Publications

Find at Harvard

2025
Working Paper

Bank Capital and the Growth of Private Credit

By: Sergey Chernenko, Robert Ialenti and David Scharfstein

We show that business development companies (BDCs)—closed-end funds that provide a significant share of nonbank loans to middle market firms—are very well capitalized according to bank capital frameworks. They have median risk-based capital ratios of about 36%... View Details

Keywords: Financing and Loans; Capital; Credit; Financial Institutions

December 2010 (Revised March 2015)
Case

The Wright Brothers and Their Flying Machines

By: Tom Nicholas and David Chen

Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948) Wright were fascinated by the mystery of flight and they built on the ideas of prominent earlier figures such as Octave Chanute (1832-1910) the French-born American who was influential in fostering the free exchange of ideas... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business History; Technological Innovation; Patents; Knowledge Sharing; Air Transportation; Air Transportation Industry; Europe; United States

Educators

Article

What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools: Avoid the Common Pitfalls So That Your Organization Can Collaborate, Learn, and Innovate

By: Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley

Workplaces have adopted internal social tools—think stand-alone technologies such as Slack, Yammer, and Chatter, or embedded applications such as Microsoft Teams and JIRA—at a staggering rate. In an ambitious study of 4,200 companies, conducted by the McKinsey Global... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Social Tools; Social and Collaborative Networks; Knowledge Sharing; Performance Improvement; Management

Find at Harvard

Register to Read

12 Apr 2022
Book

Racism, Colonialism, and Britain's Legacy of Violence

Britain’s 20th century empire was the largest in human history, with a quarter of the world’s land and nearly 700 million people. Yet the empire drew its strength from violence. That’s the conclusion Harvard Business School Professor Caroline Elkins draws in her new... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

01 Dec 2020
News

Tried and Tested

has made that topic elusive, for a lot of reasons, with the methods that we use. Zoë, your study of schmoozing and the old boys’ club drew on big data sets. How do you use data to isolate the forces at play... View Details

Keywords: Jen McFarland Flint; Scientific Research and Development Services

March 2021
Article

Increasing the Level of Abstraction as a Strategy for Accelerating the Adoption of Complex Technologies

By: Willy C. Shih

Many new technologies are complex and embody high levels of technical sophistication, and applying them should require significant knowledge and experience. Yet, the rapid adoption and incorporation of these technologies into other innovations seems inconsistent with... View Details

Keywords: Abstraction; Technological And Scientific Innovation; Technological Progress; Diffusion Of Innovation; Technology Adoption; Technological Innovation; Complexity; Information Technology; Strategy

June 2017 (Revised October 2017)
Case

Organizing for Performance: Four Vignettes

By: Robert Simons

This case provides four examples of organizations with very different business strategies: Walmart, Starbucks, Harvard Business School, and Google. To support their varying strategies, each of these organizations requires a specific configuration to provide the most... View Details

Keywords: Strategy And Execution; Management Control Systems; Organization; Span Of Control; Job Design; Resource Allocation; Organizational Design; Competitive Strategy; Value Creation

Educators

18 Sep 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Modularity, Transactions, and the Boundaries of Firms: A Synthesis

Keywords: by Carliss Y. Baldwin

2023
Working Paper

Deglobalization and Entrepreneurial Investment: The Natural Experiment of Brexit

By: Elisa Alvarez-Garrido and Juan Alcácer

We seek to gain insight into the consequences of deglobalization on entrepreneurial investment by analyzing an instance of economic disintegration: the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union. Brexit is not only a unique empirical opportunity, a natural... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurial Finance; International Relations; Trade; Disruption; Globalized Economies and Regions; United Kingdom

2023
Working Paper

Personalized Game Design for Improved User Retention and Monetization in Freemium Games

By: Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer and Julian Runge

One of the most crucial aspects and significant levers that gaming companies possess in designing digital games is setting the level of difficulty, which essentially regulates the user’s ability to progress within the game. This aspect is particularly significant in... View Details

Keywords: Freemium; Retention/churn; Field Experiment; Field Experiments; Gaming; Gaming Industry; Mobile App; Mobile App Industry; Monetization; Monetization Strategy; Games, Gaming, and Gambling; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Customers; Retention; Product Design; Strategy

March–April 2017
Article

Innovation Outcomes in a Distributed Organization: Intrafirm Mobility and Access to Resources

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury

Prior research has established a relation between intra-firm mobility and innovation outcomes at distributed organizations. The literature has also uniformly agreed on the mechanism underlying this relationship: the sharing of tacit knowledge and recombination of ideas... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Structure; Innovation and Invention; Resource Allocation

Find at Harvard

April 2025
Teaching Note

Allbirds: Decarbonizing Fashion (A) and (B)

By: Michael W. Toffel, Ken Pucker and Stacy Straaberg

Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 622-024, 625-004, 625-005, and 625-702. The Allbirds: Decarbonizing Fashion (A) case introduces Allbirds as a footwear startup not only focused on simple design, comfort, and sustainable natural materials but on decarbonizing the wider... View Details

Keywords: Decarbonization; Climate Impact; Environmental Strategy; Innovation; Product Design; Supply Chain Management; Innovation Strategy; Innovation and Management; Product Development; Climate Change; Environmental Management; Environmental Sustainability; Business Startups; Initial Public Offering; Knowledge Sharing; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Fashion Industry; United States; California

11 Aug 2008
Research & Ideas

Strategy Execution and the Balanced Scorecard

proposed can identify promising new strategic approaches. While we are agnostic with respect to which strategy methodology a company uses to arrive at its strategy, we do believe that creating a strategy map View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

08 Nov 2021
Blog Post

4 Ways the MS/MBA is Preparing Me for a Career in Health Care and the Life Sciences

Tell us about your life before HBS. I grew up in Antwerp, Belgium as part of the Jewish community. Having four grandparents who are Holocaust survivors, I felt it was important to experience life in Israel, View Details

2008
Other Unpublished Work

Accounting, Risk Management and the Aftermath of a Control Debacle

By: Anette Mikes

Despite the widespread adoption of risk management systems in the financial services industry, recent control debacles highlight the apparent lack of top managerial attention to risk controls. Yet in order to understand the workings and uses of risk controls (or any... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Governance Controls; Management Systems; Accounting; Conflict and Resolution; Trends; Financial Services Industry

2009
Working Paper

Varied Experience, Team Familiarity, and Learning: The Mediating Role of Psychological Safety

By: Bradley R. Staats, Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano

Prior work examining the relationship of varied experience (i.e., the concurrent completion of multiple tasks) and learning by groups finds inconsistent results. We hypothesize that team familiarity, i.e, individuals' prior shared work experience, may help explain this... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Learning; Performance Effectiveness; Groups and Teams; Social Psychology; Familiarity