Publications

October 2021 (Revised January 2022)
Case

Chia Network: Reimagining Programmable Money

By: William A. Sahlman and George Gonzalez

Chia Network developed a novel blockchain platform that was more eco-friendly, decentralized, and scalable than Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchains. Now, company leadership must decide how to scale the startup and prioritize various partnerships, use cases, and... View Details

Keywords: Blockchain; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Technology Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States

January 2017 (Revised November 2018)
Case

Vox Capital: Pioneering Impact Investing in Brazil

By: Julie Battilana, Marissa Kimsey, Falko Paetzold and Priscilla Zogbi

Vox Capital was the first certified impact investing fund in Brazil. Founded in 2009, it provides early-stage capital for companies offering innovative and scalable solutions to enhance the lives of low-income Brazilians, while aiming to simultaneously generate... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Social Performance Measurement; Social Entrepreneurship; Investment Funds; Social Enterprise; Brazil

April 1999
Case

Inktomi: Scaling the Internet

By: Marco Iansiti, Myra M. Hart and Richard Bergin

Presents the early months of Inktomi, a company that invented the world's first truly scalable architecture for the Internet. This core technology provides a platform for a variety of innovative applications. The company must decide the direction it wants to take. View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Leadership; Corporate Strategy; Internet

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Research Summary

Overview

By: Rembrand M. Koning

Rembrand Koning is the Mary V. and Mark A. Stevens Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. His research examines matching and selection frictions in firm growth and strategy, with an aim to help entrepreneurs and... View Details

25 Sep 2019
Video

HBS Online Community Challenge: Working to End Hunger with The Greater Boston Food Bank

2012
Article

E-Commerce in Asia: Challenges and Opportunities

By: Sunil Gupta and Tanya Bijlani

Asia is becoming increasingly attractive to businesses, especially to e-commerce firms that thrive on global and scalable business models. Yet, most global e-commerce players, with a few exceptions, have failed to achieve significant success in Asia. This article... View Details

Keywords: Asia

26 Sep 2019
News

Harvard Business School Online and The Greater Boston Food Bank Team Up to End Hunger

07 Sep 2021
News

Focus on Health and Equity to Meet 2026 Climate Goal, Advises Sustainability Committee

April 2000 (Revised September 2001)
Case

Peppers and Rogers Group, The

By: John A. Deighton

Can two successful authors build a scalable consulting practice based on their unique view of customer relationship management (CRM)? Should they emphasize strategy or execution? The case describes how Peppers and Rogers grew from two people earning speaker fees to a... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Growth and Development; Information Publishing; Going Public; Strategy; Competition; Internet; Consulting Industry

July 2021
Article

Making Medications Stick: Improving Medication Adherence by Highlighting the Personal Health Costs of Non-compliance

By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Joe J. Gladstone, Dan Berry, Charlotte L. Kirkdale, Tracey Thornley and Adam D. Galinsky

Poor compliance of prescription medication is an ongoing public health crisis. Nearly half of patients do not take their medication as prescribed, harming their own health while also increasing public health care costs. Despite these detrimental consequences, prior... View Details

Keywords: Prescription Drugs; Medication Adherence; Personal Health Costs; Health; Behavior; Motivation and Incentives; Communication Strategy

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Article

New Sales Realities

By: Frank V. Cespedes

Business leaders need to understand that it’s the fit of People, Process, Pricing, and Partners that drives sales effectiveness. As firms confront new buying processes, required sales competencies affect hiring, training, and development (People). Without a coherent... View Details

Keywords: Sales; Performance Effectiveness

August 2020
Case

Ready for Take-Off at Jet It

By: Gary P. Pisano, Hise Gibson and Nicole Gilmore

This case examines the business model and growth of a start-up company in the private aviation industry. In June 2020, amidst the COVID crisis, the company's co-founder and CEO must make a decision regarding an order of new jets that will significantly expand the... View Details

Keywords: Capacity Planning; Business Startups; Business Model; Growth and Development Strategy; Air Transportation Industry

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

25 Mar 2025
HBS Seminar

Lou Shipley, Harvard Business School

July 2016 (Revised November 2018)
Case

Code.org

By: John J-H Kim, Lauren Barley and Allison M. Ciechanover

The case explores Hadi Partovi’s mission to provide every K-12 student in the United States the opportunity to learn computer science. Students can assess how Partovi transformed his passion into an organization that reached millions around the globe through the launch... View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit Organizations; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Applications and Software; Education; Education Industry; United States

2024
Working Paper

The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance

By: Nicholas G. Otis, Rowan Clarke, Solène Delecourt, David Holtz and Rembrand Koning

Scalable and low-cost AI assistance has the potential to improve firm decision-making and economic performance. However, running a business involves a myriad of open-ended problems, making it difficult to know whether recent AI advances can help business owners make... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Performance Improvement; Small Business; Decision Choices and Conditions; Kenya

September 2003 (Revised January 2005)
Case

Bridges to Excellence: Bringing Quality Health Care to Life

By: Richard M.J. Bohmer, Ingrid Marie Nembhard and Robert Galvin

General Electric launched Bridges to Excellence Diabetes Care Link, a program through which enrolled physicians receive bonuses of up to 10% of their salary for delivering quality care to diabetic patients covered by a participating employer or health plan. A day... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Motivation and Incentives; Programs; Ethics; Quality; Moral Sensibility; Service Delivery; Compensation and Benefits; Health Industry

2021
Working Paper

Corporate Environmental Impact: Measurement, Data and Information

By: David Freiberg, DG Park, George Serafeim and T. Robert Zochowski

As an organization’s environmental impact has become a central societal consideration, thereby affecting industry and organizational competitiveness, interest in measuring and analyzing environmental impact has increased. We develop a methodology to derive comparable... View Details

Keywords: Environment; Impact; Measurement; Environmental Ratings; Corporate Valuation; Financial Materiality; Sustainability; Environmental Impact; Environmental Strategy; Impact-Weighted Accounts; IWAI; Environmental Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Measurement and Metrics; Valuation

2021
Working Paper

First Law of Motion: Influencer Video Advertising on TikTok

By: Jeremy Yang, Juanjuan Zhang and Yuhan Zhang

This paper engineers an intuitive feature that is predictive of the causal effect of influencer video advertising on product sales. We propose the concept of m-score, a summary statistic that captures the extent to which a product is advertised in the most engaging... View Details

Keywords: Influencer Advertising; Video Advertising; Computer Vision; Machine Learning; Advertising; Online Technology