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- 2024
- Working Paper
The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem Solving
The rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) open up attractive opportunities for creative problem-solving through human-guided AI partnerships. To explore this potential, we initiated a crowdsourcing challenge focused on sustainable, circular economy... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Channeled Attention and Stable Errors
By: Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Matthew Rabin and Joshua Schwartzstein
We develop a framework for assessing when somebody will eventually notice that she has
a misspecified model of the world, premised on the idea that she neglects information that
she deems—through the lens of her misconceptions—to be irrelevant. In doing so, we... View Details
- June 2023 (Revised August 2023)
- Background Note
Subscription Models: Recurring Revenues for Lasting Growth
By: Elie Ofek and Amy Konary
This note offers a comprehensive exposition to subscription revenue models and aims to explain their recent rise. It covers the advantages to firms of employing a subscription-based approach to monetization (as opposed to “one-off” upfront payment), as well as the... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Location-Specificity and Geographic Competition for Remote Workers
By: Thomaz Teodorovicz, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Evan Starr
The precipitous growth of remote work has given rise to a new phenomenon: geographic competition between localities for the physical presence of remote workers. Remote workers with high general human capital may create value for their new destinations and reverse net... View Details
- Spring 2023
- Article
Incentive Contract Design and Employee-Initiated Innovation: Evidence from the Field
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
This study examines how the design of incentive contracts for tasks defined as workers’ official responsibilities (i.e., standard tasks) influences workers’ propensity to engage in employee-initiated innovation (EII). EII corresponds to innovation activities that are... View Details
- March 2023
- Case
Mirakl: Growing The Marketplace Economy
By: Antonio Moreno, Santiago Gallino and Emilie Billaud
Mirakl provided the technology and seller network required for companies like Macy's, Best Buy, Walmart, Siemens, or Carrefour to simply design, launch, and administer a marketplace that included products from third-party sellers. What began as a basic business idea in... View Details
- March–April 2023
- Article
You Need Two Leadership Gears: Know When to Take Charge and When to Get Out of the Way
By: Lindy Greer, Francesca Gino and Robert Sutton
The debate about the best way to lead has been raging for years: Should you empower your people and get out of their way, or take charge and push them to do great work? The answer, say the authors, is to do both. Their research shows that effective leaders routinely... View Details
- January 16, 2023
- Article
40 Ideas to Shake Up Your Hiring Process
By: Joseph Fuller, Nithya Vaduganathan, Allison Bailey and Manjari Raman
Many companies today are struggling to hire and retain talent, but more often than not the problem is self-inflicted: They’re simply not using a broad enough array of tools, sometimes because they don’t even know the tools exist. In this article, the authors list 40... View Details
- Working Paper
Diversification as an Adaptive Learning Process: An Empirical Study of General-Purpose and Market-Specific Technological Know-How in New Market Entry
By: Dominika Kinga Randle and Gary P. Pisano
An enduring trait of modern corporations is their propensity to diversify into multiple lines of business. Penrosian theories conceptualize diversification as a strategy to exploit a firm’s fungible, yet “untradeable,” resources and point to redeployment of... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Before Plagiarism: Lawyers and Copynorms in Europe, 1300–1600
By: Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert
This essay uses the concept of 'copynorms', social norms about copying expressive works that can be distinct from legal norms about the same, in order to understand the meaning of intellectual property among Roman law and canon law jurists from the fourteenth through... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Pills in a World of Activism and ESG
By: Guhan Subramanian and Caley Petrucci
Easterbrook and Fischel’s The Economic Structure of Corporate Law advances their now famous passivity thesis, which posits that managers should remain passive in the face of an unsolicited tender offer for the company’s shares. Consistent with the broader... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States
By: Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, Timothy McQuade and Beatriz Pousada
We characterize the contribution of immigrants to US innovation, both through their direct productivity as well as through their indirect spillover effects on their native collaborators. To do so, we link patent records to a database containing the first five digits of... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
The Emotional Rewards of Prosocial Spending Are Robust and Replicable in Large Samples
By: Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn and Ashley V. Whillans
Past studies show that spending money on other people—prosocial spending—increases a person’s happiness. However, foundational research on this topic was conducted prior to psychology’s credibility revolution (or “replication crisis”), so it is essential to ask... View Details
- November 22, 2022
- Article
Is Novel Research Worth Doing? Evidence from Peer Review at 49 Journals
By: Misha Teplitskiy, Hao Peng, Andrea Blasco and Karim R. Lakhani
There are long-standing concerns that peer review, which is foundational to scientific institutions like journals and funding agencies, favors conservative ideas over novel ones. We investigate the association between novelty and the acceptance of manuscripts submitted... View Details
- 2022
- Chapter
Buying Time? The Vietnam War and Southeast Asia
By: Mattias Fibiger
This article examines the “buying time thesis”—the idea that the American war in Vietnam bought time for the rest of Southeast Asia to build up political, economic, military, and diplomatic defenses against communism. It finds that there is some truth to claims that... View Details
Keywords: Vietnam War; Impact; Legacy; Geopolitics; War; History; Government and Politics; Southeast Asia
- 13 Oct 2022
- Other Presentation
4 Business Ideas That Changed the World: Disruptive Innovation
By: Amy Bernstein, Rita McGrath, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Derek van Bever
A roundtable conversation takes stock of Clayton Christensen’s influential theory. This first in a series of roundtable conversations assessing the origins and impact of four breakthrough ideas.
In the 1980s, Clayton Christensen cofounded a startup that... View Details
In the 1980s, Clayton Christensen cofounded a startup that... View Details
Keywords: Disruptive Innovation
- 20 Oct 2022
- Other Presentation
4 Business Ideas That Changed the World: Shareholder Value
By: Adi Ignatius, Lynn Paine, Mihir Desai and Carola Frydman
A roundtable conversation appraises the 50-year reign of shareholder primacy and the growing backlash against it today.
The idea that maximizing shareholder value takes legal and practical precedence above all else first came to prominence in the 1970s. The... View Details
The idea that maximizing shareholder value takes legal and practical precedence above all else first came to prominence in the 1970s. The... View Details
- September 2022 (Revised August 2023)
- Case
Audrey Tang: Using Technology to Strengthen Democracy in Taiwan
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
Since the early days of the internet, Taiwan had a vibrant community of civic hackers and open-source programmers who engaged with social issues. Audrey Tang was one of them. She spearheaded the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan, where protestors peacefully... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Developing a Sustainable High Commitment, High Performance System of Organizing, Managing, and Leading: An Actionable Systems Theory of Change and Development
By: Michael Beer
This paper presents a theory for developing an adaptive high commitment, high performance system of organizing, managing, and leading. It is a synthesis of my 50 years of action and field research presented in my books and articles. It operationalized and makes... View Details
- September–October 2022
- Article
Seeking Purity, Avoiding Pollution: Strategies for Moral Career Building
By: Erin Reid and Lakshmi Ramarajan
This study builds theory on how people construct moral careers. Analyzing interviews with 102 journalists, we show how people build moral careers by seeking jobs that allow them to fulfill both the institution’s moral obligations and their own material aims. We... View Details