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- April 2020 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
Middlebury College: Energy2028
By: Brian Trelstad, Michael Norris and John McKinley
In 2018, Middlebury College’s board of trustees is considering a proposal called Energy2028 that would push the small, liberal arts and sciences college in Vermont to become a net zero carbon emitter, decrease energy usage by 25%, divest fossil fuels from its... View Details
- April 2020
- Teaching Note
Indigo Agriculture: Harnessing Nature
By: Michael W. Toffel and James Barnett
Teaching Note for HBS No. 620-024. Indigo Agriculture used a digital-enabled research and development (R&D) process to launch its initial product, microbial coatings for agricultural seeds, which increase crop yields while reducing the need for fertilizers. In doing... View Details
- 2020
- Book
Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
Free market capitalism is one of humanity’s greatest inventions and the greatest source of prosperity the world has ever seen. But this success has been costly. Capitalism is on the verge of destroying the planet and destabilizing society as wealth rushes to the top.... View Details
- March 2020 (Revised June 2022)
- Case
GreenLight Fund
By: Brian Trelstad, Julia Kelley and Mel Martin
As Tara Noland, the Executive Director (ED) of GreenLight Cincinnati, reflected on her first few years on the job. Noland had delivered on what she had been hired to do in the city: work with leading philanthropists and nonprofit executives to use data and evidence to... View Details
- March 2020 (Revised May 2020)
- Case
Generation Investment Management
By: Vikram S. Gandhi and Sarah Mehta
By January 2020, sustainable investment firm Generation Investment Management (Generation), founded in London in 2004, had grown from a shared vision among seven founders to a 90-person firm managing $27 billion in public and private equity. Throughout its history,... View Details
Keywords: Sustainable Investing; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Finance; Equity; Governance; Private Equity; Public Equity; Financial Markets; Investment; Investment Return; Investment Activism; Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Institutional Investing; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Financial Services Industry; United Kingdom; England; London
- March 11, 2020
- Editorial
A Bolder Vision for Business Schools
By: P. Tufano
Business schools teach to a model that dates back to the 1950s. Given the growing demands on business to take a lead in confronting societal challenges, business schools need to update how they train business leaders and how they compete, argues Oxford’s Saïd School... View Details
- March 2020
- Supplement
People Analytics at Teach For America (B)
By: Jeffrey T. Polzer and Julia Kelley
This is a supplement to the People Analytics at Teach For America (A) case. In this supplement, situated one year after the A case, Managing Director Michael Metzger must decide how to apply his team's predictive models generated from the previous year’s data. View Details
- March 2020
- Case
Behavior Change for Good
By: Max Bazerman, Michael Luca and Marie Lawrence
In 2017, Katy Milkman and Angela Duckworth created Behavior Change for Good (BCFG)—a behavioral science initiative founded with the goal of helping people achieve long-term behavior change in the areas of personal health, financial decisions (savings), and education.... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Corporate Environmental Impact: Measurement, Data and Information
By: David Freiberg, DG Park, George Serafeim and T. Robert Zochowski
As an organization’s environmental impact has become a central societal consideration, thereby affecting industry and organizational competitiveness, interest in measuring and analyzing environmental impact has increased. We develop a methodology to derive comparable... View Details
Keywords: Environment; Impact; Measurement; Environmental Ratings; Corporate Valuation; Financial Materiality; Sustainability; Environmental Impact; Environmental Strategy; Impact-Weighted Accounts; IWAI; Environmental Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Measurement and Metrics; Valuation
- March 2020
- Article
Diagnosing Missing Always at Random in Multivariate Data
By: Iavor I. Bojinov, Natesh S. Pillai and Donald B. Rubin
Models for analyzing multivariate data sets with missing values require strong, often assessable, assumptions. The most common of these is that the mechanism that created the missing data is ignorable—a twofold assumption dependent on the mode of inference. The first... View Details
- 2020
- Book
The Power of Experiments: Decision-Making in a Data-Driven World
By: Michael Luca and Max H. Bazerman
Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments—also known as randomized controlled trials—designed to test the impact of changes to an... View Details
- February 2020
- Supplement
Indigo Agriculture: Harnessing Nature
By: Michael W. Toffel and James Barnett
Indigo Agriculture used a digital-enabled research and development (R&D) process to launch its initial product, microbial coatings for agricultural seeds, which increase crop yields while reducing the need for fertilizers. In doing so, the company developed direct... View Details
Keywords: Operations; Supply Chain; Social Enterprise; Product Development; Distribution Channels; Business Strategy; Digital Platforms; Environmental Sustainability; Science-Based Business; Climate Change; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Green Technology Industry; United States; Massachusetts
- February 2020 (Revised August 2021)
- Case
Australia: Commodities, Competitiveness, Climate and China
By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Laura Alfaro
For the past few decades, Australia has dealt with the benefits and costs of repeated mining booms—inflation, a housing bubble, a current account deficit, and growing dependence on China. Between 1996 and 2007, however, Australia had most of these issues under control... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
A General Theory of Identification
By: Iavor Bojinov and Guillaume Basse
What does it mean to say that a quantity is identifiable from the data? Statisticians seem to agree
on a definition in the context of parametric statistical models — roughly, a parameter θ in a model
P = {Pθ : θ ∈ Θ} is identifiable if the mapping θ 7→ Pθ is injective.... View Details
- February 2020 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
Sustainable Product Management at Solvay
By: George Serafeim, Vincent Dessain and Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej
In November 2019, Ilham Kadri, CEO of Solvay, a Belgian specialty chemicals and advanced materials group, with annual revenues of more than €10 billion in 2018, announced the group’s mid-term strategy, eight months after she took the helm as Solvay’s 11th CEO. The case... View Details
Keywords: Sustainability; Sustainable Business And Innovation; Sustainability Management; Sustainable Development; Management Accounting; Innovation; Carbon Emissions; Sustainability Reporting; Sustainability Targets; Target-setting; Product; Management; Transformation; Growth and Development Strategy; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Chemical Industry; Europe; Belgium
- February 2020 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
StockX: The Stock Market of Things
By: Chiara Farronato, John J. Horton, Annelena Lobb and Julia Kelley
Founded in 2015 by Dan Gilbert, Josh Luber, and Greg Schwartz, StockX was an online platform where users could buy and sell unworn luxury and limited-edition sneakers. Sneaker resale prices often fluctuated over time based on supply and demand, creating a robust... View Details
Keywords: Markets; Auctions; Bids and Bidding; Demand and Consumers; Consumer Behavior; Analytics and Data Science; Market Design; Digital Platforms; Market Transactions; Marketplace Matching; Supply and Industry; Analysis; Price; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Fashion Industry; North and Central America; United States; Michigan; Detroit
- 2020
- Working Paper
A Framework for Product Impact-Weighted Accounts
By: George Serafeim and Katie Trinh
While there has been significant progress in the measurement of an organization’s environmental and social impacts from its operations, metrics to evaluate the impact of products once they come to market lag far behind. In this paper, we provide a framework for... View Details
- February 2020 (Revised March 2020)
- Case
Prime Coalition: Catalytic Capital for Climate Innovation
By: Ramana Nanda, Benjamin N. Roth and Olivia Hull
With long development timelines and high risk, new energy technologies were often left to languish in the “valley of death,” unable to raise enough funds to bring a product to market. In 2014, Sarah Kearney founded the nonprofit Prime Coalition to solve this problem.... View Details
Keywords: Energy Conservation; Renewable Energy; Social Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Investment; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Mission and Purpose; Science-Based Business; Nonprofit Organizations; Social Enterprise; Energy Industry; Technology Industry; Green Technology Industry; United States
- 2020
- Book
Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments
By: Stefan Thomke
Don’t fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you. When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition,... View Details
- July 2020
- Article
Exploring the Effect of Environmental Orientation on Financial Decisions of Businesses at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Evidence from the Microlending Context
By: Anton Shevchenko, Xiaodan Pan and Goran Calic
Existing research has accumulated substantial evidence on the effect that an environmental orientation has on businesses' economic performance. Yet this research does not cover small businesses from bottom‐of‐the‐pyramid (BOP) markets. In fact, despite increasing... View Details