Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,768)
- Faculty Publications (138)
- April 2019 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Clear Link Technologies, LLC: Driving Sales with Peer Effects
By: Christopher Stanton, Richard Saouma and Olivia Hull
The importance of a good peer or coworker is widely discussed, but understanding the glue that makes coworkers valuable is less understood. This case sheds light on the importance of peers and the practices and environments that make a group greater than the sum of its... View Details
Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Interactive Communication; Experience and Expertise; Decision Making; Training; Design; Compensation and Benefits; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Sharing; Human Capital; Working Conditions; Measurement and Metrics; Outcome or Result; Performance; Performance Improvement; Research; Sales; Salesforce Management; Motivation and Incentives; Telecommunications Industry; Utah; United States
- April 2019 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
Exporting Livability: Investing in New Urban Centers
By: John D. Macomber and Essie Alamsyah
Can Singapore urban design, policy continuity, and system of laws be exported outside of Singapore to accelerate the effective development of new urban agglomerations? Nina Yang, CEO of Sustainable Urban Development at Ascendas-Singbridge, a large real estate company... View Details
- Spring 2019
- Article
Fluid Teams and Knowledge Retrieval: Scaling Service Operations
By: Melissa A. Valentine, Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats and Amy C. Edmondson
To scale service operations requires retrieving knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository has the... View Details
- December 2018 (Revised March 2021)
- Background Note
Modern Automation (A): Artificial Intelligence
By: William R. Kerr and James Palano
This primer is meant to be a field guide to the late 2010s' surge in business use of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI), or enterprise software based in machine learning. First, it provides an overview of the key trends—digitization, connectivity, the continuation of... View Details
- September 2018
- Article
Do Experts or Crowd-Based Models Produce More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia
By: Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu
Organizations today can use both crowds and experts to produce knowledge. While prior work compares the accuracy of crowd-produced and expert-produced knowledge, we compare bias in these two models in the context of contested knowledge, which involves subjective,... View Details
- July–August 2018
- Article
When Technology Gets Ahead of Society
By: Tarun Khanna
New technologies can be unsettling for industry incumbents, regulators, and consumers, because norms and institutions for dealing with them don’t yet exist. Interestingly, businesspeople in emerging economies face similar challenges: The rules are unclear and... View Details
- Summer 2018
- Article
Why High-Tech Commoditization Is Accelerating
By: Willy C. Shih
Knowledge embedded within state-of-the-art production and design tools is a powerful force that is leveling the global technology playing field. It democratizes innovation and makes future competition more challenging. This paper describes the knowledge flows through... View Details
Keywords: Product Design; Product Commercialization; Product Development; Product Development Strategy; Production; Manufacturing Tools; Manufacturing; Manufacturing Industry; Engineering; Globalization; Goods and Commodities; Knowledge; Commercialization; Business Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Information Infrastructure; Technology Adoption; Consumer Products Industry; Auto Industry; Semiconductor Industry; Electronics Industry; Industrial Products Industry; Information Technology Industry; North America; Asia
- May 2018
- Article
Effects of an Information Sharing System on Employee Creativity, Engagement, and Performance
By: Shelley Xin Li and Tatiana Sandino
Many service organizations rely on information sharing systems to boost employee creativity to meet customer needs. We conducted a field experiment in a retail chain, based on a registered report accepted by Journal of Accounting Research, to test whether an... View Details
- January 29, 2018
- Article
How to Build Trust with Colleagues You Rarely See
By: Tsedal Neeley
Building trust is key to success for any organization. But that can be tricky when it comes to colleagues that you only interact with virtually. What does it take to build trust when you can’t meet in person? In this piece, the author suggests that professionals should... View Details
- 2018
- Article
Service Operations: What Have We Learned?
By: Liana Victorino, Joy M. Field, Ryan W. Buell, Michael J. Dixon, Susan M. Goldstein, Larry J. Menor, Madeleine E. Pullman, Aleda V. Roth, Enrico Secchi and Jie J. Zhang
The purpose of this article is to identify research themes in service operations that have great potential for exciting and innovative conceptual and empirical work. To frame these research themes, the article provides a systematic literature review of operations... View Details
- Article
What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools: Avoid the Common Pitfalls So That Your Organization Can Collaborate, Learn, and Innovate
By: Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley
Workplaces have adopted internal social tools—think stand-alone technologies such as Slack, Yammer, and Chatter, or embedded applications such as Microsoft Teams and JIRA—at a staggering rate. In an ambitious study of 4,200 companies, conducted by the McKinsey Global... View Details
- August 2017 (Revised August 2018)
- Case
Busbud: Building a Data Company
By: Srikant M. Datar, Alistair Croll and Caitlin N. Bowler
The case features the work of LP Maurice (HBS '08) as he decides to take on the fragmented bus travel industry and launch an online business that aggregates and shares bus schedules for routes around the world. His first challenge: finding that the data he needs is... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Business History, the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence
By: Geoffrey Jones
This working paper provides a business history perspective on debates about the Great Divergence, the rise of the income gap between the West and the Rest, and the more recent Great Convergence, which has seen a narrowing of that gap. The literature on the timing and... View Details
- April 2017
- Case
The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Sarah Mehta
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal government agency responsible for evaluating and granting patents and trademarks. In 2015, the USPTO employed approximately 8,000 patent examiners who granted nearly 300,000 patents to inventors. As of April... View Details
Keywords: Machine Learning; Telework; Collaborating With Unions; Human Resources; Recruitment; Retention; Intellectual Property; Copyright; Patents; Trademarks; Knowledge Sharing; Technology Adoption; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Productivity; Performance Improvement; District of Columbia
- February 2017
- Module Note
Leading Global Teams
By: Tsedal Neeley
This module aims to help students become effective leaders and members of global teams that must work together across national boundaries and toward a common goal. Students will learn to diagnose the challenges that global teams often face as well as strategies that... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
A Welfarist Role for Nonwelfarist Rules: An Example with Envy
I propose and formalize an argument for why economists working in the welfarist normative tradition should include nonwelfarist principles in how they judge economic policy. The key idea behind this argument is that the world is too complex, and our ability to model it... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Entrepreneurs and the Co-Creation of Ecotourism in Costa Rica
By: Geoffrey Jones and Andrew Spadafora
Between the 1970s and the 2000s, Costa Rica became established as the world’s leading ecotourism destination. This working paper suggests that although Costa Rica benefited from biodiversity and a pleasant climate, the country’s preeminence in ecotourism requires more... View Details
- May 24, 2016
- Article
Build a Culture of Health
By: John A. Quelch
Every company, large and small, has an impact on health. It does so in four ways: first, through the healthfulness and safety of the products and services it sells; second, through its attention to employee health and well-being in its work practices and benefits;... View Details
Keywords: Public Health; Four Pillars; Public Health Footprint; Culture Of Health Plan Of Action; Change; Education; Health; Human Resources; Knowledge; Labor; Leadership; Management; Operations; Outcome or Result; Personal Development and Career; Programs; Risk and Uncertainty; Strategy; Value; Consumer Products Industry; Chemical Industry; Health Industry; United States; Europe
- 2016
- Article
The Mirroring Hypothesis: Theory, Evidence, and Exceptions
By: Lyra J. Colfer and Carliss Y. Baldwin
The mirroring hypothesis predicts that organizational ties within a project, firm, or group of firms (e.g., communication, collocation, employment) will correspond to the technical dependencies in the work being performed. This article presents a unified picture of... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
The Mirroring Hypothesis: Theory, Evidence and Exceptions
By: Lyra J. Colfer and Carliss Y. Baldwin
The mirroring hypothesis predicts that organizational ties within a project, firm, or group of firms (e.g., communication, collocation, employment) will correspond to the technical patterns of dependency in the work being performed. A thorough understanding of the... View Details
Keywords: Modularity; Innovation; Product And Process Development; Organization Design; Design Structure; Organizational Ties; Mirroring Hypothesis; Industry Architecture; Product Architecture; Complex Technical Systems; Information Technology; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Relationships; Innovation and Invention; Product Development