Publications

June 1994 (Revised September 1994)
Background Note

Beating the Commodity Magnet

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and George T. Bowman

All markets follow a cycle of growth and maturity, then commoditization and decline. This note argues that while commoditization of an industry may seem inevitable, the better managed firms find a way to make money in the commodity cycle. These firms know how and when... View Details

Keywords: Goods and Commodities; Financial Markets; Competitive Strategy; Financial Services Industry

13 Oct 2020
News

Can Entrepreneurs Make Mobile Voting Easy and Secure?

24 Feb 2020
News

What happened when we tried to beat open-office distractions

29 Oct 2019
News

Why Open Offices Aren’t Working — and How to Fix Them

New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets

Twitter has attracted tremendous attention from the media and celebrities, but there is much uncertainty about Twitter's purpose. Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing... View Details

January 2008 (Revised February 2008)
Case

South Dakota Wheat Growers

By: David E. Bell and Mary L. Shelman

As a farmer-owned cooperative, South Dakota Wheat Growers (SDWG) serves the needs of its 3,600 active farmer-members by supplying farm inputs and organizing the marketing and transportation of grain produced in the co-op's service territory. For almost 80 years, the... View Details

Keywords: Cooperative Ownership; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Production; Rail Transportation; Marketing Strategy; Expansion; Economic Growth; Global Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; South Dakota

Web

Finance - Faculty & Research

Stacy Straaberg June 2025 | Case | Faculty Research Education technology (edtech) company TagHive, founded in 2017, used a direct sales team and third-party distributors to sell its Class Saathi hardware and software solution to 300 clients, mainly primary and... View Details

October 2012
Article

Target the Right Market

By: Jill Avery and Thomas Steenburgh

SparkPlace is a two-year-old business with a hot new product: software that manages and measures the effectiveness of permission-based marketing campaigns for social media. The company is in the process of deciding on which of two customer segments to focus its... View Details

Keywords: Marketing; Market Segmentation; Customer Defection; Customer Lifetime Value; Customer Relationship Management; CRM; Market Segmentation And Target Market Selection; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Technology Industry; United States

Find at Harvard

Read Now

23 Aug 2016
First Look

August 23, 2016

affects interventional cardiologists deciding between two types of cardiac stents. Analyzing 147,000 choices over six years, we find that individuals do respond to negative news by using the focal production tool less often. However, we... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

December 2018
Case

First Utility Ltd.

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

At the end of 2017 First Utility Ltd. was the largest of the middle-tier domestic energy suppliers in the United Kingdom, serving 808,000 of the country’s 27 million households with electricity and gas. In Q1 2017 First Utility captured 3% market share. The company had... View Details

Keywords: Rapid Growth Stage; Power/Energy; Energy Efficiency Standards; Energy; Competition; Diversification; Acquisition; Expansion; Growth Management; Energy Industry; United Kingdom

27 Oct 2016
HBS Seminar

Andrea Pratt, Richard Paul Richman Professor of Business and Professor of Economics, Columbia University

September 2018
Article

Knowledge Integrators and the Survival of Manufacturing Clusters

By: Giulio Buciuni and Gary P. Pisano

Over the past two decades, the greater prevalence of global supply chains has had contrasting effects on Western manufacturing clusters. While some of them dwindled, others proved resilient. Contributing to the recent literature on co-located clusters and clusters'... View Details

Keywords: Production; Industry Clusters; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Strategy; Competition

Find at Harvard

Register to Read

05 Apr 2024
Blog Post

How I Spent my 2+2 Deferral: Zoe Bhargava

join a sports tech startup along with that startup’s product team. I started as a Product Analyst, leveraging my skills and experience from Twitter and grew into a Product... View Details

Research Summary

Technology Adoption

How large are cross-country differences in technology adoption? How important are they to explain the large observed cross-country differences in per capita income? What factors accelerate of slowdown the adoption of technology? What factors affect the shape of the... View Details

April 2020
Supplement

Oaktree: Pierre Foods Investment

By: Victoria Ivashina and Terrence Shu

This case is a setting to discuss “loan to own” investment strategy that is often pursued by distressed investors. The aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis left many companies with poor liquidity and limited ability to obtain credit. One of these companies was Pierre... View Details

Keywords: Distress Investing; Investment; Debt Securities; Strategy; Restructuring

07 Dec 2015
HBS Seminar

Antonio Moreno-Garcia, Assistant Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Web

Leadership - Faculty & Research

Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch on organizational integration , sparked the field of Organizational Behavior. Early work by Michael Beer on leading organizational change , Rosabeth Kanter on innovation for productivity , John Kotter on power... View Details

Profile

Yaoxin Ding

automotive program in the world” at the University of Michigan. After graduation, he became the only non-PhD engineer at Cummins, where he worked on efficient gasoline engines for the Chinese market. Two years later, he worked with Fiat Chrysler on hybrid mini-van... View Details

April 2024 (Revised July 2024)
Case

Market Dynamics and Moral Dilemmas: Novo Nordisk’s Weight-Loss Drugs

By: Joseph L. Badaracco, Tom Quinn and John Schultz

Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk was owned by a charitable foundation, and since its founding in the 1920s had focused on producing insulin to treat diabetes. In 2017, however, it released Ozempic, a diabetes treatment with the revolutionary side effect of... View Details