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Publications
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(1,926)
- Faculty Publications (529)
- February 2010
- Case
Go Mobile: The Phirbol Franchise
By: Rajiv Lal and Natalie Kindred
To grow Phirbol, a telecom retail franchise chain in Delhi, India's underdeveloped markets, its founders were exploring ways to offer more value to the franchisees. In mid-2009, the Phirbol franchise was comprised of some 150 franchisees that had converted their small... View Details
- February 2010 (Revised November 2013)
- Case
Living PlanIT
By: Robert G. Eccles, Amy C. Edmondson, Susan Thyne and Tiona Zuzul
Living PlanIT is a start-up company that has developed a new, innovative business model for sustainable urbanization. This model reflects the software and technology backgrounds of its founders, Steve Lewis and Malcolm Hutchinson, and is in vivid contrast to other... View Details
- February 2010 (Revised January 2014)
- Case
Tennant Company
By: Toby E. Stuart, Lynda M. Applegate and James Weber
Tennant, a leading producer of floor cleaning equipment, must determine how to create, finance, structure, staff, govern, measure, and manage a new venture for developing a fundamentally new product line. In 2005, Tennant Company had developed an innovative,... View Details
- February 2010
- Article
Conflict of Interest and the Intrusion of Bias
By: Don A. Moore, Lloyd Tanlu and Max Bazerman
This paper presents evidence of performance persistence in entrepreneurship. We show that entrepreneurs with a track record of success are much more likely to succeed than first-time entrepreneurs and those who have previously failed. In particular, they exhibit... View Details
- January 2010 (Revised March 2013)
- Case
HubSpot: Lower Churn through Greater CHI
By: F. Asis Martinez Jerez, Thomas Steenburgh, Jill Avery and Lisa Brem
HubSpot, a web marketing startup is under pressure from VCs to rapidly acquire new customers and to maintain a low level of customer churn. In the case, students explore the drivers of customer churn and uncover opportunities to increase customer retention across the... View Details
- August 2009 (Revised August 2010)
- Case
Calera Corporation
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, Thomas J. Steenburgh and Lauren Barley
Brent Constantz, founder, CEO, and president of Calera Corporation, felt a surge of optimism as he gazed at the recently commissioned prototype flue gas processing line at Calera's R&D facility in Moss Landing, California. It was late May 2009, and Calera was an... View Details
- August 2009 (Revised August 2009)
- Case
Intel NBI: Radio-Frequency Identification
By: Willy C. Shih and Thomas Thurston
The Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) group was a start-up that was part of Intel's New Business Initiatives. It sought initially to develop and sell a high performance Rf fast read rate module targeted at fixed position readers that might be found in loading docks... View Details
- April 2009 (Revised December 2015)
- Case
Dot.com: Online Pet Retailing
By: Tom Nicholas and David Chen
From 1995 to 1999, the U.S. experienced a period of tremendous growth in its information technology (IT) sector. The IT industry, although it accounted for less than 10% of the U.S. economy's total output, contributed disproportionately to economic growth. One market... View Details
- April 2009
- Case
SAP AG: Orchestrating the Ecosystem
By: Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani
Business ecosystems require careful orchestration and strategic choices regarding make/buy/partner decisions and membership access. This case examines the strategic and technological issues related to managing SAP's thriving ecosystem of user communities, software... View Details
- December 2008 (Revised January 2011)
- Case
Arcadia Biosciences: Seeds of Change
By: Arthur A. Daemmrich, Forest L. Reinhardt and Mary Louise Shelman
Arcadia Biosciences is an entrepreneurial California agricultural biotech company seeking to earn carbon credits by modifying commodity crops for use in China and India. Eric Rey, Arcadia's CEO, faced a strategic inflection point in early September 2008. The company... View Details
- Article
In Microfinance, Clients Must Come First
By: Srikant M. Datar, Marc J. Epstein and Kristi Yuthas
In the debate over whether microfinance works, few microfinance institutions articulate what, exactly, their ultimate goals are and how, exactly, they will achieve them. The authors cut through the confusion by mapping a clear theory of change for microfinance. If the... View Details
- June 2008 (Revised July 2008)
- Case
How Serial Entrepreneurs Build and Manage a Board of Directors in a Venture-Backed Start Up
By: Michael J. Roberts, William A. Sahlman and Sasha Novakovich
This case includes structured interviews with four serial entrepreneurs about the way in which they built and used their boards in each of their companies and what they have learned through that process. These entrepreneurs were asked similar questions, such as "How do... View Details
- May 2008 (Revised August 2009)
- Case
Intel NBI: Handheld Graphics Organization
By: Willy C. Shih and Thomas Thurston
The Handheld Graphics Organization (HGO) was an internal start-up under Intel's New Business Incubator program. The unit designed a graphics co-processor for the handheld PDA market, to be sold with Intel's Xscale processor. Though NBI ventures were designed for a high... View Details
- May 2008 (Revised August 2009)
- Case
Intel NBI: MXP Digital Media Processor
By: Willy C. Shih and Thomas Thurston
"Gila" was a high-performance image processor project housed in Intel's New Business Initiatives (NBI) group. NBI was an incubator for corporate entrepreneurs, and it had an established methodology for ensuring a degree of autonomy while these ventures got started. But... View Details
- May 2008
- Case
Sensors Unlimited: Bringing InGaAs Technology to the Market
By: Willy C. Shih
Sensors Unlimited was a small start-up in short-wavelength infrared imaging. Its learning base came out of Bell Labs, RCA's Sarnoff Lab, and the Rockwell Science Center, and as it built its capabilities and ventured into new application areas, it discovered a “killer... View Details
- February 2008 (Revised August 2014)
- Case
MedVal Ventures
Is medical travel a viable business opportunity? A group of MBA students consider the pros and cons of starting a business that would send people from the U.S. to India for elective non-emergency surgeries. View Details
- January 2008 (Revised May 2008)
- Case
Cape Wind: Offshore Wind Energy in the USA
By: Richard Vietor
Cape Wind is an extreme example of NIMBY--not in my backyard syndrome. This is the first offshore wind project planned for the United States, in Nantucket Sound, just south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Initially proposed six years ago, in 2001, the wind farm would be... View Details
- January 2008
- Article
Entrepreneurship and Urban Success: Toward a Policy Consensus
By: Zoltan J. Acs, Edward L. Glaeser, Robert E. Litan, Lee Fleming, Stephan J. Goetz, William R. Kerr, Steven Klepper, Stuart S. Rosenthal, Olav Sorenson and William C. Strange
Like all politics, all entrepreneurship is local. Individuals launch firms and, if successful, expand their enterprises to other locations. But new firms must start somewhere, even if their businesses are conducted largely or exclusively on the Internet. Likewise,... View Details
- November 2007 (Revised February 2011)
- Case
The Ice King
By: Tom Nicholas and Sandra Nicholas
Provides an opportunity to examine the risk-reward tradeoff and the travails of entrepreneurial venturing in the nascent U.S. economy. Traces the origins and development of Frederic Tudor's Ice Company, a business which developed during the 19th century to hack chunks... View Details
- June 2007 (Revised March 2008)
- Case
Zoots - Financing Growth (A)
By: Michael J. Roberts, William A. Sahlman and Todd Krasnow
Traces the genesis and founding of Zoots, the largest chain of dry cleaning establishments in the U.S. Founded by some of the founders of the very successful Staples chain, the company raises a very large amount of capital without fully proving its business model, and... View Details