Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(2,869)
- Faculty Publications (543)
- February 2009 (Revised February 2012)
- Case
Exeter Group, Inc. (A)
By: Robert G. Eccles, Das Narayandas and Kerry Herman
Jonathan Kutchins and Mark Cullen, managing partners of IT consulting firm Exeter Group, Inc., are considering four potential client engagements. Three of them involve prominent universities, an area of market strength for the firm, and one involves a top-tier strategy... View Details
- January 2009 (Revised July 2009)
- Case
Alibaba's Taobao (A)
By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Julie M. Wulf
This case examines the decision of Alibaba Group to diversify from an international business-to-business (B2B) exchange (Alibaba.com) into a B2C and C2C exchange (Taobao.com) for Chinese retailers and consumers. In China, Taobao had managed to displace the once... View Details
- January 2009 (Revised May 2010)
- Case
Altoona State Investment Board: December 2008
By: Josh Lerner
Rod Calhoun, the head of the Altoona State Investment Board's private equity investment program, considered the communication he had just received. It was from Permira, the leading European buyout fund, and concerned its fourth fund, to which Altoona had made a £ 100... View Details
- December 2008 (Revised October 2012)
- Case
Special Economic Zones in India: Public Purpose and Private Property (A)
By: Laura Alfaro and Lakshmi Iyer
In 2005, the government of India enacted the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) Act in order to attract investment, generate export revenues, and create manufacturing jobs. However, several planned projects faced difficulties in acquiring land for setting up the SEZ. In... View Details
- December 2008 (Revised July 2010)
- Case
TravelCenters of America
By: Robin Greenwood, Daniel Jacob Goldberg and James Quinn
A New York-based hedge fund must decide whether to invest in TravelCenters of America (TA), a recent spin-off from a U.S.-based real estate investment trust. The case confronts students with the question: To what extent is this spin-off opportunity attractive from a... View Details
- December 2008 (Revised September 2009)
- Case
Cola Wars: Going Global
This case is meant to be used in conjunction with the extant "Cola Wars" case studies. It outlines the global positions of Pepsi and Coca-Cola as of 2008 in the soft drink market, and then provides an overview of their competitive situations in three markets: Mexico,... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Resolving Information Asymmetries in Markets: The Role of Certified Management Programs
Firms and regulators are increasingly relying on voluntary mechanisms to signal and infer quality of difficult-to-observe management practices. Prior evaluations of voluntary management programs have focused on those that lack verification mechanisms and have found... View Details
- November 2008 (Revised January 2010)
- Case
Stone Finch, Inc.: Young Division, Old Division
By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Elizabeth Collins
CEO Jim Billings wants to attract energetic, entrepreneurial talent to Stone Finch, Inc., which comprises an older division that fabricates products like piping and tanks for water and wastewater processing plants, and a much newer division that develops biochemical... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Human Resource Management; Motivation; Business Growth; Motivation and Incentives; Leadership; Business Subsidiaries; Innovation Strategy; Resource Allocation; Organizational Structure; Organizational Culture; Retention; Operations; Recruitment; Integration; Business Growth and Maturation; Mergers and Acquisitions; Growth and Development Strategy; Manufacturing Industry
- November 2008
- Article
Winning the Race for Talent in Emerging Markets
By: Douglas A. Ready, Linda A. Hill and Jay A. Conger
"This war for talent is like nothing we've ever seen before," write the authors, who have spent decades studying talent management and leadership development. Recently they interviewed executives at more than 20 global companies to identify strategies for attracting... View Details
- October 2008 (Revised September 2009)
- Case
Consumer Lending in Japan: Citi CFJ (A)
By: J. Gunnar Trumbull and Akiko Kanno
Despite a tradition of high household savings, Japan has supported a dynamic and technically sophisticated consumer-lending sector. The high profitability of the sector has periodically attracted interest from domestic banks as well as international investors. Most... View Details
- August 2008 (Revised December 2009)
- Case
Nantero
By: William A. Sahlman, Dan Heath and Caroline Perkins
This case describes a decision confronting the founder of Nantero, a company developing a new semiconductor technology. The company needs to raise additional venture capital. Potential investors have competing visions for the company, and its business model. Some... View Details
- August 2008
- Case
System on a Chip 2008: Ardentec Corporation
By: Willy C. Shih, Chen-Fu Chien, Chintay Shih and Ting-Chen Chen
Ardentec Corporation is a specialist in "wafer probing," a highly specialized niche sandwiched between the "front-end" and the "back-end" of semiconductor manufacturing. Because the semiconductor industry uses modular processes and has standard containers for the... View Details
- July 2008 (Revised January 2010)
- Case
Affinity Labs, Inc.
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Elizabeth Kind
In November 2006, Chris Michel left Military.com, which he founded in 1999, to start Affinity Labs, a global network of online communities. That month, Michel raised a Series A round of venture funding and established a partnership with Monster, which he had sold... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
The Future of Social Enterprise
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Herman B. Leonard and Susan McDonald
The Future of Social Enterprise considers the confluence of forces that is shaping the field of social enterprise, changing the way that funders, practitioners, scholars, and organizations measure performance. We trace a growing pool of potential funding sources to... View Details
- March 2008
- Article
What Have We Learned from Market Design?
By: Alvin E. Roth
This essay discusses some things we have learned about markets, in the process of designing marketplaces to fix market failures. To work well, marketplaces have to provide thickness, i.e. they need to attract a large enough proportion of the potential participants in... View Details
Keywords: Risk Management; Market Design; Market Participation; Market Transactions; Failure; Safety
- November 2006
- Article
Find Your Sweet Spot
By: Rob Markey, Gerard Du Toit and James Allen
Charged with extending their unit’s product lines and boosting top-line growth over the next three years, product managers at one global consumer goods company wanted to identify the most attractive customer segments to target and how best to reach them. So they turned... View Details
- February 2008
- Article
Attracting Skeptical Buyers: Negotiating for Intellectual Property Rights
By: James J. Anton and Dennis A. Yao
Expropriable disclosures of knowledge to prospective buyers may be necessary to facilitate the sale of intellectual property (IP). In principle, confidentiality agreements can protect disclosures by granting the seller rights to sue for unauthorized use. In practice,... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Contracting for Servicizing
Servicizing, a novel business practice that sells product functionality rather than products, has been touted as an environmentally beneficial business practice. This paper describes how servicizing transactions mitigate some problems associated with sales... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Attracting Flows by Attracting Big Clients: Conflicts of Interest and Mutual Fund Portfolio Choice
By: Lauren Cohen and Breno Schmidt
We explore a new channel for attracting inflows using a unique dataset of corporate 401(k) retirement plans and their mutual fund family trustees. Families secure substantial inflows by being named trustee of a 401(k) plan. This affords the plan sponsor potential... 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