Publications

2016
Working Paper

Immigrant Entrepreneurship

By: Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr

We examine immigrant entrepreneurship and the survival and growth of immigrant-founded businesses over time relative to native-founded companies. Our work quantifies immigrant contributions to new firm creation in a wide variety of fields using multiple definitions.... View Details

Keywords: Immigrants; Entrepreneurs; Entry; Firms; Growth; High-tech Marketing; Venture Capital; Entrepreneurship; Immigration; United States

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April 2021
Background Note

HEAD vs. LEAD: Disruptions Originating at the High- vs. Low-End of the Market

By: Elie Ofek, Olivier Toubia and Didier Toubia

Twenty five years after it was initially proposed, Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation continues to be a major reference for entrepreneurs, corporate innovators, and investors. However, the term “disruptive innovation” is often used in ways and contexts... View Details

Keywords: Market Entry; New Product Management; Targeting; Disruptive Innovation; Market Entry and Exit; Entrepreneurship; Product; Management; Innovation Strategy; Technology

2013
Chapter

Who Chooses Board Members?

By: Ali Akyol and Lauren Cohen

We exploit a recent regulation passed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to explore the nomination of board members to US publicly traded firms. In particular, we focus on firms’ use of executive search firms versus allowing internal members (often... View Details

Keywords: Boards; Boards Of Directors; Executive Search Firms; Governance; SEC Regulation; Governing and Advisory Boards; Management Succession; Executive Compensation

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July 2016
Article

Under New Management: Equity Issues and the Attribution of Past Returns

By: Malcolm Baker and Yuhai Xuan

There is a strong link between measures of stock market performance, such as changes in Tobin's Q or past stock returns, and equity issues. Typically, this performance is thought to be a characteristic of the firm, not the CEO who happens to run the firm. In contrast... View Details

Keywords: Performance; Management Teams; Equity

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20 Nov 2006
Research & Ideas

Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation

scientific and technological activities. And the benefit of opening up your problems to outsiders is that in fact you can get novel solutions—quicker solutions than what the firm or R&D lab might develop. It also opens up View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

September 2008 (Revised July 2012)
Case

Khosla Ventures: Biofuels Strategy

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, William A. Sahlman and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld

By 2008, a number of the firm's early cleantech investments were showing promise, and the companies were starting to need significantly more money to create the massive scale required in the energy sector. As Khosla thought about the hundreds of millions of dollars... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurial Marketing; Entrepreneurial Finance; New Product Development; Partnerships; Entrepreneurial Management; Venture Capital; Strategy; Partners and Partnerships; Renewable Energy; Entrepreneurship; Investment Funds; Environmental Sustainability; Product Development; Biotechnology Industry; Financial Services Industry

01 Dec 2009
News

Broad Range of Interests Among Nine New Faculty

HENDERSON: After two decades at MIT, she brings her interest in “green business” to HBS. Major technological shifts always pose a challenge to organizations, and Rebecca Henderson (MBA ’85, PhDBE ’88) has spent the last two decades exploring why some View Details

Keywords: Margie Kelley

Clear and Present Danger: Planning and New Venture Survival amid Political and Civil Violence

Although entrepreneurs constitute a key economic driving force for many countries, they often face unstable environments due to violence and civil unrest. Yet, we know very little about how environments characterized by high levels of political and civil violence... View Details

15 Aug 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, August 15, 2017

bankrupt the company. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=53093 2017 The Moral Responsibility of Firms Corporate Moral Agency, Positive Duties, and Purpose By: Hsieh, Nien-hê Abstract—A long-standing question... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

26 Sep 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, September 26, 2017

through a new survey instrument that allows us to codify CEOs’ diaries in a detailed and comparable fashion and to build a bottom-up measure of CEO labor supply. The comparison of 1,114 family and professional CEOs reveals that family... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

10 Nov 2020
Sharpening Your Skills

Research News and Tips: Innovating Across Time Zones

zones As companies expand operations across the globe, they must grapple with time gaps during which employees cannot collaborate (i.e., lost productivity). To study this phenomenon, a research team studied communication patterns among 250 offices of a multinational... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

Divestment or Engagement? New Research on Innovation in the Energy Sector

Why you should watch: A new and important NBER working paper, by Cohen, Gurun and Nguyen, takes a long hard look at innovation in the energy industry - and concludes that divestment campaigns targeted at fossil fuel companies may not just be ineffective.... View Details

09 Jan 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, January 9, 2018

clarify matters. There are many areas, like how firm performance connects to entrepreneurial personality, that are woefully understudied and ripe for major advances if the appropriate cross-disciplinary ingredients are assembled.... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

January 2008
Article

Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things

By: Clayton M. Christensen, Stephen P. Kaufman and Willy C. Shih

Most companies aren't half as innovative as their senior executives want them to be (or as their marketing claims suggest they are). What's stifling innovation? There are plenty of usual suspects, but the authors finger three financial tools as key accomplices.... View Details

Keywords: Investment; Innovation and Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Business and Shareholder Relations; Prejudice and Bias; Value Creation

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23 Mar 2022
Blog Post

Learning Curve: The Brother-and-Sister Team Behind a New Edtech Nonprofit

Foundation, an educational fund founded by board chair Ashish Dhawan [MBA 1997] and Siddharth Yog [MBA 2004], founder of the emerging-markets investment firm Xander.) Rocket already works with public schools in the populous states of... View Details

November 2007
Case

The 1995 Release of the Institutional Investor Research Report: The Impact of New Information

By: Boris Groysberg, Nitin Nohria and Derek Haas

In 1995, Institutional Investor magazine began selling a complete ranking of the best equity research analysts. This report allowed research firms to assess the relative quality of each analyst across the industry, and this enabled firms to know nearly as much about... View Details

Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Investment Banking; Retention; Selection and Staffing; Reports; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Performance Evaluation; Banking Industry