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- All HBS Web
(862)
- Faculty Publications (112)
- March 2019
- Technical Note
Control or Flexibility? Structured Empowerment Offers Both—Lessons from Retail & Service Chains (Abridged)
By: Tatiana Sandino
This note explains how several retail and service organizations use a practice described here as “structured empowerment” to balance control and flexibility as they grow. I define structured empowerment as a practice that grants employees both (a) the power to make... View Details
- February 2019 (Revised August 2019)
- Case
KangaTech
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Patrick J. Ferguson, Sarah Fleischer, Jin Hyun Paik and Steven Randazzo
On a warm January afternoon in 2019, Steve Saunders, Dave Scerri, Carl Dilena, and Nick Haslam (see Exhibit 1 for biographies), co-founders of KangaTech, wrapped up the latest round of discussions about the future direction of their sports-technology start-up. Focused... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 13 Platform Systems vs. Step Processes—The Value of Options and the Power of Modularity
This is the first chapter in Part 3. Its purpose is to contrast the value structure of platform systems with step processes from a technological perspective. I first review the basic technical architecture of computers and argue that every computer is inherently a... View Details
- March 2018
- Teaching Note
Mavi: Fashioning a Path to Brand Growth
By: Jill Avery and Gamze Yucaoglu
Mavi, a leading Turkish apparel retailer, had sales of $419 million in 2015, up 20%. Growth rates like these were becoming routine at Mavi. But, its path to growth was getting more challenging, and Turkven, Mavi’s private equity partner, was planning its exit options... View Details
- March 2018 (Revised March 2019)
- Technical Note
Control or Flexibility? Structured Empowerment Offers Both — Lessons from Retail & Service Chains
By: Tatiana Sandino
This note explains how several retail and service organizations use a practice described here as “structured empowerment” to balance control and flexibility as they grow. I define structured empowerment as a practice that grants employees both (a) the power to make... View Details
- February 2018
- Case
Rosslyn Resource: Monetization and Sales Strategy
By: Robert J. Dolan and Sunru Yong
Rosslyn Resource identifies exploration targets (potential mineral deposits) in the mining industry and advances them until the project can be monetized, usually through sale to a larger mining company, in return for an upfront fee and a royalty on future revenues.... View Details
- 2017
- Article
Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?
By: Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein
Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, or relevant... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Investment Timing with Costly Search for Financing
By: Samuel Antill
I develop a dynamic model of investment timing in which firms must first choose when to search for external financing. Search is costly and the arrival of investors is uncertain, leading to delay in financing and investment. Depending on parameters, my model can... View Details
- October 2017 (Revised November 2017)
- Case
Lovepop
By: Robert F. White, Ramana Nanda and Olivia Hull
As they prepare to graduate from Harvard Business School, the co-founders of greeting card company startup Lovepop need capital to cover the company’s operating costs and must choose between two seed financing offers. One offer is from an angel group and the other from... View Details
- May 2017 (Revised August 2021)
- Case
Mavi: Fashioning a Path to Brand Growth
By: Jill Avery and Gamze Yucaoglu
This case examines the strategic choices and business model with regards to branding at Mavi, a leading Turkish apparel retailer. The case is presented from the perspective of the company CEO and its global brand director who is also part owner. In 2015, Mavi had sales... View Details
Keywords: Brand Management; Brand Architecture; Brand Portfolio Strategy; Brand Positioning; International Expansion; Retailing; Fashion; Pricing; Fast Fashion; Emerging Economies; Brand Extension; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Emerging Markets; Growth and Development Strategy; Expansion; Global Range; Decision Choices and Conditions; Fashion Industry; Retail Industry; Turkey; Europe; Asia
- April 2017
- Article
Financing Risk and Innovation
By: Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf
We provide a model of investment into new ventures that demonstrates why some places, times, and industries should be associated with a greater degree of experimentation by investors. Investors respond to financing risk―a forecast of limited future funding―by modifying... View Details
- February 2017
- Case
BlaBlaCar: The Road Ahead...
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Arun Sundararajan, Emilie Billaud and Caroline Caltagirone
In 2017, the co-founders of BlaBlaCar—the world’s largest long-distance carpooling company—reflected on the evolution of their venture and the way forward. BlaBlaCar had reached critical mass and size; yet staying still was not going to be enough to be relevant and... View Details
Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Transformation; Decision Making; Values and Beliefs; Growth and Development Strategy; Digital Platforms; Network Effects; Strategic Planning; Competitive Strategy; Expansion; Internet and the Web; Transportation Networks; Transportation Industry; Web Services Industry; France; Europe
- November 2016
- Supplement
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals: Building Value from the IP Estate (B)
By: Vicki Sato, Willy Shih and Matt Higgins
The leader of a pioneering biotech company in the siRNA space weighs his options for scaling production capacity in advance of an anticipated commercial launch. Operational complexity and relative merits of in-house manufacturing versus a contractor model are... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Self-Employment Dynamics and the Returns to Entrepreneurship
By: Eleanor W. Dillon and Christopher T. Stanton
Small business owners and others in self-employment have the option to transition to paid work. If there is initial uncertainty about entrepreneurial earnings, this option increases the expected lifetime value of self-employment relative to pay in a single year. This... View Details
- September–October 2016
- Article
Growing New Corporate Businesses: From Initiation to Graduation
By: Sebastian Raisch and Michael Tushman
Large companies initiate many new businesses, but few of them reach scale. The ambidexterity literature describes how companies create exploratory businesses, but says little about how they subsequently scale these businesses. The strategy literature uses real option... View Details
- January 2016
- Case
Haiti Hope: Innovating the Mango Value Chain
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey
This case study examines a market-based approach to economic development through the eyes of NGO TechnoServe's project manager, implementing a US$9.5 million five-year public-private partnership between Coca-Cola, IDB, and USAID. The case ends at the beginning of the... View Details
Keywords: Sustainability; Economic Development; Corporate Social Responsibility; Emerging Country; Teaming; Public-private Partnership; Inter-organizational Relationships; Collaboration; Strategy Implementation; Agricultural Commodity; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Public Sector; Supply Chain Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Learning; Partners and Partnerships; Private Sector; Developing Countries and Economies; Social Enterprise; Food and Beverage Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Haiti
- November 2015
- Article
Cannibalization and Option Value Effects of Secondary Markets: Evidence from the U.S. Concert Industry
By: Victor Manuel Bennett, Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu
We examine how reducing search frictions in secondary markets affects the value appropriated by firms in primary markets. We characterize two effects on primary market firms caused by intermediaries entering secondary markets: the "cannibalization" and "option value"... View Details
- November 2015
- Article
Modularity and Intellectual Property Protection
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and Joachim Henkel
Modularity is a means of partitioning technical knowledge about a product or process. When state-sanctioned intellectual property (IP) rights are ineffective or costly to enforce, modularity can be used to hide information and thus protect IP. We investigate the impact... View Details
- October 2015
- Teaching Note
Molycorp: Financing the Production of Rare Earth Minerals (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott Mayfield
Molycorp, the western hemisphere's only producer of rare earth minerals, was in the middle of a $1 billion capital expenditure project in its effort to become a vertically integrated supplier of rare earth minerals, oxides, and metals. Yet it had just reported lower... View Details
Keywords: Convertible Debt; Uncertainty; Competition; Startup; China; Supply ＆ Demand; Growth; Rare Earth Minerals; Discounted Cash Flows; Mining; Payoff Diagrams; Option Pricing; Capital Budgeting; Capital Structure; Cash Flow; Financial Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Vertical Integration; Valuation; Metals and Minerals; Mining Industry; Industrial Products Industry; Canada; California
- September 2015
- Article
Banks as Patient Fixed-Income Investors
By: Samuel G. Hanson, Andrei Shleifer, Jeremy C. Stein and Robert W. Vishny
We examine the business model of traditional commercial banks when they compete with shadow banks. While both types of intermediaries create safe "money-like" claims, they go about this in different ways. Traditional banks create money-like claims by holding illiquid... View Details