Publications

September 1988 (Revised January 1989)
Case

Unisys: The Merger of Burroughs and Sperry

Mike Blumenthal, CEO of Burroughs, successfully executes the merger of Burroughs and Sperry in 1986. The case discusses the putting together of the two firms in a fast time period in order to achieve cost savings, high earnings, and an integrated culture. Blumenthal... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Organizational Structure; Mergers and Acquisitions; Consolidation

July 2010
Other Article

Clusters and Entrepreneurship

By: Mercedes Delgado, Michael E. Porter and Scott Stern

This article examines the role of regional clusters in regional entrepreneurship. We focus on the distinct influences of convergence and agglomeration on growth in the number of start-up firms as well as in employment in these new firms in a given region-industry.... View Details

Keywords: Economics

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January 2002 (Revised September 2002)
Case

Corporate Renewal in America

By: Bruce R. Scott and Thomas S. Mondschean

Discusses various macroeconomic, regulatory, technological, and financial forces that led to increased corporate restructuring in the United States beginning in the mid-1980s. The U.S. financial system is often viewed as the most developed in the world and a model for... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Corporate Governance; Macroeconomics; Economic Systems; Restructuring; Markets; Private Sector; Corporate Finance; Germany; Japan; United States

March 1998
Case

Bumper Acquisition (A1), A: Confidential Information for Thermo-Impact, Inc.

By: James K. Sebenius and David T. Kotchen

Located in Mundelein, IL, Thermo-Impact, Inc. is a rapidly growing, private firm that manufactures automotive bumpers. In 1995, a number of large automotive supply companies and a private equity investment firm offer to buy Thermo-Impact. The cases in this series focus... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Valuation; Negotiation Participants; Decision Making; Negotiation Process; Entrepreneurship; Negotiation Offer; Acquisition; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry; Illinois

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24 Jan 2012
Working Paper Summaries

What Do Development Banks Do? Evidence from Brazil, 2002-2009

Keywords: by Sergio G. Lazzarini, Aldo Musacchio, Rodrigo Bandeira-de-Mello & Rosilene Marcon; Banking

October 2013 (Revised November 2013)
Case

Blackstone and the Sale of Citigroup's Loan Portfolio

By: Victoria Ivashina and David Scharfstein

The credit boom that preceded the 2007-2009 financial crisis led to several lending practices that exposed banks to large risks. In particular, when the financial crisis unraveled, there were several billion dollars' worth of leveraged buyout (LBO) loans that were... View Details

Keywords: Restructuring; Private Equity; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Credit Derivatives and Swaps; Financial Markets; Investment; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry

September–October 2023
Article

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: The Effects of Common Ownership on Corporate Social Responsibility

By: Mark R. DesJardine, Jody Grewal and Kala Viswanathan

Common owners face an incredible investment challenge: managing systematic risk. Because common owners hold shares in multiple firms across an industry, an action (or inaction) by one firm that affects industry peers is felt more severely by common owners than by... View Details

Keywords: Common Ownership; Environmental Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Institutional Investing; Corporate Governance; Risk and Uncertainty; Investment Return

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2020
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 5 Ecosystems and Complementarities

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce two new building blocks to the theory of how technology shapes organizations. The first is a new layer of organization structure: a business “ecosystem.” The second is the economic concept of “complementarity.” Ecosystems are... View Details

Keywords: Business Ecosystems; Complementarity; Modularity; Information Technology; Organizations

SSRN

May 2017
Teaching Note

Partners Group: Ain't No Mountain High Enough

By: Nori Gerardo Lietz

Partners Group (PG), a Swiss-based PE manager, initiated a series of strategic shifts and evolved from a predominately fund-of-funds manager into a large, multi-asset class PE firm focused on direct investments. PG was the first PE firm to go public in 2006. A number... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Entrepreneurship; Management Practices and Processes; Private Equity

2012
White Paper

Robust Enforcement Should Complement Voluntary Regulation

By: Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel

Spurred by the anti-regulation movement that started in the 1970s, voluntary self-regulation programs have emerged in many regulatory agencies, seeking to increase cooperation between government and industry to achieve greater and more cost-effective compliance.... View Details

Keywords: Governance Compliance; Business and Government Relations

Fall 2023
Article

Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By: Hong Luo and Julie Holland Mortimer

Digitization has transformed how users find and use copyrighted goods, but many existing legal options remain difficult to access, possibly leading to infringement. In a field experiment, we contact firms that are caught infringing on expensive digital images. Emails... View Details

Keywords: Copyright Infringement; Field Experiment; Copyright; Lawfulness

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12 Apr 2013
HBS Seminar

Gary Frazier, USC Marshall School of Business

12 Dec 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Bottlenecks, Modules and Dynamic Architectural Capabilities

Keywords: by Carliss Y. Baldwin

02 Oct 2012
First Look

First Look: October 2

strategies leads to better access to finance. We hypothesize that better access to finance can be attributed to a) reduced agency costs due to enhanced stakeholder engagement and b) reduced informational asymmetry due to increased transparency. Using a View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Ranjay Gulati

Ranjay Gulati is the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration and the former Unit Head of the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. He is an expert on leadership, strategy, and organizational issues... View Details

Keywords: biotechnology; computer; financial services; industrial goods; information technology industry; pharmaceuticals; professional services; retailing

Forthcoming
Article

What's My Employee Worth? The Effects of Salary Benchmarking

By: Zoë B. Cullen, Shengwu Li and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

While U.S. legislation prohibits employers from sharing information about their employees’ compensation with each other, companies are still allowed to acquire and use more aggregated data provided by third parties. Most medium and large firms report using this type... View Details

Keywords: Information Sharing; Wages; Policy; Compensation and Benefits

2015
Working Paper

Bottlenecks, Modules and Dynamic Architectural Capabilities

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

How do firms create and capture value in large technical systems? In this paper, I argue that the points of both value creation and value capture are the system's bottlenecks. Bottlenecks arise first as important technical problems to be solved. Once the problem is... View Details

Keywords: Architecture; Architectural Knowledge; Dynamic Capabilities; Bottleneck; Modularity; Organization Design; Organization Boundaries; Property Rights; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure

SSRN

September 2008 (Revised July 2012)
Case

Khosla Ventures: Biofuels Strategy

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, William A. Sahlman and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld

By 2008, a number of the firm's early cleantech investments were showing promise, and the companies were starting to need significantly more money to create the massive scale required in the energy sector. As Khosla thought about the hundreds of millions of dollars... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurial Marketing; Entrepreneurial Finance; New Product Development; Partnerships; Entrepreneurial Management; Venture Capital; Strategy; Partners and Partnerships; Renewable Energy; Entrepreneurship; Investment Funds; Environmental Sustainability; Product Development; Biotechnology Industry; Financial Services Industry