Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,964)
- Faculty Publications (215)
- May 2023
- Teaching Note
Away: Scaling a DTC Travel Brand
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Jill Avery
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 520-051. Away, a direct-to-consumer, digital native e-commerce seller of travel luggage, is debating how to invest its latest round of venture funding. How quickly could and should Away scale and what were the most promising growth... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Culture as a Signal: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment
By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Jiehang Yu
The importance of culture as an informal management control system is increasingly acknowledged in academia. While prior research mainly focuses on the value of culture on internal stakeholders (e.g., employees), we examine whether culture serves as a credible signal... View Details
- April 12, 2023
- Article
Using AI to Adjust Your Marketing and Sales in a Volatile World
By: Das Narayandas and Arijit Sengupta
Why are some firms better and faster than others at adapting their use of customer data to respond to changing or uncertain marketing conditions? A common thread across faster-acting firms is the use of AI models to predict outcomes at various stages of the customer... View Details
- March 31, 2023
- Article
What Is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey?
Even though customer experience (CX) leaders are becoming increasingly focused on optimizing their firms’ customer journeys, they face a clear challenge: Which touchpoints along the journey should they invest in? That is, which moments when the customer interacts with... View Details
- March 13, 2023
- Article
Sales Teams Need to Stop Focusing on the Customer Funnel
Understanding where customers are, how they navigate streams in your market, and how to interact with them in a given stream is now central to crafting a good customer experience, and that has implications. Among other things, companies need to shift from thinking... View Details
- February 2023
- Supplement
Astyanax Kanakakis at norbloc: A Founder's Experience with the DIFC Fintech Hive
By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag
norbloc was founded in 2016 in Stockholm, Sweden, by Astyanax Kanakakis and his co-founders, Vitalii Demianets and Sam Saatchi. Kanakakis and Demianets got to work to address a key gap in the industry: Know Your Customer (KYC) data sharing. As the first distributed KYC... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure; Organizations; Leadership; Leadership Development; Leadership Style; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Digital Transformation; Digital Strategy; Digital Platforms; Technology Adoption; Technological Innovation; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Business and Government Relations; Business Startups; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; Banking Industry; Information Technology Industry; Sweden; Europe; Singapore; London; United Arab Emirates; Dubai; Middle East; Athens; Greece
- 2023
- Working Paper
Summarizing the Mental Customer Journey
By: Julian De Freitas, Ahmet Uğuralp, Zeliha Uğuralp, Pechthida Kim and Tomer Ullman
How do consumers summarize and act on their experiences, as when deciding whether an interaction with a firm was satisfying and whether to buy from it? Previous work on the summary of continuous experiences has tended to focus on a handful of experience patterns and... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
The Overlooked Key to a Successful Scale-Up
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Davide Sola and Martin Kupp
Many start-ups experience enormous popularity and runaway growth, but only a few go on to become stable giants. What separates them from the pack? They all go through a developmental stage called extrapolation, say three business school professors.
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- October 2022 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Framebridge (A): Reimagining Custom Framing
By: Rembrand Koning and Alicia Dadlani
In December 2018, Susan Tynan, founder and CEO of Framebridge, a four-year-old venture-backed startup that sold online custom framing, formulated plans for the future. Her vision was to revolutionize the $4 billion industry by making custom framing easy, transparent,... View Details
- September 2022
- Case
Proactive for Her
By: Rembrand Koning and Kairavi Dey
Proactive for Her began amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in August 2020 as a digital platform to provide accessible, evidence-based, primary, preventive non-judgmental healthcare services for Indian women, who were often dissuaded from seeking help as premarital sex and... View Details
- September 2022
- Case
AllSpice: GitHub for Hardware Engineers
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Mel Martin
AllSpice, a software-as-a-service company that built a GitHub-like revision control tool for hardware engineers, was in the midst of preparing for rapid scale when the 2022 market downturn left them with big decisions to make. Cofounder and CEO Valentina Ratner had to... View Details
- August 2022 (Revised October 2023)
- Case
Bajaj Finance: Building an Omnipresent Financial Services Firm
By: Das Narayandas and Rachna Tahilyani
Bajaj Finance, India’s largest consumer finance firm with $20.9 billion of assets across 50.5 million customers, is on a journey to transform itself from a traditional firm that sells loans and other financial products through brick-and-mortar outlets to an omnipresent... View Details
- May 2022
- Case
Byte
By: Boris Groysberg, Katherine Connolly Baden and Julia Kelley
In January 2021, Byte co-founders Scott Cohen and Blake Johnson reflected on how far their Los Angeles-based direct-to-consumer (DTC) orthodontics company had come since launching its clear aligners just a little over two years earlier. Cohen and Johnson were both... View Details
- Article
Act Like a Scientist: Great Leaders Challenge Assumptions, Run Experiments, and Follow the Evidence
By: Stefan Thomke and Gary W. Loveman
Though they’ve been warned for decades about the dangers of overrelying on gut instinct and personal experience, managers keep failing to critically examine—much less challenge—the ideas their decisions are based on. To correct this problem they need to think and act... View Details
- April 2022
- Teaching Note
Banorte Móvil: Data-Driven Mobile Growth
By: Ayelet Israeli and Carla Larangeira
In mid-2019, Carlos Hank was deliberating over the results for Banorte Móvil—the mobile application for Banorte, Mexico’s most profitable and second-largest financial institution. Hank, who had been appointed as Banorte´s Chairman of the Board in January 2015, had... View Details
- April 2022 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Mastercard Labs (A)
When Ajaypal (Ajay) Banga became the CEO of Mastercard in 2010, he shifted the company’s competitive focus from card networks to cash itself. Mastercard’s new vision of a “World Beyond Cash” distilled into a three-pronged framework: Grow the core business, Diversify... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Culture; Culture Change; Organizational Adaptation; Organizational Effectiveness; Alignment; Leadership; Leadership Development; Innovation; Innovation Ecosystems; Ecosystem; Diversity; Collaboration; Co-creation; Learning Organizations; Empowerment; Globalization; Agility; Prototype; Experiment; Partnerships; Operating Model; Risk Management; Metrics; Payments; Financial Inclusion; Financial Industry; Ambidexterity; Corporate Innovation; Innovation Lab; Digital Transformation; Digital Strategy; Credit Cards; Innovation Leadership; Organizational Culture
- April 2022 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Mastercard Labs (A) (Abridged)
When Ajaypal (Ajay) Banga became the CEO of Mastercard in 2010, he shifted the company’s competitive focus from card networks to cash itself. Mastercard’s new vision of a “World Beyond Cash” distilled into a three-pronged framework: Grow the core business, Diversify... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Culture; Organizational Culture; Culture Change; Organizational Adaptation; Organizational Effectiveness; Alignment; Leadership; Leadership Development; Innovation; Innovation Ecosystems; Diversity; Collaboration; Co-creation; Learning Organizations; Empowerment; Ecosystem; Agility; Prototype; Experiment; Partnerships; Operating Model; Risk Management; Metrics; Payments; Financial Inclusion; Financial Industry; Ambidexterity; Corporate Innovation; Innovation Lab; Accelerator; Start-up; Intrapreneurship; Competitive Strategy; Business Model; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Digital Transformation
- March 2022 (Revised July 2022)
- Teaching Note
Camera IQ and the Metaverse: Building Augmented Reality Brand Experiences
By: Jill Avery
Camera IQ, a camera marketing software company that empowered brands to create and launch augmented reality experiences (AREs) across social platforms, had just raised an additional $5 million to fund further product development and expand its marketing and sales... View Details
Keywords: Brand Management; Virtual Reality; Augmented Reality; B2B; E-commerce; Technology Platform; Marketing; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Digital Marketing; Internet and the Web; Growth Management; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Social Media; Applications and Software; Digital Platforms; Advertising Industry; United States
- Article
Eliminating Unintended Bias in Personalized Policies Using Bias-Eliminating Adapted Trees (BEAT)
By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli
An inherent risk of algorithmic personalization is disproportionate targeting of individuals from certain groups (or demographic characteristics such as gender or race), even when the decision maker does not intend to discriminate based on those “protected”... View Details
- February 2022
- Case
Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards
In 2006, the Cleveland Clinic and Mubadala Investment Company partnered with a bold ambition to deliver world class healthcare in the United Arab Emirates. In 2015, after nearly a decade of planning and construction, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi opened its doors. By... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Culture; Alignment; Organizational Effectiveness; Purpose; Impact; Leadership Development; Diversity; Collaboration; Co-creation; Learning Organizations; Empowerment; Teams; Team Dynamics; Teamwork; Team Effectiveness; Trust; Talent; Talent Development And Retention; Psychological Safety; Organizational Evolution; Coaching; Board; Analytics; Innovation; Data; Data Visualization; Digital Technology; Digital; Customer Experience; Experimentation; Change Management; Data-driven Decision-making; Debates; Ecosystem; Partnership; Telemedicine; Sustainability; Global Organizations; Local; Hospital; Healthcare; United Arab Emirates; Health Care and Treatment; Partners and Partnerships; Globalization; Quality; Organizational Culture; Mission and Purpose; Innovation and Management; Information Technology; Joint Ventures; Leadership; Performance Effectiveness; Abu Dhabi; United Arab Emirates