Publications

11 May 2009
Research & Ideas

The IT Leader’s Hero Quest

with a diverse set of companies. "In this way, we could pool all this knowledge and distill it down to the essential principles that CIOs can generally apply, regardless of industry or size of firm, while describing 'realistic' and... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

Dorothy A. Leonard

Dorothy Leonard*, the William J. Abernathy Professor of Business Administration Emerita, joined the Harvard faculty in 1983 after teaching for three years at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taught MBA courses in... View Details

Keywords: computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer; computer

11 Apr 2024
News

Mission Control

analytical work. I did a piece of research that uncovered or discovered the equivalence to Moore's law from the computer industry in the space industry. And I had full understanding of how Moore's law, 2x... View Details

January 2006 (Revised October 2006)
Case

Hewlett-Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk (A)

By: Clayton M. Christensen

Hewlett-Packard decided that, to grow more rapidly, it needed to design a revolutionary disk drive product that would create an entirely new market or application for magnetic recording technology. The company followed most of the "rules" good managers follow in such... View Details

Keywords: Management; Information Infrastructure; Innovation and Management; Product Development; Computer Industry; United States

Blog

Is AI Coming for Your Job?

experts perform their work. Yes, certain tasks can be completed correctly and completely by AI, but for those types of tasks we will see something like the Industrial Revolution, where people's jobs changed, and they were able to use new... View Details

13 Mar 2018
First Look

March 13, 2018

of firm-level total factor productivity (TFP), sales and cash-flow, higher probabilities to engage in R&D, and export. We find no significant effects for firms from industrialized economies and negative effects for firms in other... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

25 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

Why IT Does Matter

but not nearly as dramatic as a computer produced in 2000, which runs 10 million times faster than a 1960s' computer. Carr's graph on information technology stands as a subject lesson for Darrell Huff's well-known book How to Lie with... View Details

Keywords: by F. Warren McFarlan & Richard L. Nolan

09 Jun 2008
Lessons from the Classroom

Monetizing IP: The Executive’s Challenge

firms to focus on their IP? A: In many nations, intellectual property has become increasingly important. In part, this change has reflected the changing mixture of the economy, with the development of knowledge-intensive industries such... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Video Game; Web Services

24 Feb 2020
Research & Ideas

The Hidden Vulnerabilities of Open Source Software

industry and application security companies, including developer-first security company Snyk and the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center (SCRC), the Linux Foundation and LISH were able to combine private usage data with publicly... View Details

Keywords: by Frank Nagle and Jenny Hoffman; Computer

03 Dec 2021
Blog Post

Physicians Off the Beaten Path

engineering and was required to spend equal amounts of time at a laboratory, in front of a computer and at the hospital. “Doctors,” this professor said, “won’t trust you if they know you are engineers.” I later came to know he was being... View Details

01 Jan 2004
News

D. Ronald Daniel, MBA 1954

graduated from HBS and was finishing a three-and-a-half-year stint as an officer in the U.S. Navy Supply Corps, in charge of a select group that used early models of giant IBM computers to manage inventory for the Navy's airplanes. About... View Details

February 2024 (Revised January 2025)
Case

AGENTS.inc: Pathways to Growth at an AI Startup

By: Frank Nagle, Manuel Hoffmann, Karoline Ströhlein and Susan Pinckney

The case describes the history of AGENTS.inc. Despite being a small startup, with only four employees, that had never had a funding round, the company boasted an impressive client portfolio including multiple Fortune 500 companies. While AGENTS.inc had been an early... View Details

01 Aug 2001
News

Richard B. Fisher (MBA '62)

of his first assignments—an analysis of the economic feasibility of a Canadian hydroelectric plant—required him to master the FORTRAN and COBOL programming languages. "Building a computer model was no mean feat in 1962," Fisher recalls.... View Details

Keywords: Richard B. Fisher; Warren A. Law; Alumni Achievement Award; Finance; Management of Companies and Enterprises; Management

14 Mar 2023
Blog Post

How I Spent My 2+2 Deferral: Dyllan Muller

Associate Scientist at Unilever’s Personal Care R&D site in Trumbull, Connecticut. There, I did computational chemistry research and machine learning modeling to find new active ingredients for skincare products. I quickly found out,... View Details

April 2001 (Revised March 2002)
Case

Seagate Technology Buyout

By: Gregor M. Andrade, Stuart C. Gilson and Todd C. Pulvino

In March 2000, a group of private investors and senior managers were negotiating a deal to acquire the disk drive operations of Seagate Technology. The motivating factor for the buyout was the apparently anomalous market value of Seagate's equity: Seagate's equity... View Details

Keywords: Valuation; Leveraged Buyouts; Financial Strategy; Computer Industry