Publications

March 2024 (Revised August 2024)
Case

Darktrace: Scaling Cybersecurity and AI (A)

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Alexis Lefort

In 2023, Darktrace CEO Poppy Gustafsson was contemplating her growth strategy at a leading U.K.-based cybersecurity venture, launched in 2013 by a group of anti-terror cyber specialists, University of Cambridge mathematicians, and artificial intelligence (AI) experts.... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Talent; Scaling; Entrepreneurship; Cybersecurity; Leadership; Business Growth and Maturation; Recruitment; Resignation and Termination; AI and Machine Learning; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Culture; Going Public; Technology Industry; United Kingdom; Europe; United States

Educators

This work leverages the strengths of expert human assessments of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) included in Cochrane reviews with data science techniques to build a comprehensive database on biomedical research quality. The data links the full-text and... View Details

15 Apr 2015
News

Review: Strategy Rules, by David Yoffie and Michael Cusumano

2010
Article

Hospital Performance, the Local Economy, and the Local Workforce: Findings from a U.S. National Longitudinal Study

Background: Pay-for-performance is an increasingly popular approach to improving health care quality, and the US government will soon implement pay-for-performance in hospitals nationwide. Yet hospital capacity to perform (and improve performance) likely depends on... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Performance; Health Industry; United States

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April 2012
Article

Broadening Focus: Spillovers, Complementarities and Specialization in the Hospital Industry

By: Jonathan R. Clark and Robert S. Huckman

The long-standing argument that focused operations outperform others stands in contrast to claims about the benefits of broader operational scope. The performance benefits of focus are typically attributed to reduced complexity, lower uncertainty, and the development... View Details

Keywords: Performance Capacity; Operations; Advertising; Production; Corporate Strategy; Relationships; Medical Specialties; Complexity; Risk and Uncertainty; Experience and Expertise; Diversification; Quality; Health Industry

06 Nov 2017
News

Smart Leaders Focus on Execution First and Strategy Second

October 2014
Article

Good Cop, Bad Cop: Complementarities Between Debt and Equity in Disciplining Management

By: Alexander Guembel and Lucy White

In this paper we examine how the quantity of information generated about firm prospects can be improved by splitting a firm's cash flow into a "safe" claim (debt) and a "risky" claim (equity). The former, being relatively insensitive to upside risk, provides a... View Details

Keywords: Information; Borrowing and Debt; Equity; Corporate Finance

Fall 2012
Article

Marketing and Public Policy: Transformative Research in Developing Markets

By: C. Shultz, Rohit Deshpandé, Bettina Cornwell, A. Ekici, P. Kothandaraman, M. Peterson, S. Shapiro, D. Talukdar and A. Veeck

Developing markets are a challenge for researchers who study them and for governments, business leaders, and citizens who strive to improve the quality of life in them. The limitations of the dominant development paradigm coupled with the need to focus on consumers... View Details

Keywords: Demand and Consumers; Development Economics; Marketing Strategy; Emerging Markets

The time has come for American managers to rethink the traditional relationship between management and workers. The personnel practices of the past are an obstacle today, blocking the higher productivity and quality levels your firm will need to succeed in the... View Details

October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
Case

KOKO Networks: Bridging Energy Transition and Affordability with Carbon Financing

By: George Serafeim, Siko Sikochi and Namrata Arora

The problem was massive: two million hectares of African forests were lost annually to charcoal production for cooking, an area equivalent to 13 times Greater London, resulting in one billion tons of carbon emissions yearly. At the same time, an estimated 700,000... View Details

Keywords: Clean Tech; Digital; Carbon Credits; Carbon Offsetting; Climate Change; Entrepreneurship; Energy Sources; Environmental Sustainability; Health; Market Design; Business Startups; Transition; Environmental Regulation; Policy; Energy Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Africa; Kenya; Rwanda

Educators

11 AM – 12 PM EST, 13 Jan 2016
Webinars: Trending@HBS

What Great Service Leaders Know and Do: Creating Breakthroughs in Service Firms

In their recently completed book by the same title, Professor Schlesinger and coauthors and fellow HBS faculty members James L. Heskett (emeritus) and W. Earl Sasser posit the following: that management has within its control the authority, and, they think, the... View Details

Article

Operations Research in the Public Sector and Nonprofit Organizations

By: Zilla Sinuany-Stern and H. David Sherman

Public sector and nonprofit organizations (NPO) have been growing substantially in number and size since the turn of the millennium. In light of the ongoing economic crises these sectors are expected to grow even more with expanded demands for services, increased need... View Details

Keywords: Third Sector; Operations; Public Sector; Nonprofit Organizations

Article

Defining, Measuring, and Improving Value in Spine Care

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Derek Haas

This chapter discusses how to measure and improve spine care outcomes and costs. Today’s commonly used outcome metrics, such as readmission and complication rates, are actually process and quality metrics. They are not the outcomes, such as improvement in pain and... View Details

Keywords: Spine Care; Outcomes Measurement; Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing; Health Care and Treatment; Cost; Measurement and Metrics; Performance Improvement; Value

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Research Summary

Consumerism and the Distributed Delivery of Health Care

By: Robert S. Huckman

This stream of Professor Huckman's work examines the growing tendency for health care to be delivered in a more distributed manner. Examples of this phenomenon include health IT, teleradiology, medical travel, remote monitoring of chronic medical conditions, and retail... View Details

May 2018
Article

Effects of an Information Sharing System on Employee Creativity, Engagement, and Performance

By: Shelley Xin Li and Tatiana Sandino

Many service organizations rely on information sharing systems to boost employee creativity to meet customer needs. We conducted a field experiment in a retail chain, based on a registered report accepted by Journal of Accounting Research, to test whether an... View Details

Keywords: Information; Knowledge Sharing; Employees; Creativity; Performance

March 2002
Background Note

Virtuous Cycles: Improving Service and Lowering Costs in E-Commerce

Illustrates how various elements in a customer's encounter with Internet services relying on physical service (labor-intensive customer support and/or logistics) affect one another. Presents a framework that suggests: 1) that improving service quality in specific... View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Service Delivery; Performance Efficiency; Performance Effectiveness; Service Industry

Educators

August 2020
Article

Do Physician Incentives Increase Patient Medication Adherence?

By: Edward Kong, John Beshears, David Laibson, Brigitte Madrian, Kevin Volpp, George Loewenstein, Jonathan Kolstad and James J. Choi

We conducted a randomized experiment (911 primary care practices and 8,935 nonadherent patients) to test the effect of paying physicians for increasing patient medication adherence in three drug classes: diabetes medication, antihypertensives, and statins. We measured... View Details

Keywords: Health Economics; Medication Adherence; Physician Payment Incentives; Primary Care; Quality Improvement; Health Care and Treatment; Motivation and Incentives; Behavior

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2018
Book

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

By: Amy C. Edmondson

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy. With so much riding on innovation,... View Details

Keywords: Psychological Safety; Knowledge Economy; Teaming; Management; Organizational Culture; Innovation and Management; Learning