selvaggia: Myth, Rites, and the Right in Carlo Ginzburg's Storia notturna

By: Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert

Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1939) is widely considered one of Europe’s leading historians. His masterpiece Storia notturna (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), widely praised for its extraordinary erudition and creativity, is now over three decades old but it continues to inspire... View Details

Keywords: Mythology; Culture; Political Doctrine; History; Government and Politics; Society

Article

Faithful and Customizable Explanations of Black Box Models

By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Ece Kamar, Rich Caruana and Jure Leskovec

As predictive models increasingly assist human experts (e.g., doctors) in day-to-day decision making, it is crucial for experts to be able to explore and understand how such models behave in different feature subspaces in order to know if and when to trust them. To... View Details

Keywords: Interpretable Machine Learning; Black Box Models; Decision Making; Framework

2020
Article

Why Do User Communities Matter for Strategy?

By: Sonali K. Shah and Frank Nagle

In this essay, we explore how strategic management research and practice could benefit from considering the benefits and challenges obtainable through working with user communities. User communities represent a unique organizing structure for the exchange of ideas and... View Details

Keywords: User Communities; Innovation; Open Source; Collaboration; Cooperative Strategy; Knowledge Sharing; Strategy; Collaborative Innovation and Invention

October 2018
Case

African Bank Investments Limited (A)

By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz

Less than a year after joining the board of African Bank Investments Limited (ABIL), the newest director finds himself in difficult discussions with other directors about removing the struggling company’s CEO. The case is set in South Africa in mid-2014 as shares in... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Personal Finance; Corporate Accountability; Governing and Advisory Boards; Corporate Governance; Crisis Management; Insurance; Leadership; Management; Risk Management; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Insurance Industry; Africa; South Africa

Educators

Article

Private and Civil Society Governors of Mercury Pollution from Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining: A Network Analytic Approach

By: Kristin Sippl

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is both a subsistence livelihood for millions of people and the leading source of mercury pollution globally. The United Nation’s 2013 Minamata Convention on Mercury aims to address this challenge, but such public regulatory... View Details

Keywords: Artisanal And Small-scale Mining (ASM); Private Governance; Gold; Mercury; Mining; Governance; Networks; Pollutants; Research

February 2018
Supplement

Qualtrics (B)

By: Doug J. Chung and James M. Lattin

Qualtrics was an online survey research platform and since the beginning, the company had relied entirely on an inside sales model—sales done remotely without face-to-face contact with clients. The low-cost inside sales model, along with an emphasis on a strong sales... View Details

Keywords: Inside Sales Model; Sales; Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation

2014
Article

Unequality: Who Gets What and Why It Matters

By: Michael I. Norton

Who should get what, and what are the consequences? Economic inequality in the United States has been rising for decades, yet only recently have behavioral scientists explored two central questions surrounding the optimal level of inequality. First, what are the... View Details

Keywords: Inequality; Ethics; Productivity; Gambling; Equality and Inequality; Fairness; Income; Performance Productivity; United States

2018
Book

American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890–1940

By: Laura Phillips Sawyer

American Fair Trade explores the contested political and legal meanings of the term fair trade from the late nineteenth century through the New Deal era. This history of American capitalism argues that business associations partnered with regulators to... View Details

Keywords: Economic Systems; Competition; Policy; Fairness; History; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; United States

January 2014
Teaching Note

Dr. Benjamin Hooks and Children's Health Forum

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Ai-Ling Malone

The case includes law, business, and public health perspectives on an African American leader's social entrepreneurship and leadership in other social movements. Later in his life, Dr. Benjamin Hooks championed the eradication of lead poisoning. Prior to that Hooks... View Details

Keywords: Leading Change; Health Disorders; Social Entrepreneurship; Personal Development and Career; Social Issues; United States

2007
Working Paper

Incompatible Assumptions: Barriers to Producing Multidisciplinary Knowledge in Communities of Scholarship

By: Corinne Bendersky and Kathleen L. McGinn

Co-locating knowledge workers from different disciplines may be a necessary but insufficient step to generating multidisciplinary knowledge. We explore the role of assumptions underlying knowledge creation within the field of organizational studies, and investigate how... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Management; Knowledge Sharing; Business Processes; Groups and Teams