Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(12,313)
- Faculty Publications (3,073)
- April 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
AI Wars
By: Andy Wu, Matt Higgins, Miaomiao Zhang and Hang Jiang
In February 2024, the world was looking to Google to see what the search giant and long-time putative technical leader in artificial intelligence (AI) would do to compete in the massively hyped technology of generative AI. Over a year ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a... View Details
- April 2023 (Revised September 2023)
- Case
Levels: The Remote, Asynchronous, Deep Work Management System
By: Joseph B. Fuller and George Gonzalez
Levels is a highly innovative startup in the health care space. They intend to revolutionize health by linking behavior—eating, exercise, sleeping, etc.—to changes in metabolism. They believe metabolic health can be managed through careful monitoring of changes in... View Details
- Spring 2023
- Article
Incentive Contract Design and Employee-Initiated Innovation: Evidence from the Field
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
This study examines how the design of incentive contracts for tasks defined as workers’ official responsibilities (i.e., standard tasks) influences workers’ propensity to engage in employee-initiated innovation (EII). EII corresponds to innovation activities that are... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
Learning Down to Train Up: Mentors Are More Effective When They Value Insights from Below
By: Ting Zhang, Dan Wang and Adam D. Galinsky
Although mentorship is vital for individual success, potential mentors often view it as a costly burden. To understand what motivates mentors to overcome this barrier and more fully engage with their mentees, we introduce a new construct, learning direction, which... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Limits of Algorithmic Measures of Race in Studies of Outcome Disparities
By: David S. Scharfstein and Sergey Chernenko
We show that the use of algorithms to predict race has significant limitations in measuring and understanding the sources of racial disparities in finance, economics, and other contexts. First, we derive theoretically the direction and magnitude of measurement bias in... View Details
- April 2023
- Article
The Real Exchange Rate, Innovation and Productivity
By: Laura Alfaro, Alejandro Cuñat, Harald Fadinger and Yanping Liu
We evaluate manufacturing firms' responses to changes in the real exchange rate (RER) using detailed firm-level data for a large set of countries for the period 2001-2010. We uncover the following stylized facts about regional variation of manufacturing firms'... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Metaverse Wars
By: Andy Wu, David B. Yoffie and Matt Higgins
In 2023, the term metaverse — a combination of “meta” and “universe” — had become a catch-all for a diverse set of expectations about online virtual worlds and the future of the internet. To some, the metaverse conjured images of a massive participatory videogame... View Details
- March 2023
- Case
Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (A)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards
In 2018, Ana Owczarzak was appointed to lead Google Ads' new innovation and accelerator team - the Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL). The purpose of SAIL was to offer testing and incubation services for individuals within Google Ads who were developing new... View Details
- March 2023
- Supplement
Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (B)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards
In 2018, Ana Owczarzak was appointed to lead Google Ads' new innovation and accelerator team - the Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL). The purpose of SAIL was to offer testing and incubation services for individuals within Google Ads who were developing new... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Pratham 2.0: Sustaining Innovation
By: Brian Trelstad, Samantha Webster and Malini Sen
Pratham is a Mumbai-based nonprofit, which focuses on high-quality, low-cost, and replicable interventions to address gaps in India’s education system. From inception, it has pioneered innovation, from early childhood learning centers to adaptive literacy programs, to... View Details
- March 2023
- Case
Mirakl: Growing The Marketplace Economy
By: Antonio Moreno, Santiago Gallino and Emilie Billaud
Mirakl provided the technology and seller network required for companies like Macy's, Best Buy, Walmart, Siemens, or Carrefour to simply design, launch, and administer a marketplace that included products from third-party sellers. What began as a basic business idea in... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised June 2025)
- Case
Close Concerns: Diabetes Research and Advocacy
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Brian L. Walker
This case describes the Exit considerations of Kelly Close, HBS MBA, and founder of the primary distributor of diabetes newsletters. It is part of the fourth module in the Innovating in Health Care HBS MBA course, which contains cases of other health care firms that... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Doing Business in Kigali, Rwanda
By: Andy Zelleke, A. Zelleke, Leonard A. Schlesinger, Leonard A. Schlesinger, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Wale Lawal
This case examines the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Rwanda. It highlights Rwanda's economic transformation in the decades leading up to 2023 in the context of its history, culture, and politics. The case gives an overview of some of the main... View Details
- 2023
- Chapter
Marketing Through the Machine’s Eyes: Image Analytics and Interpretability
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Flora Feng and Kannan Srinivasan
he growth of social media and the sharing economy is generating abundant unstructured image and video data. Computer vision techniques can derive rich insights from unstructured data and can inform recommendations for increasing profits and consumer utility—if only the... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised May 2023)
- Technical Note
Technical Note: The Traits of Entrepreneurs
By: Jo Tango and Alys Ferragamo
Why do some entrepreneurs succeed and others do not? Are there personality traits that lead someone to become an entrepreneur? Although many questions still remain, there has been significant research on the “entrepreneurial personality.” This note provides an... View Details
- March 2023
- Case
Woven Planet - Designing Software for the Car of the Future
By: Gary P. Pisano and Catherine Piner
Founded in 2021, Woven Planet Holdings—a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation—was developing Arene, an automotive software platform consisting of an operating system, development and simulation tools, and a cloud-based service that could store and analyze vehicle... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
On (A)
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Karolin Frankenberger and Sascha Mader
Founded in 2010, in just one decade, the Swiss company On had established itself as a main player in global sports footwear and apparel. Based on an unconventional strategy which one of the founders labeled as “obsessively distinct,” On grew its sales with a compound... View Details
Keywords: Brands and Branding; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Model; Business Startups; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Satisfaction; Digital Marketing; Disruptive Innovation; Distribution Channels; Entrepreneurship; Environmental Sustainability; Global Strategy; Initial Public Offering; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Marketing Strategy; Product Design; Product Development; Product Marketing; Social Media; Strategy; Supply Chain Management; Technological Innovation; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Retail Industry; Sports Industry; Europe; Switzerland; Germany; United States
- March 2023 (Revised March 2023)
- Case
Roche: Innovation and Access to Healthcare
By: George Serafeim, Susanna Gallani and Benjamin Maletta
In May 2022, Roche Group, one of the largest healthcare companies in the world, hosted its first investor event focused exclusively on its efforts to impact access to healthcare. While Roche had recently set an ambitious goal to double the number of patients that had... View Details
Keywords: ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Sustainable Finance; Growth Strategy And Execution; Sustainability Targets; Impact Evaluation; Healthcare Access; Healthcare Innovation; Healthcare Systems; Healthcare Operations; Finance; Strategy; Health Testing and Trials; Health Care and Treatment; Growth Management; Measurement and Metrics; Innovation Strategy; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Health Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; Switzerland; North America; Europe; Asia; Latin America; Africa
- March 2023 (Revised March 2025)
- Case
Accelerating AI Adoption in the U.S. Air Force
By: Maria P. Roche and Alexander Farrow
In August 2022, the Pentagon tasked U.S. Air Force Captain Victor Lopez to launch a new office for AFWERX, an Air Force innovation unit that leveraged commercial developers and military talent to acquire advanced technologies. This task was particularly arduous because... View Details
- March 2023
- Article
Attracting the Sharks: Corporate Innovation and Securities Class Action Lawsuits
By: Elisabeth Kempf and Oliver Spalt
This paper provides novel evidence suggesting that securities class action lawsuits, a central pillar of the U.S. litigation and corporate governance system, can constitute an obstacle to valuable corporate innovation. We first establish that valuable innovation output... View Details