Publications

August 2011 (Revised September 2011)
Case

Wii Encore?

By: Andrei Hagiu

Nintendo faced huge difficulties in July 2011. Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox had caught up with the innovative motion-sensing controllers of the original Wii. And the new Nintendo 3DS handheld console had experienced a very disappointing start. Moreover,... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Innovation Strategy; Two-Sided Platforms; Brands and Branding; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry

06 Mar 2020
News

Networking Doesn’t Have to Be Self-Serving

2024
Working Paper

HIV Tests and AIDS Treatments—Containing a Fearsome Pandemic: Case Histories of Transformational Advances

By: Amar Bhidé, Srikant M. Datar and Katherine Stebbins

This case history describes how a diverse cast of characters, including public health organizations, research laboratories, for-profit healthcare companies, activists, and regulators, rolled back the outbreak of HIV/AIDS in just fifteen years. Moreover, as the case... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Technology Adoption; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Invention; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

SSRN

14 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

Restarting Under Uncertainty: Managerial Experiences from Around the World

establishing or revising their safety protocols or preemptively stacking inventory. Adaptation sometimes meant being able to strike a fine balance between leveraging existing capabilities and finding View Details

Keywords: by Raffaella Sadun, Andrea Bertoni, Alexia Delfino, Giovanni Fassio, and Mariapaola Testa

18 Oct 2006
Research & Ideas

New at the Helm: A Talk with HBS Dean Light

application aside and asked whether I'd like to get a doctorate instead," recalls Light. After discussions during a visit to the campus, Light agreed to enter a new doctoral program in decision and... View Details

Keywords: by Roger Thompson; Education

11 Oct 2024
Research & Ideas

How AI Could Ease the Refugee Crisis and Bring New Talent to Businesses

overwhelmed and congested system. The other algorithm, focused on balancing where refugees settle, seeks to maintain an even distribution over time. This algorithm was able to ensure that the placements to... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand; Technology; Information Technology

Article

R&D: A Small Contribution to Productivity Growth

By: Diego Comin

In this paper I evaluate the contribution of R&D investments to productivity growth. The basis for the analysis are the free entry condition and the fact that most R&D innovations are embodied. Free entry yields a relationship between the resources devoted to R&D and... View Details

Keywords: Research and Development; Investment; Interest Rates; Performance Productivity; Technological Innovation; Perspective; United States

Find at Harvard

16 Jan 2019
Research & Ideas

What Football Firings Teach Managers About Staying Relevant

explanatory variables, controlling for player quality, total team salary, total number of players used by the team during the season (a proxy for team injuries over the course of a season), and team View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg, Evan M.S. Hecht, and Abhijit Naik; Sports

Jung Koo Kang

Jung Koo Kang is an assistant professor in the Accounting and Management Unit. He teaches the Financial Reporting and Control course in the MBA required curriculum.

Professor Kang’s research areas are in financial technology and innovation, alternative data,... View Details

January 2019
Case

Data.gov (Abridged)

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Robert D. Austin and Yumi Yi

This case presents the logic and execution underlying the launch of Data.gov, an instantiation of President Obama's initiative for transparency and open government. The process used by Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO, and his team to rapidly develop the website and to... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Rights; Analytics and Data Science; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Cost vs Benefits; Innovation and Management; Information Management; Public Administration Industry; Information Industry; United States

01 Mar 2023
News

Clearing the Air

believe that we can just take existing processes for capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air and improve them through optimizing the chemical engineering process. The fundamental bottleneck that View Details

Keywords: April White and Dan Morrell; Illustrations by Richard Borge

Dennis Campbell

Dennis W. Campbell is currently the Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. His research and teaching activities focus broadly on how management control systems can be designed to balance short-term strategy execution... View Details

Keywords: financial services; service industry; hotels ＆ motels; consumer products; restaurant; manufacturing; professional services

summer 1997
Article

An Empirical Exploration of a Technology Race

By: J. Lerner

An extensive theoretical literature examines technological competition, and in particular whether leaders maintain their standing. These models, however, have received little support. Innovation is examined in the disk drive industry, an environment particularly... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Learning

Find at Harvard

Robert Simons is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School. For over 35 years, Simons has taught accounting, management control, and strategy execution courses in both the Harvard MBA and Executive Education Programs. For 2024/25, he is teaching a... View Details

2013
Working Paper

How Does Risk Management Influence Production Decisions? Evidence from a Field Experiment

By: Shawn Cole, Xavier Gine and James Vickery

Weather is a key source of income risk, particularly in emerging market economies. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial involving a sample of Indian farmers to study how an innovative rainfall insurance product affects production decisions. We find that... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Production; Weather; Insurance; Emerging Markets; Agribusiness; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; India

Article

Active World Model Learning with Progress Curiosity

By: Kuno Kim, Megumi Sano, Julian De Freitas, Nick Haber and Daniel Yamins

World models are self-supervised predictive models of how the world evolves. Humans learn world models by curiously exploring their environment, in the process acquiring compact abstractions of high bandwidth sensory inputs, the ability to plan across long temporal... View Details

Keywords: World Models; Mathematical Methods

23 Feb 2017
News

If Democrats Want to Challenge Trump, They Need a New Strategy

May 2010 (Revised May 2010)
Case

Data.gov

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Robert D. Austin and Yumi Yi

This case presents the logic and execution underlying the launch of Data.gov, an instantiation of President Obama's initiative for transparency and open government. The process used by Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO, and his team to rapidly develop the website and to... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Rights; Analytics and Data Science; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Cost vs Benefits; Innovation and Management; Information Management; Public Administration Industry; Information Industry; United States