Publications

17 Nov 2003
Research & Ideas

The Business Case for Diabetes Disease Management

What should business people in particular know about the pros and cons of attempts to treat and control diabetes—or indeed other chronic diseases? That was the focus of a lively case-study discussion among some fifty participants led by... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Health

12 Oct 1999
Research & Ideas

Value Judgments: Business Ethics Across Borders

organizational values and business ethics, Paine focused on U.S. companies engaged in business principally at home. But faced with an increasing number of questions from international students about whether... View Details

Keywords: by Judith A. Ross

Article

Interorganizational Alliances and the Performance of Firms: A Study of Growth and Innovation Rates in a High-technology Industry

Keywords: Organizations; Alliances; Performance; Business Ventures; Growth and Development; Innovation and Invention; Information Technology; Information; Technology Industry

November 1998 (Revised July 1999)
Background Note

Business as Stakeholder in Public Education: A History of Business Efforts to Improve Public Schools in the United States

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter

Explores seven roles businesses and business leaders have played with respect to U.S. public education reform historically and today: "owners" helping set the agenda; "investors" donating funds; "customers" hiring graduates; "experts" contributing management know-how;... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Education; Performance Improvement; Business and Community Relations; United States

15 Jul 2002
Research & Ideas

Going Green Makes Good Business Sense

Business leaders must respond to growing concerns about pollution, but both the environment and corporate coffers can be green, says Harvard Business School professor Forest Reinhardt. The key to success may... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

22 Sep 2014
Op-Ed

Online Banks Fill Funding Needs for Small Business

indicators but also focus on current cash flow and performance of the small businesses using a broad array of traditional and nontraditional data sources. The new lenders generally fall into three... View Details

Keywords: by Karen Mills; Banking; Financial Services

21 Oct 2015
Research & Ideas

How to Predict if a New Business Idea is Any Good

program weren’t random—they did have entrepreneurial acumen. However, Shu contends that having a large group of people with general business experience evaluate an idea could be more effective than having a... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Accommodations; Financial Services

Research Summary

Airline Schedule Disruptions

Increasing congestion and frequent schedule disruptions throughout the National Air Transportation System, both at airports and en route, have led to significant flight and passenger delays. Professor Fearing's primary research focus is on measuring and reducing... View Details

Keywords: Performance Measurement; Air Transportation; Traffic Flow Management; Air Transportation Industry

06 Mar 2013
Research & Ideas

HBS Cases: Women MBAs at Harvard Business School

McGinn, the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, established a set of field studies in which female second-years researched the reasons behind differing academic performances between male and... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

June 2, 2020
Article

How to 'Re-engineer' Your Business for Safety

By: Hubert Joly

Process reengineering was a massive trend in the 1990s. By focusing on improving either cost, quality, or service, a company could gain benefits in all three categories. Today, the principles that underpin process reengineering can be applied anew, with safety as a... View Details

Keywords: Re-engineering; COVID; Safety; Performance Improvement; Organizational Change and Adaptation

Register to Read

12 Jul 2020
Book

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2020

well into, is my colleague Shoshanna Zuboff’s magisterial The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. This book is one of genius. It provides a sweeping description of the rise and impact of business models that are premised on harvesting and... View Details

Keywords: by Staff

June 2016
Teaching Note

N12 Technologies: Building an Organization and Building a Business

By: David A. Garvin

N12 Technologies was a startup founded in 2010 that employed nanotechnology to manufacture a patented material to improve the performance of carbon fiber composites, which were used in a wide variety of products, ranging from bicycles to automobiles to aircraft parts.... View Details

Keywords: Startup; Organizational Structure; Nanotechnology; Business Processes; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Management Systems; Commercialization; Industrial Products Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry; Bicycle Industry; Transportation Industry; United States

2022
Book

Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies

By: Ranjay Gulati

This book offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent... View Details

Keywords: Purpose; Business And Society; Organizations; Mission and Purpose; Performance Effectiveness; Organizational Culture

13 Jan 2003
Research & Ideas

Making Biotech Work as a Business

No matter how you slice the numbers, all arrows in biotechnology's financial performance after twenty years are still pointing downward, said HBS professor Gary P. Pisano recently. Despite the great promise of the sector—to improve the... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Biotechnology; Health; Technology

06 Oct 2014
Research & Ideas

Why Businesses Need a Language Strategy

Lost sales. Friction. Inefficiency. These are dirty words in the world of business, and they are inevitabilities for companies that don't watch their language, so to speak. Harvard Business School Associate Professor Tsedal Neeley... View Details

Keywords: Re: Tsedal Neeley

December 2019 (Revised August 2022)
Exercise

Janet Ames (C)

By: Brian Trelstad and Brian Trelstad

The series of Janet Ames cases follow a fictional alumna of Harvard Business School into her consulting career in Boston. Over the series of cases, Ames is first offered the opportunity to join the board of a Boston-based non-profit organization, which offers students... View Details

Keywords: Philanthropy; Board; Non-profit Management; Career Changes And Transitions; Evaluation; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Governing and Advisory Boards; Social Enterprise; Social Entrepreneurship; Nonprofit Organizations; Management; Personal Development and Career; United States

November 2009
Case

Finance Myopia in a Systems Business

By: J. Bruce Harreld

This short case describes the tensions that often arise between finance executives attempting to curtail unproductive activities and strategy executives trying to optimize overall firm performance. View Details

Keywords: Finance; Managerial Roles; Performance Improvement; Performance Productivity; Conflict and Resolution; Strategy; Competition

Educators

2016
Working Paper

The Search for Peer Firms: When Do Crowds Provide Wisdom?

By: Charles M.C. Lee, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang

In knowledge-based economies, many business enterprises defy traditional industry boundaries. In this study, we evaluate six "big data" approaches to peer firm identifications and show that some, but not all, "wisdom-of-crowd" techniques perform exceptionally well. We... View Details

Keywords: Peer Firm; EDGAR Co-search; Analyst Co-coverage; Wisdom Of Crowds; Performance Benchmarking; Crowd Of Crowds; Internet and the Web; Accounting