Publications

February 2023
Case

Adyen: Reshaping the Payment Ecosystem

By: Marco Di Maggio, Antonio Moreno and Elena Corsi

A payment services company rethinks its strategy to reach out to a different customer base. View Details

Keywords: Digital Platforms; Entrepreneurship; Service Operations; Market Entry and Exit; Financial Services Industry; Europe

March 2008 (Revised March 2014)
Case

Facebook

By: Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, Thomas R. Eisenmann, Aaron Smith, David Chen and Brian Feinstein

As Facebook topped one billion monthly users in October 2012, the online social network continued to face questions about how best to monetize its surging traffic. The company could invest further in new advertising products, which represented the majority of the... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Profit; Open Source Distribution; Social and Collaborative Networks; Competition; Competitive Strategy; Internet and the Web; Digital Platforms; Information Technology Industry

December 2019
Case

Steemit: A New Social Media?

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Alexander White and Karen Elterman

This case discusses the alternative social media site Steemit, including the principles it was founded on in 2016 and the challenges it faced in 2019. Steemit was a blockchain-based platform that aimed to differentiate itself from other social media companies by... View Details

2017
Working Paper

Cluster Mapping as a Tool for Development

By: Christian H.M. Ketels

This report builds on the foundational work on cluster mapping that Prof. Michael E. Porter has led at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness (ISC), Harvard Business School over the last two decades. He launched the U.S. Cluster Mapping Initiative in the late... View Details

Keywords: Industry Clusters; Development Economics

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June 2022
Case

Worten Portugal: Becoming a Digital Marketplace

By: Antonio Moreno, Pedro Amorim and Tonia Labruyere

With Amazon's entry into Portugal, Miguel Mota Freitas, CEO of Portuguese electronics chain Worten, is reflecting on their strategy of building a competitive marketplace. View Details

Keywords: Digital Transformation; Digital Strategy; Digital Platforms; Brands and Branding; E-commerce; Logistics; Service Delivery; Supply Chain; Competitive Strategy; Diversification; Consumer Products Industry; Electronics Industry; Retail Industry; Portugal; Spain

May 2008 (Revised March 2010)
Supplement

Palm (C): 2005

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Kevin Boudreau and Jordan Mitchell

This case series looks at three important inflection points in Palm's history that relate to decisions about its platform: when the company was debating whether to open its operating system (OS) for licensing to third-party hardware manufacturers; 2001, when the... View Details

Keywords: History; Decisions; Business Model; Technological Innovation; Value Creation; Digital Platforms; Rights; Competition

2007
Working Paper

Competition in Modular Clusters

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and C. Jason Woodard

The last twenty years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated "clusters," "networks," or "ecosystems" of firms. In these clusters the activities of R&D, product design, production, distribution, and system integration may be split up among hundreds or even thousands... View Details

Keywords: Price; Profit; Digital Platforms; Industry Clusters; Competition; Horizontal Integration; Vertical Integration

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January 2025
Case

Arsenal Capital Partners’ Refinancing of Pinnacle

By: Victoria Ivashina and Srimayi Mylavarapu

Arsenal Capital Partners’ portfolio company, Pinnacle, a leading producer of high-performance adhesive technologies, has experienced rapid growth under Arsenal’s ownership. Over just two years, Pinnacle's EBITDA increased from $13.5 million to $60 million. By mid-2021,... 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

Keywords: Business Model; Business Startups; Games, Gaming, and Gambling; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Network Effects; Multi-Sided Platforms; Partners and Partnerships; Competition

October 2008 (Revised February 2009)
Case

Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering

Explores the journey of aggressive learning and capability building in the operations of a major Korean Shipbuilder. While DSHM had once used its superior learning capability to topple its Japanese competition, it now faced the potential for a similar attack from new... View Details

Keywords: Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Ship Transportation; Competitive Strategy; Globalization; Manufacturing Industry; Japan; China; South Korea

16 Nov 2016
Research & Ideas

Turning One Thousand Customers into One Million

First 1,000 Customers, we explored how these two-sided platforms got their start and attracted a significant number of early adopters based on a Harvard Business School case that professor Teixeira wrote with Morgan Brown. “Airbnb... View Details

Keywords: by Thales S. Teixeira and Michael Blanding; Retail; Transportation; Accommodations

04 Sep 2020
Blog Post

Advice from a Career Switcher: The Value of Informational Conversations with Alumni

Adam Palay (Class of 2021) knows a thing or two about making professional pivots. “After completing my AB and MS in English, and deciding to put a PhD on hold, I spent four months teaching myself how to code,” said Adam. He explained, “At the time, a lot of online... View Details

Web

Faculty & Advisors | MBA

Behring Inc., where he served as President – Americas. Marc began his career as a strategy consultant at Bain & Company and later joined Bain Capital. He serves on the boards Wesleyan University, Mass General Brigham, and the U.S.-China... View Details

15 Oct 2007
Research & Ideas

Businesses Beware: The World Is Not Flat

expansion," Ghemawat argues. While identifying similarities from one place to the next is essential, effective cross-border strategies will take careful stock of differences as well. An expert on global strategy, Ghemawat lays out an... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

February 2021 (Revised March 2022)
Case

TikTok in 2020: Super App or Supernova?

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Dan Maher and Dan O'Brien

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was launched in 2012 around a simple idea – helping users entertain themselves on their smartphones while on the Beijing Subway. In less than a decade, it had become one of the world’s most valuable private companies, with investors... View Details

May 2022 (Revised April 2024)
Case

Third Point in 2020: Growth Is Where the Value Is?

By: Robin Greenwood, James Williams and Denise Han

In early May 2020, Daniel Loeb’s team at Third Point was evaluating a potential growth opportunity in the Walt Disney Company and whether investor activism might play a role. Battered by the effects of COVID-19, the company’s stock had initially tumbled to $86 and then... View Details

Keywords: Growth; Equity; Disney; Value; COVID-19 Pandemic; Economics; Strategy; Growth and Development; Investment Return; Opportunities; Business and Stakeholder Relations; North America

October 19, 2021
Article

The Facebook Trap

By: Andy Wu

Facebook has a clear mission: Connect everyone in the world. Clarity is good, but in Facebook’s case, it has also put the company in a bind because the mission—and the company’s vision for creating value through network effects—has also become the source of its biggest... View Details

Keywords: Business And Society; Mission and Purpose; Network Effects; Value Creation; Corporate Accountability; Strategy