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June 2010 (Revised July 2011)
Case

Classic Knitwear and Guardian: A Perfect Fit?

By: John A. Quelch and Patricia Girardi

Classic Knitwear manufactures and distributes casual apparel, either unbranded or under a private-label brand name. Partly because Classic has no brand recognition with consumers, gross margins are low. To improve margins, the company considers partnering via a... View Details

Keywords: Market Research; Forecasting; Consumer Marketing; New Product Marketing; Product Lines; Merchandising; Branding; Demand and Consumers; Partners and Partnerships; Marketing Strategy; Forecasting and Prediction; Product Marketing; Brands and Branding; Product Development; Manufacturing Industry; Manufacturing Industry

October 2021 (Revised December 2021)
Case

Customer-Centric Design with Artificial Intelligence: Commonwealth Bank

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Jin Hyun Paik and Steven Randazzo

As Commonwealth Bank (CommBank) CEO Matt Comyn delivered the full financial year results in August 2021 over videoconference, it took less than two minutes for him to make his first mention of the organization's Customer Engagement Engine (CEE), the AI-driven customer... View Details

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Customer-centricity; Banks and Banking; Customer Focus and Relationships; Technological Innovation; Transformation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance; AI and Machine Learning; Financial Services Industry; Australia

March 2021 (Revised August 2022)
Case

Seeding and Selling Asana

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie Ma and Amram Migdal

In December 2019, Oliver Jay, Asana’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), was reconsidering his go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Asana was cloud-based work management software that enabled users to break up projects into discrete tasks that could be assigned, scheduled, and... View Details

Keywords: SaaS; Customer Journey; Business Model; Business Organization; Change Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Technology Industry; United States

Web

HBS Entrepreneurship Summit - Alumni

Sessions on the technologies that will define the next decade Small-group discussions built to provide intimate support on personal challenges Programming addressing the unique challenges facing underrepresented founders For additional... View Details

23 May 2018
News

Abigail P. Johnson, MBA 1988

serves 27 million individual customers Chairman and CEO, Fidelity Management and Research LLC The summer before college, Abby Johnson worked in the “wire room” at the family business, Fidelity Investments. She took calls from customers, wrote down account numbers,... View Details

Keywords: Susan Young

08 Feb 2024
Blog Post

African American Student Union Spotlight on Joint Degrees

as joint degree students, sharing insights from their time before and during the MBA program. Swanee Golden (MBA/MPP 2025) Where is your hometown? My hometown is Princeton, New Jersey. What was your pre-MBA industry and role? Before HBS,... View Details

May 2011 (Revised March 2012)
Case

Nanda Home: Preparing for Life after Clocky

By: Elie Ofek and Jill Avery

Gauri Nanda, the inventor of Clocky, the alarm clock that rolls off the bed stand and forces its owner to find it, has to make critical decisions regarding the future of her nascent company. As sales of Clocky show signs of declining, she must decide whether to... View Details

Keywords: Brands and Branding; Management; Electronics Industry

04 Dec 2012
First Look

First Look: December 4

employees in a large information technology firm. These findings have implications for research on homophily, gender relations in organizations, and formal and informal... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

March 2023 (Revised January 2025)
Case

Wilshire Lane Capital

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Lindsay N. Hyde and Stacy Straaberg

In September 2021, Adam Demuyakor (MBA 2017) was faced with decisions about how to launch his venture capital (VC) investment firm. His previous investment activities were a series of angel investments and special purpose vehicles alongside two part-time general... View Details

Keywords: Ownership Stake; Investment Funds; Venture Capital; Business and Shareholder Relations; Real Estate Industry; Real Estate Industry; Los Angeles; California; United States

02 Apr 2001
Research & Ideas

Not All M&As Are Alike—and That Matters

and fitting the new product or technology into existing activities. Scenario 5: The Industry Convergence M&a The first four categories involve changing the relationships among a particular industry's... View Details

Keywords: by Joseph L. Bower

December 2023
Article

Self-Orienting in Human and Machine Learning

By: Julian De Freitas, Ahmet Uğuralp, Zeliha Uğuralp, Laurie Paul, Joshua B. Tenenbaum and T. Ullman

A current proposal for a computational notion of self is a representation of one’s body in a specific time and place, which includes the recognition of that representation as the agent. This turns self-representation into a process of self-orientation, a challenging... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Behavior; Learning

September 2019 (Revised August 2020)
Case

Engineering an Inclusive Bioeconomy

By: Tarun Khanna, Raffaella Sadun and Susie L. Ma

In 2019, entrepreneur Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio was developing a project he hoped could generate and share wealth from the natural resources of the Amazon without destroying those resources. His idea, called Earth Bank of Codes (EBC), would create a library of the... View Details

17 Aug 2009
Research & Ideas

Quantifying the Economic Impact of the Internet

The fight was lost as consumers voted for free information supported by advertising over subscription services. Ironically, online advertising and the commercialization of the Web achieved important goals of the resisters: to preserve the... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch; Advertising; Publishing

14 Apr 2009
First Look

First Look: April 14, 2009

structures. SWFs seem to engage in a form of trend chasing, since they are more likely to invest at home when domestic equity prices are higher, and invest abroad when foreign prices are higher. Funds see the industry P/E ratios of their... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

14 Aug 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, August 14, 2018

where the next left-field idea could be the next big thing. This book explores this culture of psychological safety and provides a blueprint for bringing it to life. The road is sometimes bumpy, but succinct and informative scenario-based... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

December 2011
Article

Platform Envelopment

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne

Due to network effects and switching costs in platform markets, entrants generally must offer revolutionary functionality. We explore a second entry path that does not rely upon Schumpeterian innovation: platform envelopment. Through envelopment, a provider in one... View Details

Keywords: Digital Platforms; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Economic Systems; Development Economics; Business or Company Management; Business Strategy; Network Effects; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry