Publications

21 Sep 2016
HBS Seminar

Catherine Tucker, MIT Sloan School of Management

March 1994 (Revised July 1995)
Case

Lotus Development Corp. in 1994

Jim Manzi, president and CEO of Lotus, must decide whether to position the firm as a provider of network applications or of the architectural programs required to support network applications. The decision will have lasting implications for Lotus's position in both... View Details

Keywords: Information Infrastructure; Competitive Advantage; Applications and Software; Industry Structures; Information Technology Industry

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12 PM – 1 PM EDT, 16 Oct 2014
Webinars: Trending@HBS

Can China Lead?

Can China sustain its remarkable emergence of the past 35 years? Surely No, for multiple reasons. China will be a leader, but not the leader. Professor McFarlan will talk about both the challenges and opportunities for those seeking to do business with and within China... View Details

Research Summary

Building Small Business Utopia: How Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Can Increase Small Business Success

By: Karen Mills

Small business lending has remained unchanged for decades, laden with frictions and barriers that prevent many small businesses from accessing the capital they need to succeed. Financial technology, or “fintech,” promises to change this trajectory. In 2010, new fintech... View Details

August 2023
Teaching Note

Huawei: A Global Tech Giant in the Crossfire of a Digital Cold War

By: William C. Kirby and Noah B. Truwit

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 320-089. By 2020, Ren Zhengfei, CEO of Huawei, had transformed the small telephone switch manufacturer he founded in 1987 into a $120 billion telecommunications company poised to lead the lucrative rollout of fifth-generation (5G)... View Details

Keywords: Geopolitical Units; Business and Government Relations; International Relations; Communication Strategy; Telecommunications Industry; China

Small business lending has remained unchanged for decades, laden with frictions and barriers that prevent many small businesses from accessing the capital they need to succeed. Financial technology, or “fintech,” promises to change this trajectory. In 2010, new fintech... View Details

Debora L. Spar

Debora Spar is the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Senior Associate Dean for Business and Global Society. Her current research focuses on issues of gender and technology, and the interplay between... View Details

Keywords: biotechnology; broadcasting; communications; entertainment; federal government; health care; information; internet; music; pharmaceuticals

February 2024
Article

Archetypes of Product Launch by Insiders, Outsiders, and Visionaries

By: Shane Greenstein

What archetypes emerge from prominent episodes of product launches? This essay examines a set of episodes in information technology history that led to significant changes in industry leadership. It highlights that, in all of these instances, there is an example of a... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Product Launch; Leadership; Market Entry and Exit

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January 2011 (Revised June 2011)
Case

Intellectual Property Intermediaries

By: Andrei Hagiu

During the past 5 to 10 years, several different intermediation business models have emerged for the intellectual property (IP) market. This note describes the most prominent ones: non-practicing entities (or patent trolls), defensive patent aggregators, online IP... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Intellectual Property; Auctions; Digital Platforms; Information Technology; Service Industry

November 1998 (Revised February 1999)
Case

Bolsa de Valores de Guayaquil (BVG): Reaching Worldwide Investors Through the Internet

By: Lynda M. Applegate, Ramiro Montealegre, Dusya Vera and Karen Barone

The Guayaquil Stock Exchange developed a Web site to provide information about the market in Ecuador. Though the system provided some dynamic information for potential investors and allowed for some transactions to occur via the Internet, it had not at the time of the... View Details

Keywords: Stocks; Foreign Direct Investment; Emerging Markets; Internet; Technology Industry; Ecuador

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Regina E. Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She was the first woman to be tenured and chaired at Harvard Business School and serve on many established and start-up corporate health care/medical... View Details

Keywords: health care; insurance industry; medical devices; retailing; digital health

February 2024
Case

ReSpo.Vision: The Kickstart of an AI Sports Revolution

By: Paul A. Gompers, Elena Corsi and Nikolina Jonsson

This case study explores the growth journey of Polish computer vision sports start-up ReSpo.Vision in an emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem. By providing 3D data and analysis to soccer clubs, ReSpo.Vision achieved significant milestones with a €1 million seed round, an... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Business Plan; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Decisions; Decision Choices and Conditions; Forecasting and Prediction; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Applications and Software; Business Strategy; Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Poland; Europe

July 2020
Technical Note

Digital Natives Growing Without a Sales Force

By: Das Narayandas, Michael Norris and Amram Migdal

This brief case describes the rise of so-called digital natives (also called born-in-digital) in the 2000s and 2010s that successfully grew without a sales force. The case highlights the emergence of business-to-business Internet and cloud-based companies and their... View Details

2012
Working Paper

When Do User Innovators Start Firms? A Theory of User Entrepreneurship

A rich and distinguished body of research has documented the importance of user innovations. For the most part, this literature has found that users innovate but do not commercialize their innovations. Instead, users benefit from using their innovations and allow... View Details

Keywords: Customers; Commercialization; Emerging Markets; Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention

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09 Nov 2009
Research & Ideas

Come Fly with Me: A History of Airline Leadership

war years; and innovator Herb Kelleher at Southwest near the end of the century. In this e-mail interview, Mayo, director of the HBS Leadership Initiative and the Thomas S. Murphy Distinguished Research Fellow, discusses how executives representing different leadership... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Air Transportation

Joseph B. Fuller

Joseph Fuller is a Professor of Management Practice in General Management and Entrepreneurship. He founded and co-leads the school’s project, Managing the Future of Work, as well as the Harvard Project on the Workforce. He currently leads the FIELD Global Capstone... View Details

August 2013 (Revised September 2015)
Case

Coursera

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Hyunjin Kim

By providing free and open-access online courses at a large scale, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms seek to innovate the business models of the traditional higher education industry. In a little over a year, Coursera had grown at a rapid rate to emerge as a... View Details

Keywords: Business Models; Strategy; Competition; Business Model; Internet and the Web; Higher Education; Competitive Advantage; Education Industry

17 Mar 2022
News

Pandemic’s E-Commerce Surge Proves Less Persistent, More Varied

January 2024 (Revised January 2025)
Case

Huawei: Resilience amid Autarky and Adversity

By: William C. Kirby and Daniel Fu

In September 2023, Huawei made a dramatic return to the global smartphone space with the launch of its Mate 60 Pro smartphone, equipped with an indigenously designed, 7nm chip. This came despite a myriad of export controls and restrictions imposed against the company... View Details