Publications

Educators

15 Nov 2006
Research & Ideas

Lessons Not Learned About Innovation

be rediscovered in each managerial generation (about every six years) as a fundamental way to enable new growth. But each generation seems to have forgotten or never learned the mistakes of the past, so we see classic traps repeated over... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

05 Feb 2015
Research & Ideas

How New BofA Executives Learn its ’Deep Smarts’

executives. To address these needs, the bank has created an onboarding program for executives one to two levels below the C-suite. The program aims to ensure that the new executives understand role expectations, quickly develop a network among key stakeholders, build... View Details

Keywords: Re: Dorothy A. Leonard; Banking

November 2012 (Revised September 2013)
Case

Learning Resources: A Hands-On Toy Company Deals with New Challenges and Opportunities

By: Boris Groysberg and Anahita Hashemi

Learning Resources is a family-owned educational toy company that, by late 2011, was facing a myriad of challenges, including increased competition, entry into new markets, new distribution methods, rising costs of production in China, and changing customer behavior.... View Details

Keywords: Leading Teams; Strategy Formulation; Strategy And Execution; Innovation; Corporate Culture; Industry Analysis; Organizational Alignment; Entrepreneurs; Sales Channels; Leadership; Strategy; Change Management; Innovation Leadership; Family Business; Entrepreneurship; Product Design; Sales; Retail Industry; United States

Educators

05 Dec 2017
Research & Ideas

What We've Learned from 101 Entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets

studied at Harvard Business School. Credit: Bartosz Hadyniak For perspectives on what has been learned so far, HBS Working Knowledge conducted an email interview with four of the key drivers of CEM: Project coordinators Geoffrey Jones,... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2022
Working Paper

Product2Vec: Leveraging Representation Learning to Model Consumer Product Choice in Large Assortments

By: Fanglin Chen, Xiao Liu, Davide Proserpio and Isamar Troncoso

We propose a method, Product2Vec, based on representation learning, that can automatically learn latent product attributes that drive consumer choices, to study product-level competition when the number of products is large. We demonstrate Product2Vec’s... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Choice; Consumer Behavior; Competition; Product Marketing

SSRN

06 Feb 2020
Research & Ideas

What We Learned from Reading Jeff Bezos’ Patents

patent activities at Amazon. To do so, we began by looking at Amazon’s patent history using the Derwent Innovation database for the years 1998-2018, which included more than 11,000 published patents in the United States. We learned four... View Details

Keywords: by Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg; Retail

2022
Chapter

Lessons Learned from Support to Business during COVID-19

By: Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Benjamin Iverson and Adi Sunderam

The authors survey the new federal subsidies and loans provided to businesses in the first year of the pandemic—including the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program, and aid targeted at specific industries such as airlines... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Small Business; Government Legislation; Policy

December 13, 2022
Article

What Elon Musk Can Learn from Steve Jobs’s Return to Apple

By: Andy Wu and Goran Calic

Changing the strategic direction of an existing company is among the hardest management challenges out there. Most attempts fail. In trying to remake Twitter, Elon Musk has a daunting task ahead of him. There’s precedent, however, for dramatically reimagining a major... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Corporate Strategy; Change Management; Transformation

December 2007
Article

Learning to Live with Governments: Unilever in India and Turkey, 1950-1980

By: G. Jones

A noteworthy characteristic of the contemporary global economy is the uneven distribution of world foreign direct investment (FDI). In 2007 three-quarters of world FDI was located in developed countries. The residual was concentrated in a small number of emerging... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Ethics; Foreign Direct Investment; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business and Community Relations; Business and Government Relations; Consumer Products Industry; India; Turkey

Find at Harvard

21 Aug 2019
Research & Ideas

What Machine Learning Teaches Us about CEO Leadership Style

CEOs are communicators. Studies show that CEOs spend 85 percent of their time in communication-related activities, including speeches, meetings, and phone calls with people both inside and outside the firm. Now, new research using machine View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

24 Apr 2018
Op-Ed

Op-Ed: What Mark Zuckerberg Can Learn About Crisis Leadership from Starbucks

Facebook’s current data privacy crisis, could learn a lot from Johnson. Let’s examine how Johnson and Zuckerberg measured up against what I have identified as 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis. #1: Face reality, starting with yourself.... View Details

Keywords: by Bill George; Technology; Food & Beverage

2010
Working Paper

Commodity Chains: What Can We Learn from a Business History of the Rubber Chain? (1870-1910)

By: Felipe Tamega Fernandes

The literature on the rubber boom applied a Dependendist view of rubber production in the Brazilian Amazon. Even though a sizable surplus was generated in the rubber chain, it was mostly appropriated by foreigners. This view is in tune with the Global Commodity Chain... View Details

Keywords: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Business History; Supply Chain; Manufacturing Industry; Rubber Industry; Brazil

11 Mar 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Return Migration and Geography of Innovation in MNEs: A Natural Experiment of On-the-Job Learning of Knowledge Production by Local Workers Reporting to Return Migrants

Keywords: by Prithwiraj Choudhury; Technology

2025
Working Paper

Balancing Engagement and Polarization: Multi-Objective Alignment of News Content Using LLMs

By: Mengjie Cheng, Elie Ofek and Hema Yoganarasimhan

We study how media firms can use LLMs to generate news content that aligns with multiple objectives—making content more engaging while maintaining a preferred level of polarization/slant consistent with the firm’s editorial policy. Using news articles from The New York... View Details

Keywords: Large Language Models; Content Creation; Media; Polarization; Generative Ai; Direct Preference Optimization; AI and Machine Learning; News; Perspective; Digital Marketing; Policy; Media and Broadcasting Industry

SSRN

Research Summary

Paper - Commodity Chains: what can we learn from a business history of the rubber chain? (1870-1910)

The literature on the rubber boom applied a Marxist/Dependendist view of rubber production in the Brazilian Amazon. Even though a sizeable surplus was generated in the rubber chain, it was mostly appropriated by foreigners. This view is in tune with the Global... View Details

March 2019
Case

DayTwo: Going to Market with Gut Microbiome

By: Ayelet Israeli and David Lane

DayTwo is a young Israeli startup that applies research on the gut microbiome and machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized nutritional recommendations to its users in order to minimize blood sugar spikes after meals. After a first year of trial rollout in... View Details

Educators

Summer 2020
Article

Venture Capital's Role in Financing Innovation: What We Know and How Much We Still Need to Learn

By: Josh Lerner and Ramana Nanda

Venture capital is associated with some of the most high-growth and influential firms in the world. Academics and practitioners have effectively articulated the strengths of the venture model. At the same time, venture capital financing also has real limitations in its... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Financing; Venture Capital; Financing and Loans; Technological Innovation

Find at Harvard

November 2020
Teaching Note

DayTwo: Going to Market with Gut Microbiome

By: Ayelet Israeli

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 519-010. DayTwo is a young Israeli startup that applies research on the gut microbiome and machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized nutritional recommendations to its users in order to minimize blood sugar spikes after meals.... View Details