Publications

August 2024
Case

Cristina Ventura: The Career of a Catalyst

By: Linda A. Hill, Allison J. Wigen and Ruth Page

This multimedia case follows the career of Chief Catalyst Officer for the Lane Crawford Joyce Group (LCJG), Cristina Ventura. After beginning her career in luxury in Europe and Asia, Ventura was recruited in 2011 to open Apple’s flagship stores in Hong Kong and South... View Details

Keywords: Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Leadership Style; Leading Change; Entrepreneurship; Luxury; Family Business; Personal Development and Career; Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Asia; China; Hong Kong

October 2021 (Revised December 2021)
Case

Customer-Centric Design with Artificial Intelligence: Commonwealth Bank

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Jin Hyun Paik and Steven Randazzo

As Commonwealth Bank (CommBank) CEO Matt Comyn delivered the full financial year results in August 2021 over videoconference, it took less than two minutes for him to make his first mention of the organization's Customer Engagement Engine (CEE), the AI-driven customer... View Details

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Customer-centricity; Banks and Banking; Customer Focus and Relationships; Technological Innovation; Transformation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance; AI and Machine Learning; Financial Services Industry; Australia

May 2022
Case

Timnit Gebru: 'SILENCED No More' on AI Bias and The Harms of Large Language Models

By: Tsedal Neeley and Stefani Ruper

Dr. Timnit Gebru—a leading artificial intelligence (AI) computer scientist and co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team—was messaging with one of her colleagues when she saw the words: “Did you resign?? Megan sent an email saying that she accepted your resignation.” Heart... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Employment; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Technological Innovation

23 Jul 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Informed and Interconnected: A Manifesto for Smarter Cities

Keywords: by Rosabeth Moss Kanter & Stanley S. Litow; Technology

September 2024
Case

XYZ Robotics

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Brian Mao Fu, Shu Lin and Jamie Gong

Founded in 2018, XYZ Robotics was a China-based startup specializing in robotic picking solutions and 3D machine vision products. Amid an economic downturn and intense competition, the company faced considerable financial challenges and needed to determine the best way... View Details

Keywords: Robotics; 3D Systems; China; Resource Allocation; Business Startups; Competition; Product; Economic Slowdown and Stagnation; Technology Industry; China

November 2000
Case

beenz.com: Building "The Web's Currency" Into a Global Business

Beenz.com, an incentive-based Web currency and customer management tool, is reassessing its business in August 2000, one year after launch. The original vision was to make the currency globally available and recognized. However, the company's rapid internationalization... View Details

Keywords: Globalized Firms and Management; Growth Management; Internet and the Web; Marketing; Business Startups

April 1992 (Revised July 1992)
Case

U.S. Robotics, Inc.

U.S. Robotics (USR) is a fast-growing $80 million computer communications company with the aggressive growth target of becoming a $500 million company by 1995. It is widely accepted as the technology leader in its market, and relies strongly on its ability to bring... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Expansion; Product Development; Growth and Development Strategy; Computer Industry; Computer Industry; United States

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April 2011 (Revised July 2014)
Case

Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd.: Driving Change Through Internal Communication

By: Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind

Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL), confronted in 2003 with an urgent need to change how it operated externally, adopted a highly innovative approach to communicating internally. This case, set in 2010, presents an overview of the new, more interactive model of employee... View Details

Keywords: Communication Strategy; Interpersonal Communication; Employee Relationship Management; Innovation and Management; Leading Change; Management Practices and Processes; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Corporate Strategy; India

Stefan Thomke (sthomke@hbs.edu), an authority on the management of innovation, is the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He has worked with firms on product, process, and... View Details

Keywords: computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer

05 Apr 2018
News

How a Coal Polluter Became a Renewable Energy Leader

Kim B. Clark

Kim B. Clark joined the Harvard faculty in 1978 and served as Dean of the Faculty at Harvard Business School from 1995 to 2005. He received the B.A. (1974), M.A. (1977), and Ph.D. (1978) degrees in economics from Harvard University.

Professor Clark's research has... View Details

July 1998
Supplement

Bell Atlantic in Union City

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter

In this pioneering project to wire a school for the Internet and put computers in students' homes, Bell Atlantic combined its need for a beta site for a technology trial with the school reform efforts of the Union City, New Jersey public schools, under the leadership... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Social Enterprise; Internet and the Web; Education; Business and Community Relations; Education Industry; New Jersey

05 Aug 2015
What Do You Think?

What Happened to the ‘Innovation, Disruption, Technology’ Dividend?

technology is being diverted to the creation of more variations on basic ideas faster instead of “an economy based on new products/platforms/ideas.” Donald Shaw cited “problems in finding qualified people to hire.” He also said that,... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Computer; Computer

January 2025
Case

Hebbia: Redefining Productivity for Knowledge Workers Using AI

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Minoshka Narayan

In early 2025, George Sivulka, founder and CEO of Hebbia, reflected on the company’s rapid ascent as a pioneer in GenAI-powered productivity tools for knowledge workers. With its proprietary technology, Hebbia had redefined information retrieval and analysis and earned... View Details

Keywords: Transformation; Customer Relationship Management; AI and Machine Learning; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Service Delivery; Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Technology Industry; United States; New York (city, NY)

March 1996 (Revised April 1996)
Case

Andy Chew at Siemens Nixdorf: Change from the Middle

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and John F. McGuire

Andy Chew, a British manager reassigned to Germany by a large German computer company, is in the middle of carrying out a project as a designated "change agent" in a program to reshape the culture toward one that is more entrepreneurial for success as a nimble global... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Organizational Culture; Information Technology; Technological Innovation; Business or Company Management; Projects; Computer Industry; Computer Industry; Germany

23 Sep 2016
News

Will Yahoo hack trigger better security checks?

August 2001 (Revised September 2002)
Case

Sony PlayStation2 (A)

By: Rohit Deshpande and Seth Schulman

In early 1999, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc., had to determine the appropriate U.S. launch strategy for the next-generation video game player, Sony PlayStation2. Despite the success of the original PlayStation1, new competitors and an uncertain... View Details

Keywords: Games, Gaming, and Gambling; Globalization; Marketing Strategy; Product Launch; Risk and Uncertainty; Competitive Strategy; Information Technology; Computer Industry; Computer Industry; United States

October 2019
Article

Making Sense of Recommendations

By: Michael Yeomans, Anuj Shah, Sendhil Mullainathan and Jon Kleinberg

Computer algorithms are increasingly being used to predict people's preferences and make recommendations. Although people frequently encounter these algorithms because they are cheap to scale, we do not know how they compare to human judgment. Here, we compare computer... View Details

Keywords: Recommender Systems; Artificial Intelligence; Interpretability; Information Technology; Forecasting and Prediction; Decision Making; Attitudes

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