Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,666)
- Faculty Publications (505)
- December 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Manufacturing Moderna's Future
By: Satish Tadikonda and William Marks
In 2019, Moderna faced long odds of survival having failed to develop a successful clinical program out of the vast platform technology they had built around mRNA. Nearly overnight, the company skyrocketed to success with a vaccine for COVID-19, leading to an extremely... View Details
- December 2023
- Case
Francis Ngannou
By: Anita Elberse
In May 2023, professional fighter Francis Ngannou is facing a choice: re-sign with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the world’s premier mixed-martial-arts (MMA) organization, or opt for a contract with the Professional Fighters League (PFL), a growing but... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Thermo Fisher Scientific: Foray into Contract Research
By: Satish Tadikonda, William Marks and Kevin Emancipator
After publicly declaring that they would not enter the contract research organization (CRO) business in 2017, Thermo Fisher purchased Pharmaceutical Product Development (PPD), one of the biggest players in the CRO space, in 2021. Much had changed in the intervening... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised June 2024)
- Case
Catalent: Catalyzing the Next Era of Growth
By: Satish Tadikonda, William Marks and Kevin Emancipator
Catalent's newly appointed CEO, Alessandro Maselli, experienced the highs of the pharmaceutical contract development manufacturing (CDMO) space during COVID-19 while helping Moderna and others bring vaccines to market quickly and safely. After rushing to add capacity... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement
By: David Delacrétaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym
Current refugee resettlement processes account for neither the preferences of refugees nor the priorities of hosting communities. We introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional knapsack constraints that captures the (possibly multidimensional) sizes of... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised October 2023)
- Case
Mohamed Salah
By: Anita Elberse and Taher El Moataz Bellah
In June 2022, Mohamed Salah, one of the world’s best soccer players, and his lawyer and advisor Ramy Abbas Issa were in ongoing discussions with top English Premier League club Liverpool FC about a new playing contract for Salah. Arguably the Arab world’s biggest... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
RightHand Robotics: Choosing the First Market
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Stacy Straaberg
In early 2015, RightHand Robotics’s (RHR) leadership faced several decisions in commercializing the startup’s robotic picking solution. RHR’s central product was the RightPick integrated robotic picking system which featured a robotic arm, a three-fingered robotic hand... View Details
- August 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
DexAI
By: Jo Tango and Christina Wallace
During a challenging fundraising environment, the DexAI founders received two term sheets with nearly identical economic terms but very different legal ones. The entrepreneurs had to navigate: representations and warranties (their personal guarantees that the company's... View Details
- July 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Raymond Jefferson: Trial by Fire
By: Anthony Mayo and Carin-Isabel Knoop
In the spring of 2021, Raymond (Ray) Jefferson applied for a job in President Joseph Biden’s administration. Ten years earlier, false allegations were used to force him to resign from his prior U.S. government position as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Veterans’... View Details
- June 2023
- Technical Note
Enhancing Your Contribution to Group Learning in Marketing
By: Jill Avery
How to enhance your contribution to group learning in RC Marketing. Includes information on the learning contract in a case class and the respective roles of instructor and students, how to analyze a marketing case, how to participate in a marketing case discussion,... View Details
Keywords: Marketing
- June 12, 2023
- Article
The Limits of Capacity Building for Investment Contract Negotiations
By: Karl P. Sauvant, Vanessa Sze Wai Tsang and Louis T. Wells
Developing countries must negotiate the best possible investment contracts with foreign investors at the outset. Donor organizations regularly push for “capacity building” to create technical expertise for negotiations within host country governments. But building and... View Details
- April 2023
- Case
Drive Capital: A New Road for Venture
By: Paul A. Gompers and Alicia Dadlani
Founded by two former Sequoia Capital partners, Columbus-Ohio-based Drive Capital’s mission was to build a world-class venture capital firm in the middle of the U.S., an area historically overlooked by VCs. Drive faced early challenges of attracting investors, sourcing... View Details
- Spring 2023
- Article
Incentive Contract Design and Employee-Initiated Innovation: Evidence from the Field
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
This study examines how the design of incentive contracts for tasks defined as workers’ official responsibilities (i.e., standard tasks) influences workers’ propensity to engage in employee-initiated innovation (EII). EII corresponds to innovation activities that are... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised May 2023)
- Case
Akamai Technologies: Expanding the Talent Pipeline
By: Christopher Stanton, Lynda M. Applegate, Allison Ciechanover, Emily Grandjean and Sophie Beck
In 2022, senior executives of Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies met to consider whether and how to scale a successful technical training program. The program, Akamai Technical Academy (ATA), was launched in 2016 to address a key challenge at Akamai and in the... View Details
- January 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
OhmConnect: Energizing the Future
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller
Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households... View Details
Keywords: App Development; Renewable Energy; Electricity Usage; Regulations; VC; Technology; Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC); Scalability; Applications and Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business Model; Venture Capital; Energy Industry; United States; California; Texas; Europe
- 2023
- Chapter
Generalized Matching: Contracts and Networks
By: John William Hatfield, Ravi Jagadeesan, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky, Alexander Teytelboym and Alexander Westkamp
- December 2022
- Article
Competition, Contracts, and Creativity: Evidence from Novel Writing in a Platform Market
By: Yanhui Wu and Feng Zhu
A growing number of people today are participating in the gig economy, working as independent contractors on short-term projects. We study the effects of competition on gig workers' effort and creativity on a Chinese novel-writing platform. Authors produce and sell... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Issuance and Design of Sustainability-linked Loans
By: Maria Loumioti and George Serafeim
Sustainability-linked loans (i.e., syndicated loans for which pricing is linked to a sustainability performance indicator) have rapidly evolved into a significant private debt product. We find that sustainability-linked lending has been available mostly to borrowers... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Sustainable Finance at Itau BBA
By: George Serafeim, Maria Loumioti and Benjamin Maletta
As of August 2022, the Itau BBA had structured dozens of sustainability linked bonds, which made future interest payments a function of the borrower meeting a target for a sustainability metric, and had solidified its reputation as a pioneer of sustainable finance in... View Details
Keywords: Sustainable Finance; Corporate Social Responsibility; Environmental Sustainability; Growth Strategy; Debt Contracting; Performance Metrics; Risk Assessment; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Financial Instruments; Risk Management; Debt Securities; Measurement and Metrics; Banking Industry; Pulp and Paper Industry; Latin America
- October 2022
- Case
Colette Phillips and GetKonnected!: Creating Inclusive Ecosystems
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Amy Chiu and Joyce Kim
Colette Phillips’ marketing firm had just won the City of Boston’s 2nd largest contract in history to a Black-owned company. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Get Konnected!, the networking organization for people of color that she founded 15 years earlier and led to... View Details
Keywords: Diversity; Ecosystem; Inclusion; People Of Color; Network; Racial Bias; Gender Bias; Entrepreneurial Ecosystem; Entrepreneur; Change; Change Barriers; Change Leadership; Community; Innovation; Pandemic; Impact; Systemic Racism; Minority-owned Businesses; Social and Collaborative Networks; Equity; Race; Small Business; Prejudice and Bias; Boston