Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(5,555)
- Faculty Publications (1,086)
- 2015
- Comment
In the Shadow of the Crowd: A Comment on 'Valve's Way'
There are many ways to exercise authority. Perrow (1986), in his review of March and Simon's Organizations (1958), offers a threefold classification of the ways authority can be exercised in organizations: (1) direct, "fully obtrusive" controls such as giving orders... View Details
- November 2015
- Case
Rubicon Global
By: William A. Sahlman and Hunter Ashmore
The case describes Rubicon Global, a startup that aimed to disrupt the waste management industry. The company started with a bold idea: create a cloud-based, full-service waste management company providing low-cost, highly efficient, and environmentally friendly... View Details
- November 2015 (Revised January 2017)
- Case
Uber: Changing the Way the World Moves
By: Youngme Moon
In 2015, Uber is building what may be the largest point-to-point transportation network of its kind; it is literally changing the way the world moves. But unlike traditional transportation logistics companies like FedEx, Uber has an incredibly lightweight... View Details
- October 2015 (Revised October 2016)
- Case
Building Watson: Not So Elementary, My Dear! (Abridged)
By: Willy C. Shih
This case is set inside IBM Research's efforts to build a computer that can successfully take on human challengers playing the game show Jeopardy! It opens with the machine named Watson offering the incorrect answer "Toronto" to a seemingly simple question during the... View Details
- October 2015 (Revised September 2016)
- Technical Note
Flight: Now without Humans Aboard
By: Mitchell Weiss, Karim Lakhani, HT Kung and Kerry Herman
This note provides an overview of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) industry in September 2015. UAVs offered many potential applications in industries as diverse as aerial imaging and photography, agriculture, construction, infrastructure inspection and... View Details
- October 2015
- Article
How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Companies
By: Michael E. Porter and James E. Heppelmann
The evolution of products into intelligent, connected devices is revolutionizing business. In a November 2014 article, "How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition," Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and PTC president and CEO James... View Details
- Article
The Social Contract Model of Corporate Purpose and Responsibility
By: Nien-he Hsieh
Of the many developments in business ethics that Thomas Donaldson has helped pioneer, one is the application of social contract theory to address questions about the responsibilities of business actors. In Corporations and Morality, Donaldson develops one of the... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
The Wisdom of Crowds in Operations: Forecasting Using Prediction Markets
By: Achal Bassamboo, Ruomeng Cui and Antonio Moreno
Prediction is an important activity in various business processes, but it becomes difficult when historical information is not available, such as forecasting demand of a new product. One approach that can be applied in such situations is to crowdsource opinions from... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
A Normative Theory of Dynamic Capabilities: Connecting Strategy, Know-How, and Competition
By: Gary P. Pisano
The field of strategy has mounted an enormous effort to understand, define, predict, and measure how organizational capabilities shape competitive advantage. While the notion that capabilities influence strategy dates back to the work of Andrews (1971), attempts to... View Details
- September 2015 (Revised March 2016)
- Case
Intuit: Turbo Tax PersonalPro - A Tale of Two Entrepreneurs
By: Shikhar Ghosh, Joseph Fuller and Michael Roberts
The case provides a vehicle for teaching about both corporate intrapreneurship and the use of lean startup methods. It tells the story of a product manager within Intuit who develops an idea for a new product that spans two of the company's existing business... View Details
- September 2015
- Case
GovDelivery
By: Mitchell Weiss
Is government the biggest, worst customer in the world? And is that a reason for venture investors to back companies that sell to government or to stay away? It had been seven years since Scott Burns joined his friend Zach Stabenow to get a company called GovDocs off... View Details
- September 2015
- Article
Design and Implementation of a Privacy Preserving Electronic Health Record Linkage Tool in Chicago
By: Abel Kho, John Cashy, Kathryn Jackson, Adam Pah, Satyender Goel, Jorn Boehnke, John Eric Humphries, Scott Duke Kominers and et al.
Objective
To design and implement a tool that creates a secure, privacy preserving linkage of electronic health record (EHR) data across multiple sites in a large metropolitan area in the United States (Chicago, IL), for use in clinical... View Details
To design and implement a tool that creates a secure, privacy preserving linkage of electronic health record (EHR) data across multiple sites in a large metropolitan area in the United States (Chicago, IL), for use in clinical... View Details
Keywords: Information; Customers; Safety; Rights; Ethics; Entrepreneurship; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; Chicago
- 2015
- Article
The Nobel Prize: The Identity of a Corporate Heritage Brand
By: Mats Urde and Stephen A. Greyser
Purpose—The purpose of this study is to understand the identity of the Nobel Prize as a corporate heritage brand and its management challenges.
Design/methodology/approach—An in-depth case study analysed within a heritage brand model and a corporate... View Details
Design/methodology/approach—An in-depth case study analysed within a heritage brand model and a corporate... View Details
- Article
Visualizing and Measuring Software Portfolio Architecture: A Power Utility Case
By: Robert Lagerström, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Alan MacCormack
In this paper, we test a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) based method for visualizing and
measuring software portfolio architectures. Our data is drawn from a power utility company, comprising 192 software applications with 614 dependencies between them. We
show that the... View Details
- August 2015 (Revised May 2017)
- Case
TSG Hoffenheim: Football in the Age of Analytics
By: Feng Zhu, Karim R. Lakhani, Sascha L. Schmidt and Kerry Herman
In 2015, Dietmar Hopp, owner of Germany's Bundesliga football team TSG Hoffenheim and co-founder of the global enterprise software company SAP, was considering how to ensure long-term sustainability and competitiveness for TSG Hoffenheim. While historically a small... View Details
- August 2015 (Revised December 2016)
- Case
Apple Pay
By: Sunil Gupta, Shelle Santana and Margaret L. Rodriguez
On September 9, 2014, in front of a packed audience in Cupertino, CA, Tim Cook, the chief executive officer of Apple, announced the much anticipated launch of Apple Pay. "Our vision is to replace this [wallet] and we are going to start with payments." Cook then invited... View Details
Keywords: Technology; Digital Services And Strategy; Launch; Mobile; Mobile Payments; Apple; Payments; Smartphone; Apple Pay; Eddy Cue; Jennifer Bailey; iOS; Iphone; Marketing; Product; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Product Launch; Finance; Credit Cards; Technology Industry; Banking Industry; United States; United Kingdom
- August 2015
- Case
Yesware (A)
By: Shikhar Ghosh, Christopher Payton and Ali Huberlie
Matthew Bellows founded Yesware, a Boston-based tech startup, to solve a problem that he'd encountered as a sales manager: sales people hate entering data, rarely do it accurately, and almost always input data that can't be synthesized in a way that is useful for the... View Details
Keywords: Firing; Culture Change; Startup; Technology; Hiring; Entrepreneurship; Negotiation; Sales; Human Resources; Technology Industry; Boston
- August 2015
- Case
Yabbly (A)
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Christopher Payton
In November 2013, with less than 10 months of cash on hand, Tom Leung, the founder and CEO of Yabbly, must decide where to focus his resources. His startup, a question-and-answer application for shopping decisions, had benefited from a strong showing at the SXSW... View Details
- June 2015 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
Uber and Stakeholders: Managing a New Way of Riding
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Daniel Fox
By 2015, technological innovations—the smartphone and the advanced data connectivity that enabled it—created new opportunities for people to move around cities quickly and conveniently without owning a car, via car-sharing services like Zipcar or new ride-sharing... View Details
Keywords: Uber; Ride-sharing; Sharing Economy; Transportation Network Company; Leadership And Change Management; Stakeholder Management; Managing Change; Leadership; Regulation; Smartphones; Web-enabled Application; Disruptive Technology; Startup Management; Entrepreneurship; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Transportation; Mobile Technology; Transportation Industry; Technology Industry
- June 2015 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
WeChat: A Global Platform?
By: Willy Shih, Howard Yu and Feng Liu
WeChat was developed by Tencent Holdings as a lightweight messaging platform. As it grew quickly to become the most popular messaging app in China, it added a range of products and services that sat on top that were designed to appeal to a broad range of consumers and... View Details