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Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(2,500)
- People (7)
- News (470)
- Research (1,676)
- Events (17)
- Multimedia (6)
- Faculty Publications (667)
- August 1998
- Case
Electronic Commerce at Air Products
By: F. Warren McFarlan and Melissa Dailey
In 1998,chief information officers (CIOs) in the highly competitive international gases and chemicals business faced the reality that electronic commerce capability was a strategic necessity. The results of annual surveys of technology officers in the chemical industry... View Details
Keywords: Management Teams; Information Technology; Globalized Markets and Industries; Infrastructure; Internet and the Web; Technology Adoption; Business Strategy; Chemical Industry; United States
McFarlan, F. Warren, and Melissa Dailey. "Electronic Commerce at Air Products." Harvard Business School Case 399-035, August 1998.
- December 1987 (Revised August 1990)
- Case
Florida Power & Light's Quality Improvement Program
Describes a major electric utility's highly successful effort to institute a comprehensive quality improvement program throughout the organization. Designed to be used in a comparative analysis of the quality improvement effort described in Paul Revere Insurance Co.... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Quality; Performance Productivity; Utilities Industry; Florida
Hart, Christopher. "Florida Power & Light's Quality Improvement Program." Harvard Business School Case 688-043, December 1987. (Revised August 1990.)
- March 2004 (Revised April 2005)
- Case
Midwest Office Products
By: Robert S. Kaplan
Presents an easy introduction to time-driven activity-based costing (ABC) that allows students to build a simple ABC model of order profitability. Midwest's time-driven ABC approach is based on two categories of parameter estimates. The first is the cost per hour of... View Details
Keywords: Cost; Price; Activity Based Costing and Management; Time Management; Financial Reporting; Profit; Performance Improvement; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Performance Evaluation
Kaplan, Robert S. "Midwest Office Products." Harvard Business School Case 104-073, March 2004. (Revised April 2005.)
- August 2018
- Case
Performance Improvement Consulting and Hi-R-Me: Making Sales Calls
By: Frank V. Cespedes and David Mattson
This case study focuses on a professional services firm (“Performance Improvement Consulting”) and its sales calls on Hi-R-Me, a potential client. The case is supplemented by videos showing the initial contact call, a follow-up discovery call, and a face-to-face... View Details
Cespedes, Frank V., and David Mattson. "Performance Improvement Consulting and Hi-R-Me: Making Sales Calls." Harvard Business School Case 819-043, August 2018.
- July 1987
- Case
Altoona Corp.: Computer Products Division
By: Roger E. Bohn and Robert H. Hayes
A relatively small manufacturer of computer memory disks has achieved a major market position through the use of its statistical quality control (SQC) program. It is now expanding the production of a new line of disks and is encountering problems getting the process... View Details
Keywords: Factories, Labs, and Plants; Volatility; Performance Consistency; Performance Improvement; Performance Productivity; Quality; Mathematical Methods; Hardware; Manufacturing Industry
Bohn, Roger E., and Robert H. Hayes. "Altoona Corp.: Computer Products Division." Harvard Business School Case 688-010, July 1987.
Six Myths of Product Development
Many companies approach product development as if it were manufacturing, trying to control costs and improve quality by applying zero-defect, efficiency-focused techniques. While this tactic can boost the performance of factories, it generally backfires with... View Details
- 11 Apr 2014
- Working Paper Summaries
Learning By Thinking: How Reflection Improves Performance
- Article
Improved Bounds on the Sizes of S.P Numbers
By: Paul Myer Kominers and Scott Duke Kominers
A number which is S.P in base r is a positive integer which is equal to the sum of its base-r digits multiplied by the product of its base-r digits. These numbers have been studied extensively in The Mathematical Gazette. Recently, Shah Ali... View Details
Keywords: Mathematical Methods
Kominers, Paul Myer, and Scott Duke Kominers. "Improved Bounds on the Sizes of S.P Numbers." Mathematical Gazette 94, no. 529 (March 2010): 127–129.
- February 2025
- Article
Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency
By: Ryan W. Buell and MoonSoo Choi
Through a large-scale field experiment with 393,036 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run... View Details
Keywords: Transparency; Customer Selection; Customer Compatibility; Retention; Service Operations; Service Delivery; Marketing Strategy; Marketing Communications; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Satisfaction; Banking Industry; Australia
Buell, Ryan W., and MoonSoo Choi. "Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency." Management Science 71, no. 2 (February 2025): 1335–1355.
- Article
How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition
By: Michael E. Porter and James E. Heppelmann
Information technology is revolutionizing products. Once composed solely of mechanical and electrical parts, products have become complex systems that combine hardware, sensors, data storage, microprocessors, software, and connectivity in myriad ways. These "smart,... View Details
Keywords: Strategy; Competition; Information Technology; Transformation; Information Technology Industry
Porter, Michael E., and James E. Heppelmann. "How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition." Harvard Business Review 92, no. 11 (November 2014): 64–88.
- 10 Jun 2015
- News
High-Tech Tools Won’t Automatically Improve Your Operations
- Summer 2017
- Article
Performance Feedback in Competitive Product Development
By: Daniel P. Gross
Performance feedback is ubiquitous in competitive settings where new products are developed. This article introduces a fundamental tension between incentives and improvement in the provision of feedback. Using a sample of 4,294 commercial logo design tournaments, I... View Details
Keywords: Feedback; Evaluation; Tournaments; Innovation; Performance Evaluation; Motivation and Incentives; Rank and Position; Product Development; Learning
Gross, Daniel P. "Performance Feedback in Competitive Product Development." RAND Journal of Economics 48, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 438–466.
- May 2024 (Revised February 2025)
- Case
Lowe's: Improving the Total Home Strategy
By: Elie Ofek, K. Shelette Stewart and Alicia Dadlani
In 2023, Marvin Ellison, CEO of Lowe’s, contemplated enhancements to the company’s Total Home Strategy to accelerate performance and grow market share. In the last five years since becoming CEO, Ellison had championed a turnaround of the company, completing a... View Details
Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; E-commerce; Competition; Brands and Branding; Business Strategy; Retail Industry; United States; North Carolina
Ofek, Elie, K. Shelette Stewart, and Alicia Dadlani. "Lowe's: Improving the Total Home Strategy." Harvard Business School Case 524-054, May 2024. (Revised February 2025.)
- Research Summary
Designing Productive Zones of Privacy
A common theme that integrates my research and course development is how increasingly transparent workplaces can improve productivity and performance by putting up certain boundaries to observation. While the research above empirically and theoretically explores the... View Details
- 14 Dec 2007
- Op-Ed
When Your Product Becomes a Commodity
lose market share but improve profitability. 2. Compensate your salesforce on profit margin, not sales revenues. A volume-based salesforce will sign up any customer, regardless of profitability. That's OK early in the View Details
Keywords: by John Quelch
- Article
Vungle Inc. Improves Monetization Using Big-Data Analytics
By: Bert De Reyck, Ioannis Fragkos, Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Casey Lichtendahl, Hammond Guerin and Andrew Kritzer
The advent of big data has created opportunities for firms to customize their products and services to unprecedented levels of granularity. Using big data to personalize an offering in real time, however, remains a major challenge. In the mobile advertising industry,... View Details
Keywords: Big Data; Monetization; Data and Data Sets; Advertising; Mobile Technology; Customization and Personalization; Performance Improvement
De Reyck, Bert, Ioannis Fragkos, Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Casey Lichtendahl, Hammond Guerin, and Andrew Kritzer. "Vungle Inc. Improves Monetization Using Big-Data Analytics." Interfaces 47, no. 5 (September–October 2017): 454–466.
- October 1990 (Revised June 1992)
- Case
Direct Product Profitability at Hannaford Brothers Co.
By: Walter J. Salmon
Concerns the pioneering use of a method of accounting in retailing which takes into account not only sales and the cost of goods sold but, at the item level, all of the variable costs associated with each item that is sold. Focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of... View Details
Salmon, Walter J. "Direct Product Profitability at Hannaford Brothers Co." Harvard Business School Case 591-002, October 1990. (Revised June 1992.)
- Article
Products to Platforms: Making the Leap
By: Feng Zhu and Nathan Furr
Following the path of companies such as Apple and Amazon, more and more firms are trying to become not just product purveyors but also platform providers, facilitating direct connections between customers and other groups. Although launching a platform can generate new... View Details
Zhu, Feng, and Nathan Furr. "Products to Platforms: Making the Leap." Harvard Business Review 94, no. 4 (April 2016): 72–78.
- April 2009
- Journal Article
Perspectives on the Productivity Dilemma
By: Paul S. Adler, Mary Benner, David James Brunner, John Paul MacDuffie, Emi Osono, Bradley R. Staats, Hirotaka Takeuchi, Michael Tushman and Sidney G. Winter
For more than a century, operations researchers have recognized that organizations can increase efficiency by adhering strictly to proven process templates, thereby rendering operations more stable and predictable. For several decades, researchers have also recognized... View Details
Keywords: Learning; Innovation and Invention; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Operations; Business Processes; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Efficiency; Performance Improvement; Performance Productivity; Adaptation
Adler, Paul S., Mary Benner, David James Brunner, John Paul MacDuffie, Emi Osono, Bradley R. Staats, Hirotaka Takeuchi, Michael Tushman, and Sidney G. Winter. "Perspectives on the Productivity Dilemma." Journal of Operations Management 27, no. 2 (April 2009): 99–113.
- August 28, 2018
- Article
How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence
By: Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer
People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a... View Details
Keywords: Transparency; Social Influence; Collective Intelligence; Interaction; Problem Solving; Collaboration; Intermittant; Breaks; Always On; Communication Technologies; Communication; Design; Information; Management; Leadership; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Performance; Social and Collaborative Networks; Information Technology
Bernstein, Ethan, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer. "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 35 (August 28, 2018).