Design thinking - Publications - Faculty & Research

24 Oct 2007
Sharpening Your Skills

Sharpening Your Skills: Managing Innovation

encourage innovative thinking about a challenge is to deconstruct the problem, such as when a musical director makes the orchestra practice a madrigal at a snail's pace. When trying to create something new you have to do something... View Details

17 Nov 2008
Research & Ideas

Decoding the Artful Sidestep

lot about (I believe it was something about a specific education policy). I was especially interested in the answer, so when it never came I began to wonder: Has he been dodging questions all along? I think he had been. I told Mike about... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

05 Jul 2004
Research & Ideas

Radical Change, Entrepreneurial Opportunity

importantly, mindset. Photography firms like Nikon, Canon, or Kodak, coming into this new arena, think about it very differently than Sony or another consumer electronics firm or HP or Intel as computer industry firms. So given the biases... View Details

Keywords: by Michael J. Roberts; Technology

04 Jul 2016
Research & Ideas

Is Your Org Chart Stuck in a Rut? Try a Scientific Experiment

organizations that really ends up with no trend line” “For decades, we’ve been in this cycle where an organization hires a consulting firm to help design and execute a restructuring, and then, as soon as they’re done, they start that... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

22 May 2007
First Look

First Look: May 22, 2007

explore the use of more distributed institutional forms. In this article, we review the emerging scholarship on the formation and function of self-regulatory institutions. Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-089.pdf Evolution Analysis of Large-Scale... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

27 Nov 2017
Research & Ideas

Beware the Lasting Impression of a 'Temporary' Selfie

llSource: iStock Think that probably inappropriate Snapchat selfie is safe from leaking into your professional life because it disappears? Think again. Features on some communication apps like Snapchat and... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

05 May 2003
Research & Ideas

Greed, Fear, and The System Hinder Corporate Reform

shareholders have lost an "enormous" amount of wealth? Designing regulatory systems is very tricky and could result in the "unintended consequences" of slippery CEO pay efforts, he observed. "I View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

10 Sep 2007
Research & Ideas

High Note: Managing the Medici String Quartet

creative leadership very close-up. The business researcher in me was looking for parallels with intimate creative collaboration in general. If you think about it, there aren't too many human collaboration experiences more extreme than a... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Music

20 Apr 2020
Book

Why COVID-19 Raises the Stakes for Healthy Buildings

recently wrote a book about it: Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity, to be published April 21. Although facilities managers might think they’re saving a few dollars on electricity and air filters,... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Real Estate; Health

26 Sep 2007
Sharpening Your Skills

Sharpening Your Skills: Negotiation

strategy is an aligned combination of set-up moves that occur away from the table, deal design moves, and tactics at the table, all designed to overcome the barriers you've identified. The best response to a... View Details

25 Oct 2006
Op-Ed

Fixing Executive Options: The Veil of Ignorance

developed an influential body of work about justice, starting from the premise that ignorance might just be bliss. His theories were designed to consider a monumental, if esoteric, question: If you were in charge of the world and had to... View Details

Keywords: by Mihir Desai & Joshua Margolis

24 Aug 2009
Research & Ideas

SuperCorp: Values as Guidance System

greater contact across the value chain and especially with end users builds the company brand and triggers opportunities for innovation. Rationale for thinking long-term. Sustainability is more than a buzzword for vanguard companies, and... View Details

Keywords: by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

24 Feb 2014
Research & Ideas

Uncovering Racial Discrimination in the ‘Sharing Economy’

host's profile picture is the second-most prominent element on any listing page, displayed next to the default picture of the property.) "Research has shown that when something is more salient, you respond more to it," Luca says. "This is something a platform should... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Construction; Real Estate; Advertising

31 Mar 2014
Research & Ideas

Encouraging Niche Content in an Ad-Driven World

the production of high-quality niche content? "The number of eyeballs might not be as many, but advertisers obviously care about the match between content and an upper-end consumer," Zhu says. "If you are a very specialized company, you may want to View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Information; Publishing; Journalism & News

30 Nov 2018
What Do You Think?

What’s the Best Administrative Approach to Climate Change?

Summing Up: Should a 'Montreal Protocol' for Administering Global Warming Be Pursued? Climate change and how to manage it is a daunting subject. Nevertheless, several readers of this month’s column were willing to venture a model or two for administering a system... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Energy

06 May 2002
What Do You Think?

What’s Driving the “New Marketing?”

Vargas-Bianchi added, "I do think we need to advance...marketing concepts beyond the 4 Ps, but ultimately, didn't they imply to a certain extent what the authors now mean by 'value'?" Perhaps we should be encouraged that the... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

18 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

Open Innovation Contestants Build AI-Based Cancer Tool

Dream Challenge (involving experts as solvers), we believe this work is unique in that it specifically recruited non-domain experts via the Topcoder platform. Lagace: How did you design and carry out the study? Why Topcoder? LISH team:... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Health; Medical Devices & Supplies

05 Sep 2006
Research & Ideas

HBS Cases: Porsche’s Risky Roll on an SUV

premium? "I think the central question posed by the cases—and we can generalize this more broadly beyond Porsche—is, what difference does location make in a globalized world? Can products just be manufactured anywhere?" One... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Auto; Manufacturing

15 May 2019
Research Event

The Unconventional Capitalism That Shapes Business History

Lalocracio In thinking about the current contested state of global capitalism, and what to do about it, much can be learned from the debates I heard at the recent Harvard Business School conference, Seeking the Unconventional in Forging... View Details

Keywords: by Geoffrey G. Jones; Education

06 Nov 2017
Research Event

Who is Responsible for the Future of Cities?

have to make sense of this.” It was a fitting introduction to a multidisciplinary panel called The Future of Cities, which considered urban growth from as many diverse perspectives as there were panelists. Hosted by the Harvard Business School and Graduate School of... View Details