Publications
Publications
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- Faculty Publications (776)
- May 2011
- Background Note
Scale Effects, Network Effects, and Investment Strategy
By: Willy Shih
This technical note discusses scale economies, and direct and indirect network effects in the context of building better business models. Some of the great business disasters of the dot.com bubble were companies that scaled their infrastructure without working through... View Details
- April 2011 (Revised June 2011)
- Case
Internet Securities, Inc.: Path to Sustainability
By: Lynda M. Applegate, William R. Kerr and Ryan Johnson
Founded in 1994 when the Internet was still a "toy for techies," the case is set in 1998 when Internet IPOs were red-hot. Internet Securities provides hard-to-find financial, business, economic, and political information on emerging markets. Information from over 600... View Details
- April 2011
- Case
The Sandbox: Creating a Bottom-Up Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
By: Shikhar Ghosh, Lynda M. Applegate, Rhea Ghosh and Amar Kumar
Discussion of new model of Social Enterprise that applies the venture capital model to social enterprise. View Details
- April 2011 (Revised May 2011)
- Case
EMC2: Delivering Customer Centricity
By: Thomas Steenburgh and Jill Avery
This case introduces the concept of customer centricity and traces its development at EMC, the world's leading data storage hardware and information management software company. EMC's customers had historically relied on EMC salespeople to guide them through the... View Details
- March 2011
- Teaching Note
TopCoder (A): Developing Software through Crowdsourcing (TN)
By: Karim R. Lakhani and Eric Lonstein
Teaching Note for 610032. View Details
- March 2011 (Revised February 2012)
- Case
Innovation and Growth at Actelion Ltd.
By: Gary P. Pisano, Daniela Beyersdorfer and Ruth Dittrich
In late 2010, Jean-Paul Clozel, CEO of the Swiss biotech pharmaceuticals firm Actelion, looks back on a successful decade. The small venture that he had started with a few of his scientist colleagues in the late 1990s to discover novel medicine in a research-driven... View Details
- March 2011 (Revised December 2012)
- Teaching Note
Bono and U2 (TN)
By: Nancy F. Koehn, Nora N. Khan and Elizabeth Legris
Teaching Note for 809148. View Details
- March 2011 (Revised December 2012)
- Case
Demand Media
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
Google search had helped Demand Media grow to be a $1.9 billion online publisher. Then, social media and smartphone apps began to change the way people navigated the Internet. How should Demand Media respond? The business ran on a radically new model in which a stable... View Details
- March 2011
- Case
MorphoSys AG: The Evolution of a Biotechnology Business Model
By: Gary P. Pisano, Ryan Johnson and Carin-Isabel Knoop
In the biotech world, the 18-year-old Munich-based company MorphoSys was a rarity: it was profitable. The company achieved this profitability not by developing and selling its own drugs, but by licensing access to its proprietary library of human antibodies. Recently,... View Details
- March 2011 (Revised August 2014)
- Background Note
Social Media in Health Care
By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Selin Gunal Tyler and Charles C. Huang
This note reviews the social media firms in health care that help providers and consumers to interact and their nascent business models. View Details
- March 2011
- Teaching Note
PrimedicProviding Primary Care in Mexico (TN)
Teaching Note for 811040. View Details
- February 2011 (Revised May 2011)
- Case
Utilis: Designing, Producing, and Selling Rapid Deployment Shelters for a Troubled World
By: Herman B. Leonard, Daniela Beyersdorfer and Simon Harrow
How can a company that supplies disaster response and humanitarian agencies best handle the intrinsically unpredictable and highly volatile demand for its products? Utilis is a French supplier of rapid-deploy high-end tent solutions for civilian and military uses (such... View Details
- February 2011 (Revised March 2012)
- Course Overview Note
Competing through Business Models: Introductory Note for Students (Half-Course Version)
By: Hanna Halaburda and Ramon Casadesus-Masanell
- February 2011 (Revised September 2013)
- Case
Sarvajal: Water for All
By: John D. Macomber and Mona Sinha
Entrepreneur wrestles with business model using SMS and RFID technology, franchising, and leasing to rapidly grow off-the-grid water purification business without subsidies. The company seeks to provide potable water services to rural and urban India where the public... View Details
- January 2011 (Revised January 2011)
- Case
Marvel Enterprises, Inc. (Abridged)
By: Anita Elberse
The management team of Marvel Enterprises, known for its universe of superhero characters that includes Spider-Man, the Hulk, and X-Men, must reevaluate its marketing strategy. In June 2004, only six years after the company emerged from bankruptcy, Marvel has amassed a... View Details
- January 2011 (Revised April 2011)
- Case
TripAdvisor
By: Sunil Gupta and Kerry Herman
By 2010, TripAdvisor was the largest travel site in the world operating in 24 countries and 16 languages, with listings for 455,000 hotels, 92,000 attractions and 564,000 restaurants in over 71,000 destinations worldwide. It had over 40 million reviews from 35 million... View Details
- January 2011 (Revised October 2014)
- Case
Dropbox: 'It Just Works'
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Michael Pao and Lauren Barley
Dropbox is a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup, founded in 2006, that provides online storage and backup services to millions of customers using a "freemium" (free + premium offers) business model. The case recounts Dropbox's history from conception through... View Details
- January 2011
- Case
Masdar and Tianjin: Eco-Cities
By: John D. Macomber
Compares Masdar City and Tianjin Eco-City, two high profile "sustainable cities." Each showcases technological and financial innovation. Is it real? Is it replicable and defensible? The case is intended to introduce main concepts and tradeoffs with respect to rapid... View Details
- January 2011 (Revised November 2014)
- Case
Mochi Media
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Amit Jain
In late 2009, the management of Mochi Media, a venture-backed startup, must decide how to invest scarce resources to achieve continued growth. Mochi has developed a three-sided platform, connecting Flash game developers, sites that aggregate these games, and... View Details
- January 2011
- Case
Sidoti & Company: Launching a Micro-Cap Product
By: Boris Groysberg, Paul M. Healy and Sarah Abbott
It is 2010 and Sidoti & Company, a New York-based brokerage firm specializing in small capitalization stocks, has just launched a new product- micro cap stock research. The firm has hired a group of five analysts who will produce written research reports on micro-cap... View Details