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(341)
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Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(341)
- News (33)
- Research (270)
- Events (2)
- Multimedia (3)
- Faculty Publications (129)
- 2012
- Working Paper
Organization Design for Distributed Innovation
Systems of distributed innovation—so-called business ecosystems—have become increasingly prevalent in many industries. These entities generally encompass numerous corporations, individuals, and communities that might be individually autonomous but related through their... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Design; Innovation and Management; Social and Collaborative Networks; Intellectual Property; Rights; Governance Controls
Baldwin, Carliss Y. "Organization Design for Distributed Innovation." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 12-100, May 2012.
Self-Managing Organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing
Fascination with organizations that eschew the conventional managerial hierarchy and instead radically decentralize authority has been longstanding, albeit at the margins of scholarly and practitioner attention. Recently, however, organizational experiments in... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local... View Details
Keywords: Geographic Location; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Multinational Firms and Management; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Trust; Asia; Europe; United States
Bloom, Nicholas, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen. "The Organization of Firms Across Countries." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 12-005, August 2011. (Slides from 2008.)
- 18 May 2012
- Working Paper Summaries
Organization Design for Distributed Innovation
Keywords: by Carliss Y. Baldwin
- 10 Apr 2025
- Blog Post
IFC India 2025: SELCO - Decentralized Renewable Energy to Develop While Decarbonizing
across the country. On the final day of the India IFC, we visited a rural public health clinic powered by SELCO’s decentralized renewable energy (DRE) solutions. The SELCO team also graciously organized a... View Details
- 23 Nov 2011
- Working Paper Summaries
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
- Research Summary
Overview
Pushing decision authority downward and increasing employee autonomy have become watchwords for the modern organization. Leaders of contemporary organizations view efforts to replace “command and control” systems with less-hierarchical approaches to organizing as... View Details
- August 1995
- Case
Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.: IT Organization and Architecture Challenges
By: Richard L. Nolan
Presents the outcome of Air Products ICON decentralization projects. New issues are explored, including the challenges of having a decentralized MIS staff, global network, client/server architecture, new data center issues, outsourcing, a new highly strategic customer... View Details
Keywords: Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Applications and Software; Organizational Design; Problems and Challenges
Nolan, Richard L. "Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.: IT Organization and Architecture Challenges." Harvard Business School Case 196-017, August 1995.
- September 24, 2021
- Article
A Labor Movement for the Platform Economy
By: Li Jin, Scott Duke Kominers and Lila Shroff
Platforms are fundamentally changing the contract between workers and companies—and the workers and creatives that create value for platform companies, and rely on platforms for their livelihoods, often have little power when it comes to getting their concerns... View Details
Keywords: Gig Workers; Decentralized Collective Action; Internet and the Web; Labor; Labor and Management Relations; Digital Platforms
Jin, Li, Scott Duke Kominers, and Lila Shroff. "A Labor Movement for the Platform Economy." Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (September 24, 2021).
- 2019
- Working Paper
Who Should Select New Employees, Headquarters or the Unit Manager? Consequences of Centralizing Hiring at a Retail Chain
By: Carolyn Deller and Tatiana Sandino
We examine how changing the allocation of hiring decision rights in a multiunit organization affects employee-firm match quality, contingent on a unit’s circumstances. Our research site, a US retail chain, switched from a decentralized hiring model (hiring by business... View Details
Keywords: Control; Selection; Decentralization; Company Values; Retail Chains; Decision Making; Economics; Geography; Employees; Selection and Staffing; Organizational Design; Situation or Environment; Retail Industry
Deller, Carolyn, and Tatiana Sandino. "Who Should Select New Employees, Headquarters or the Unit Manager? Consequences of Centralizing Hiring at a Retail Chain." Harvard Business School Series in Accounting and Control, No. 16-088, January 2016. (Revised August 2019. Forthcoming in The Accounting Review.)
- July 2020
- Article
Who Should Select New Employees, Headquarters or the Unit Manager? Consequences of Centralizing Hiring at a Retail Chain
By: Carolyn Deller and Tatiana Sandino
We examine how changing the allocation of hiring decision rights in a multiunit organization affects employee-firm match quality, contingent on a unit’s circumstances. Our research site, a U.S. retail chain, switched from a decentralized hiring model (hiring by... View Details
Keywords: Control; Selection; Decentralization; Company Values; Retail Chains; Employees; Selection and Staffing; Local Range; Business Headquarters; Decision Making
Deller, Carolyn, and Tatiana Sandino. "Who Should Select New Employees, Headquarters or the Unit Manager? Consequences of Centralizing Hiring at a Retail Chain." Accounting Review 95, no. 4 (July 2020): 173–198.
- Forthcoming
- Article
Centralization and Organization Reproduction: Ethnic Innovation in R&D Centers and Satellite Locations
By: William R. Kerr
We study the relationship between firm centralization and organizational reproduction in satellite locations. For decentralized firms, the ethnic compositions of inventors in satellite locations mostly resemble their host cities, with little link to the inventor... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Reproduction; Centralization; Research and Development; Innovation and Invention; Organizational Design; Ethnicity
Kerr, William R. "Centralization and Organization Reproduction: Ethnic Innovation in R&D Centers and Satellite Locations." Organization Science (forthcoming). (Pre-published online October 24, 2023.)
- 2023
- Working Paper
Centralization and Organization Reproduction: Ethnic Innovation in R&D Centers and Satellite Locations
By: William R. Kerr
We study the relationship between firm centralization and organizational reproduction in satellite locations. For decentralized firms, the ethnic compositions of inventors in satellite locations mostly resemble their host cities, with little link to the inventor... View Details
Keywords: Ethnicity; Business Offices; Research and Development; Innovation and Invention; Organizational Design
Kerr, William R. "Centralization and Organization Reproduction: Ethnic Innovation in R&D Centers and Satellite Locations." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 24-015, September 2023.
- November 2009
- Article
Organizational Design and Control across Multiple Markets: The Case of Franchising in the Convenience Store Industry
Many companies operate units that are dispersed across different types of markets, and thus serve significantly diverging customer bases. Such market-type dispersion is likely to compromise the headquarter's ability to control its local managers' behavior and satisfy... View Details
Keywords: Market Dispersion; Decentralization; Incentives; Business Headquarters; Geographic Location; Governance Controls; Distribution; Organizational Design; Franchise Ownership; Retail Industry
Campbell, Dennis, Srikant M. Datar, and Tatiana Sandino. "Organizational Design and Control across Multiple Markets: The Case of Franchising in the Convenience Store Industry." Accounting Review 84, no. 6 (November 2009): 1749–1779.
- December 2014
- Article
The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization
By: Nicholas Bloom, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the "information" and "communication" components together. We show theoretically and empirically that this is problematic. Information and communication technologies have very... View Details
Bloom, Nicholas, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen. "The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization." Management Science 60, no. 12 (December 2014): 2859–2885.
- 01 May 2009
- What Do You Think?
Do Innovation and Entrepreneurship Have to Be Incompatible with Organization Size?
Summing Up Where are the leaders that can help elephants avoid a stall? Like a good case study, this month's question divided respondents nearly down the middle on the question of whether or not organizations naturally "stall"... View Details
Keywords: by Jim Heskett
- 28 Oct 2010
- Working Paper Summaries
The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization
- June 2022 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Buurtzorg
By: Ethan Bernstein, Tatiana Sandino, Joost Minnaar and Annelena Lobb
As co-founders of home nursing company Buurtzorg, Jos de Blok and Gonnie Kronenberg prized both self-management and organizational learning. Buurtzorg’s 10,000 nurses across 950 neighborhood nursing teams in the Netherlands were empowered to manage themselves, both in... View Details
Keywords: Healthcare; Best Practices; Best Practices Transfer; Flat Organization; Self-Managed Organizations; Self-Managed Teams; Organizational Learning; Knowledge Management; Learning; Management Practices and Processes; Human Resources; Communication; Organizational Structure; Organizational Design; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Groups and Teams; Networks; Health Industry; Netherlands; Europe
Bernstein, Ethan, Tatiana Sandino, Joost Minnaar, and Annelena Lobb. "Buurtzorg." Harvard Business School Case 122-101, June 2022. (Revised January 2023.)
- July 13, 2023
- Article
Threads Foreshadows a Big—and Surprising—Shift in Social Media
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Liang Wu
Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, has become the fastest downloaded app in history. One of the reasons for this is because it allows users to port over their profiles and follows from the already popular social media platform Instagram, also owned by Meta—a feature... View Details
Keywords: Decentralization; Twitter; Facebook; Instagram; Crypto Economy; Blockchain; Network; Industrial Organization; Competition; Open Innovation; Open Platforms; Open Source Innovation; Social Networks; Social Media; Applications and Software; Information Technology Industry
Kominers, Scott Duke, and Liang Wu. "Threads Foreshadows a Big—and Surprising—Shift in Social Media." Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (July 13, 2023).
- 2017
- Supplement
Uncommon Schools (B): Seeking Excellence at Scale through Standardized Practice
By: John J-H Kim and Sarah McAra
The (B) case provides an update to the (A) case by illustrating how charter school management organization Uncommon Schools responded to the disparity in its students’ 2013 standardized test results. In 2015, CEO Brett Peiser and his management team decided to align... View Details
Keywords: Charter Schools; Nonprofit Organizations; Strategy; Teaching; Talent And Talent Management; Innovation; Education; Early Childhood Education; Middle School Education; Organizational Structure; Performance Consistency; Growth and Development Strategy; Innovation and Invention; Education Industry
Kim, John J-H, and Sarah McAra. "Uncommon Schools (B): Seeking Excellence at Scale through Standardized Practice." Harvard Business Publishing Supplement, 2017. (Case No. PEL-080.)