Publications

25 Oct 2024
Blog Post

Harvard Business School Announces Latest RISE Fellows

As part of the Harvard Business School (HBS) Advancing Racial Equity action plan, 26 students from the MBA Classes of 2025 and 2026 have been named recipients of a Recognizing Individuals Seeking Equity (RISE) Fellowship. First announced... View Details

March 2019 (Revised May 2019)
Case

Fetchr: A New Way of Last Mile Delivery

By: V.G. Narayanan and Eren Kuzucu

By mid-2016, five years of aggressive growth had transformed Fetchr from a small logistics startup to a 1,000-employee, full-fledged last-mile delivery company operating across four countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Already beneficiaries of the... View Details

01 Sep 2005
News

Business Plan Contest Has Many Winners

With its ninth annual competition last May, the HBS Business Plan Contest has become a well-established start-up that hits “home runs” every year. This year’s traditional track winner was Karen Grajwer (MBA ’05), founder of Uplift, an... View Details

Keywords: Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

25 Jun 2020
Blog Post

Harvard Business School Class of 2021 Student Profiles

International Rescue Committee HBS ACTIVITIES Section A Community Values Rep, Tech Club, Harvard Innovation Labs Venture Incubation Program Merve Ciplak Merve believes the combined JD/MBA degree best positions her for leadership in a rapidly changing world. “Today,... View Details

24 Feb 2014
News

A Capital Idea for Small Business

Callaghan McGee Photos by Tracy Powell (Editor's Note: Brad McGee passed away in November 2015.) John Callaghan (MBA 1984) and Brad McGee (MBA 1987) became close friends while growing up in the small town of Carmel, NY. Their friendship has spanned more than four... View Details

Keywords: Robert S. Benchley; crowd-funding; online communities; Finance; Securities, Commodities, and Other Financial Investments; Finance

09 Jan 2020
Book

Rethinking Business Strategy in the Age of AI

seems to point to the fact that we’ll have much slower employment growth. Gerdeman: Traditional businesses must live in fear of becoming the next Kodak, Blockbuster, or Sears. Do you think longstanding companies can take advantage of AI... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

16 Jun 2016
Blog Post

Why Entrepreneurs Should Consider Business School

hands-on way to practice customer discovery and rapid iteration. The Entrepreneurial Manager class applies founder concepts like lifetime value, customer acquisition, and staged financing. And every course included early-stage company cases. Ironically, understanding... View Details

25 Mar 2016
News

Business Gets Serious Inside ‘Shark Tank’

01 Sep 2016
News

The Big Business of Little Loans

Funding Circle, among others. It was a wide circle. These startups are part of a new ecosystem filling the void left by traditional banks that don’t want to lend to small businesses because they are too... View Details

Keywords: Nancy Miller

July 2019
Case

Instabeat—One More Lap?

By: Shikhar Ghosh, Nicole Tempest Keller and Alpana Thapar

This case follows Lebanese entrepreneur, Hind Hobeika, an engineer and competitive swimmer who spends seven years trying to launch a wearable heartrate monitor and motion sensor to help swimmers track their performance while swimming. While the Beirut-based... View Details

Keywords: Startup; Manufacturing; Prototyping; Female Protagonist; Business Startups; Decision Making; Entrepreneurship; Information Infrastructure; Information Technology; Design; Organizational Culture; United States; Lebanon

June 2016
Teaching Note

HubSpot: Lower Churn through Greater CHI

By: Jill Avery, Asis Martinez Jerez and Thomas Steenburgh

HubSpot, a web marketing startup selling inbound marketing software to small- and medium-sized businesses, is under pressure from its venture capital partners to rapidly acquire new customers and to maintain a low level of customer churn. The B2B SaaS company is in the... View Details

Keywords: CRM; Customer Acquisition; Customer Retention; Churn Management; SaaS Business Models; Customer Lifetime Value; Venture Capital; Startup; Software; Monitoring And Control; Marketing; Customer Relationship Management; Marketing Strategy; Accounting; Technology Industry; United States

18 Jul 2014
News

Diversity in Business Winner: Abir Sen

2025
Working Paper

Bringing Science to Market: Knowledge Foundations, Inventor-Founders, and Performance

By: Justine Boudou and Maria Roche

In this paper, we examine how a startup’s knowledge foundations—embedded in its core technology—influence its performance in the exit market. Using a dataset of 1,006 biomedicine startups founded between 2005 and 2015, we focus on two key factors: (1) the degree of... View Details

Keywords: Firm Performance; Knowledge Foundations; Exits; Academic Startups; Inventor-founder; Specialized Scientific Knowledge; Competitive Advantage; Value Creation; Research; Information Publishing; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship

Read Now

January 2022 (Revised September 2023)
Case

Simplifyy

By: Paul A. Gompers and Alicia Dadlani

Jake Lisby, co-founder and CEO of Simplifyy, a property technology startup in Kansas City, Missouri, was both exhausted and exhilarated by the flurry of activity surrounding the pivot of the business model in late 2021. Simplifyy, a venture-backed PropTech company, was... View Details

Keywords: SaaS; SaaS Business Models; Business Model; Business Startups; Small Business; Geographic Location; Technological Innovation; Information Technology; Transformation; Problems and Challenges; Real Estate Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States; Missouri

November 2017 (Revised September 2020)
Supplement

Miami's Tech Future (B): Building the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

In 2017, Miami was rated #1 among U.S. cities for startups, but about 40th for “scale-ups” – growth companies. This case shows how leaders of incubators and accelerators supported startups and a culture of entrepreneurship, but also describes some factors limiting... View Details

Keywords: Scaling; Growth; Startup; Community Engagement; Community Impact; Community Relations; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Information Technology; Growth and Development Strategy; Business and Community Relations; Miami; Florida