Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(4,444)
- Faculty Publications (588)
- February 2024 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
Korea Venture Investment Corporation
By: Paul A. Gompers and Billy Chan
Financial service sector Korea Venture Investment Corporation (KVIC) is the venture capital arm of the Korean government with a founding mission to build a domestic startup ecosystem that would be as competitive as Silicon Valley. KVIC manages a basket of... View Details
- February 2024
- Case
Oak Street Health: From Start-up to Strategic Acquisition
By: Leemore S. Dafny and Thomas H. Lee
Oak Street Health opened its first primary care center for seniors in underserved communities in 2013. By 2022 the company had 169 centers and a market valuation exceeding $10 billion. Oak Street created value by accepting risk-adjusted, capitated payments for Medicare... View Details
- February 2024 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
AGENTS.inc: Pathways to Growth at an AI Startup
By: Frank Nagle, Manuel Hoffmann, Karoline Ströhlein and Susan Pinckney
The case describes the history of AGENTS.inc. Despite being a small startup, with only four employees, that had never had a funding round, the company boasted an impressive client portfolio including multiple Fortune 500 companies. While AGENTS.inc had been an early... View Details
Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Model; Business Startups; Small Business; Transformation; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decisions; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Financial Strategy; AI and Machine Learning; Digital Platforms; Technological Innovation; Copyright; Management; Growth and Development; Market Timing; Ownership; Risk and Uncertainty; Competition; Open Source Distribution; Entrepreneurial Finance; Computer Industry; Europe; Germany
- February 2024
- Supplement
JTC: Stronger Together with Shared Ownership: What JTC Did and Its Impact
By: Ethan Bernstein
Nigel Le Quesne, CEO of Jersey-based financial services firm JTC, firmly believed that "shared ownership" was at the heart of his company’s successful track record. The firm had seen its revenues, profits, and number of clients and staff grow steadily throughout its... View Details
- February 2024
- Case
Adventures Inc: 21st Century Brand Building
By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott
Founded in 2020, Adventures worked with celebrities in Brazil to create and launch digitally native brands. The idea was to match the celebrity’s skill in creating content and entertaining fans with Adventures’ skill in consumer packaged goods marketing and operations.... View Details
Keywords: Digital Brand; Influencer Marketing; Growth And Scaling; Capital Constraints; Brand Portfolio Strategy; CPG; Start-up; Celebrity Endorsement; Digital Marketing; Growth and Development Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Advertising; Social Media; Business Startups; Joint Ventures; Brands and Branding; Brazil
- January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Runa
By: Paul Gompers and Carla Larangeira
In early 2022, Courtney McColgan, founder and CEO of Runa, a human resources and payroll Software-as-a-Service platform, faced an unexpected tech market downturn. Founded in 2018, Runa catered to small and medium-sized businesses in Mexico, offering an affordable and... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Exercise
Travelogo: Understanding Customer Journeys
By: Eva Ascarza, Nicolas Padilla and Oded Netzer
In late May 2023, Sarah Merino, the newly appointed manager of the Customer Insights group at Travelogo—an online travel booking platform—initiates a comprehensive analysis of clickstream data to understand the varied behaviors and needs of their users. In preparation... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Uncle Nearest: Creating a Legacy
By: Hise Gibson, Archie L. Jones, Nicole Gilmore and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone
Fawn Weaver, as a Black woman and industry outsider in a capital-intensive, highly regulated, competitive and male-dominated spirits industry, successfully overcame numerous obstacles to launch a premium American whiskey brand, Uncle Nearest in 2017, which became the... View Details
Keywords: Advertising; Business Startups; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decisions; Forecasting and Prediction; Age; Ethnicity; Gender; Entrepreneurship; Working Capital; Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Intellectual Property; Trademarks; Leadership Style; Growth and Development; Growth and Development Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Marketing Strategy; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Culture; Private Ownership; Performance Effectiveness; Strategic Planning; Problems and Challenges; Prejudice and Bias; Social Issues; Competition; Competitive Strategy; Expansion; Entrepreneurial Finance; Food and Beverage Industry; Tourism Industry; United States; Tennessee; France
- 2024
- Chapter
Managing, Preserving, and Unlocking Wealth through FinTech
By: Grace Headinger, Lauren Cohen and Zhaoheng Gong
In nearly every generation, a sentiment like Einstein’s has been expressed as a cautionary tale to constrain the development and application of technology. In spite of these calls, technology has time and again proven its utility and ability to improve across and upon... View Details
- 2024
- Book
The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create
By: Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers
We demystify the coming digital revolution, showing how NFTs will transform our online and offline interactions.
NFTs aren’t just pictures on the internet, or a fad that has come and gone. Rather, they’re a new technology for creating digital assets and... View Details
NFTs aren’t just pictures on the internet, or a fad that has come and gone. Rather, they’re a new technology for creating digital assets and... View Details
Keywords: Economic Systems; Microeconomics; Entrepreneurship; Cultural Entrepreneurship; Information Technology; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Strategy; Digital Platforms; Digital Strategy; Digital Transformation; Internet and the Web; Technology Adoption; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Product Positioning; Markets; E-commerce; Market Design; Value; Customer Value and Value Chain; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Organizational Structure; Customer Ownership; Ownership; Advertising Industry; Communications Industry; Computer Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Fashion Industry; Information Technology Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Technology Industry; Web Services Industry
- November 2023
- Article
Algorithmic Mechanism Design with Investment
By: Mohammad Akbarpour, Scott Duke Kominers, Kevin Michael Li, Shengwu Li and Paul Milgrom
We study the investment incentives created by truthful mechanisms that allocate resources using approximation algorithms. Some approximation algorithms guarantee nearly 100% of the optimal welfare, but have only a zero guarantee when one bidder can invest before... View Details
- December 18, 2023
- Article
Are Everywhere Stores the New Face of Retail?
By: David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
Historically, customer engagement and product fulfillment occurred in the same place — a traditional retail store. But today, retailers are beginning to explore how they can create opportunities for customers to engage with products in native environments. A related... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Coordinated R&D Programs and the Creation of New Industries
By: Daniel P. Gross and Maria P. Roche
Complex systems technologies—including “deep tech”—are prone to numerous frictions that stymie commercial development. Yet technologies with these features underpin some of the most valuable industries of the past century. We examine how large, mission-oriented... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Bridgit: Persevere or Pivot?
By: Reza Satchu and Patrick Sanguineti
In late 2012, Mallorie Brodie and Lauren Lake, two young women in their final year of college, founded Bridgit, a technology startup that developed solutions to simplify vital but laborious processes within the construction industry. In the Fall of 2013, after months... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Why Do Index Funds Have Market Power? Quantifying Frictions in the Index Fund Market
By: Zach Y. Brown, Mark Egan, Jihye Jeon, Chuqing Jin and Alex A. Wu
Index funds are one of the most common ways investors access financial markets and are perceived to be a transparent and low-cost alternative to active investment management. Despite these purported virtues of index fund investing and the introduction of new products... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Technical Note
Design and Evaluation of Targeted Interventions
By: Eva Ascarza and Ta-Wei (David) Huang
Targeted interventions serve as a pivotal tool in business strategy, streamlining decisions for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. This note delves into two central facets of such interventions: first, the design of potent decision guidelines, or targeting... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Vida Health: Transforming Chronic Disease Treatment
By: William Sahlman and Nicole Tempest Keller
San Francisco based Vida Health, founded by Stephanie Tilenius, former vice president of Commerce and Payments at Google, was a B2B digital health startup focused on the treatment of cardiometabolic conditions, such as diabetes and obesity. Its innovative digital... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Sprout Solutions
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Bonnie Yining Cao and Dawn H. Lau
Husband-and-wife co-founders Patrick and Alexandria Gentry had built Sprout Solutions to be one of the biggest Software-as-a-Service human resources management platforms in the Philippines, guided by the mission to "impact the life of every Filipino by improving... View Details
- September 2023
- Supplement
Design and Evaluation of Targeted Interventions
By: Eva Ascarza
Targeted interventions serve as a pivotal tool in business strategy, streamlining decisions for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. This note delves into two central facets of such interventions: first, the design of potent decision guidelines, or targeting... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
(Not) Paying for Diversity: Repugnant Market Concerns Associated with Transactional Approaches to Diversity Recruitment
In a 20-month ethnographic study, I examine how a technology firm, ShopCo (a pseudonym), considered 13 different recruitment platforms to attract racial minority engineering candidates. I find that when choosing whether to adopt recruitment platforms focused on racial... View Details