Publications

December 2001 (Revised January 2002)
Case

Nestle S.A.

By: Ray A. Goldberg and Hal Hogan

Peter Brabeck wants to focus Nestle as a wellness company in the global food system and do so in a way that provides both growth in sales and margins in both developed and developing countries. View Details

Keywords: Brands and Branding; Product Development; Supply Chain Management; Food; Multinational Firms and Management; Business Growth and Maturation; Sales; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Switzerland

03 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

Why Fierce Competitors Apple and Amazon Became ’Frenemies’ Over eReaders

Technology and Operations Management unit at Harvard Business School. And why would Apple ever allow a Kindle app in its App Store in the first place? "We all know historically Apple often says no to apps that directly compete with... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Information; Publishing; Technology

02 Feb 2004
Research & Ideas

Mapping Your Corporate Strategy

structure for meetings where managers can quickly see which aspects of their strategy are succeeding and where they are falling short. The causal relationships enable managers to test whether the theory of... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

01 Mar 2010
News

Money Matters

advice, buy products, and manage finances. Enter iTrust with a range of services covering mortgages, mutual funds and other investments, insurance, and tax and financial planning. From the outset, the partners aimed to distinguish iTrust... View Details

Keywords: Roger Thompson; Finance

2010
Working Paper

When Open Architecture Beats Closed: The Entrepreneurial Use of Architectural Knowledge

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

This paper describes how entrepreneurial firms can use superior architectural knowledge to open up a technical system to gain strategic advantage. The strategy involves, first, identifying "bottlenecks" in the existing system, and then creating a new open architecture... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Investment Return; Growth and Development Strategy; Product Design; Organizational Design; Competitive Advantage; Technology Industry

Read Now

19 Jun 2014
News

Turning "Black Gold" to Green

two oil fields, have contracts to manage as much CO2 as is produced by a small city, and we have the financial backing to finish the job," Dawe says. "That's about as tangible as it gets." Dawe is the president and cofounder of Berkeley,... View Details

Keywords: Ralph Ranalli; Oil and Gas Extraction; Mining

January 2007 (Revised November 2007)
Case

Organic Growth at Wal-Mart

By: Jan W. Rivkin and Troy Smith

In 2005, an executive vice president at Wal-Mart must decide whether to expand the retailer's selection of organic food. The decision is made in the context of wider attempts to move the giant retailer slightly upscale and to focus on environmental sustainability. View Details

Keywords: Food; Growth and Development Strategy; Product; Business Processes; Environmental Sustainability; Expansion; Retail Industry; United States

09 Jul 2008
Research & Ideas

Starbucks’ Lessons for Premium Brands

prices. Third, opening new stores and launching a blizzard of new products create only superficial growth. Such strategies take top management's eye off of improving same store sales year-on-year. This is the heavy lifting of retailing,... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch; Retail

June 2006 (Revised October 2007)
Case

Takashimaya in Transition

By: Rajiv Lal, Masako Egawa and Chisato Toyama

Takashimaya, the largest department store in Japan, was suffering from declining sales. CEO Koji Suzuki had succeeded in instituting changes to cut costs. However, Suzuki needed to come up with a strategy to increase sales, particularly in apparel, which comprised the... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Brands and Branding; Product Development; Sales; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Retail Industry; Japan

Find at Harvard

19 Jul 2004
Research & Ideas

Why Innovations Sit on the Shelf

Why are so many businesses—though seemingly intent on fostering innovation—unable to get new products through their organizations and into the marketplace? Ed Ludwig faced such circumstances as the new president of New Jersey-based Becton... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Beer, Russell Eisenstat & Derek Schrader

14 Jul 2003
Research & Ideas

Keeping Your Balance With Customers

From product push to customer pull, technology has vastly reshaped the business transaction—and in turn, the customer's place in the value chain. Today, managing the customer relationship has become the... View Details

Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton

Student-Profile

Elliot Tobin

he took an entry-level econ course and discovered he was a natural at it. Hoping to build on his theoretical basis through practical efforts, Elliot worked as a product manager at Staples and then as a... View Details

Web

Raffaella Sadun | Working Knowledge

School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work and co-PI of the Digital Reskilling Lab. Her research focuses on managerial and organizational drivers of productivity and growth in corporations and the... View Details

19 Sep 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

Say Again? Uncommon Advice for Common Business Problems

when their employees are naturally proactive. When a Competitor Abandons the Market, Should You Advance or Retreat? Companies pay close attention when a competitor drops out of the market. Too often, though, they come to the wrong conclusion. Hiding From View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

01 Mar 2015
News

A Boomtown's Echo

is the Bakken formation, a 25,000-square-mile underground deposit that—thanks to a rise in fracking and new oil extraction technologies—has produced as much as 1 million barrels of oil and gas a day, or about the production equivalent of... View Details

Keywords: Oil and Gas Extraction; Mining

March 1997 (Revised July 1999)
Case

S1 Corporation

S1 is a fast growing subsidiary of the Samsung Group in South Korea that sells business security products. S1 has implemented a number of marketing initiatives that the company president would like to have evaluated. View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Price; Salesforce Management; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; South Korea

February 1998 (Revised August 2006)
Case

House of Tata, 1995: The Next Generation (A)

By: Tarun Khanna, Krishna G. Palepu and Danielle Melito Wu

The Tata Group began the 1990s as a confederation of loosely coupled firms. This case considers the rise to prominence of the new CEO of Tata Group, Ratan Tata, and his attempts to strengthen the inter-relationships among the group companies at a time when critics... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Business Conglomerates; Organizations; Corporate Strategy; Consolidation; Business Strategy; Alignment; Consumer Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry

2008
Other Teaching and Training Material

Interview with Reuben Mark, Chairman & CEO, Colgate Palmolive Co.

By: Joseph L. Bower

Keywords: Leadership; Management Succession; Consumer Products Industry

October 1981 (Revised June 1985)
Case

Walton Instruments Manufacturing--1980

Provides an opportunity for students to examine the impact of different manufacturing control methods on the manufacturing infrastructure. Information flow, inventory control, quality control and process flows interact and different trade-offs are examined. Introduces... View Details

Keywords: Quality; Production; Management Practices and Processes; Infrastructure