Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,781)
- Faculty Publications (151)
- July 2020
- Article
The Role of Interdependence in the Microfoundations of Organization Design: Task, Goal, and Knowledge Interdependence
By: Marlo Raveendran (formerly Goetting), Luciana Silvestri and Ranjay Gulati
Interdependence is a core concept in organization design, yet one that has remained consistently understudied. Current notions of interdependence remain rooted in seminal works, produced at a time when managers’ near-perfect understanding of the task at hand drove the... View Details
- 2020
- Article
Why Do User Communities Matter for Strategy?
By: Sonali K. Shah and Frank Nagle
In this essay, we explore how strategic management research and practice could benefit from considering the benefits and challenges obtainable through working with user communities. User communities represent a unique organizing structure for the exchange of ideas and... View Details
- April 2020
- Article
Field Comparisons of Incentive-Compatible Preference Elicitation Techniques
By: Shawn A. Cole, A. Nilesh Fernando, Daniel Stein and Jeremy Tobacman
Knowledge of consumer demand is important for firms, policy makers, and economists. One common tool for incentive-compatible demand elicitation, the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism, has been widely used in laboratory settings but rarely evaluated for... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Is Maximising Creativity Good? The Importance of Elaboration and Internal Confidence in Producing Creative Ideas
By: Goran Calic, Elaine Mosakowski, Nick Bontis and Sébastien Hélie
While knowledge management researchers acknowledge that individuals transition from generation to implementation of ideas, these transitions are not fully understood. The current article focuses on idea elaboration – defined as the transition of an idea from an... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Engineering Serendipity: When Does Knowledge Sharing Lead to Knowledge Production?
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
We investigate how knowledge similarity between two individuals is systematically related to the likelihood that a serendipitous encounter results in knowledge production. We conduct a natural field experiment at a medical research symposium, where we exogenously... View Details
- September 2019 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
Google: To TVC or Not to TVC?
By: William R. Kerr and Carl Kreitzberg
In late 2018, evidence emerged that many of Google’s temporary help agency workers, vendors, and independent contractors (“TVCs”) were unhappy with the company. TVCs, who reportedly made up 49.95% of Google’s 170,000-person global workforce, had raised concerns of... View Details
Keywords: Workforce; Independent Contractors; Talent Management; Silicon Valley; Google; Employee Attitude; Employee Compensation; Employee Engagement; Future Of Work; Innovation; Innovation And Strategy; Inequality; Talent Acquisition; Labor; Talent and Talent Management; Strategy; Technological Innovation; Employees; Attitudes; Innovation and Management; Human Resources; Equality and Inequality; Information Technology Industry; United States; San Francisco
- September 2019
- Case
Shell: A Company of Opportunity?
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Emer Moloney
The Opportunity Hub was a cloud-based platform that enabled managers to market projects they were working on and associated resourcing needs as “Opportunity Owners” and employees, or “Opportunity Seekers,” to browse these statements of need and engage when they had... View Details
Keywords: Business Divisions; Change Management; Competency and Skills; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Energy; Energy Sources; Non-Renewable Energy; Renewable Energy; Human Resources; Employees; Retention; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Jobs and Positions; Job Design and Levels; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Labor; Human Capital; Labor Unions; Leading Change; Resource Allocation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Evaluation; Performance Productivity; Strategic Planning; Projects; Motivation and Incentives; Business Strategy; Social and Collaborative Networks; Technology Platform; Chemical Industry; Energy Industry; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; United Kingdom; Netherlands
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Impact of Professionals' Contributions to Online Knowledge Communities on Their Workplace Knowledge Work
By: Hila Lifshitz - Assaf and Frank Nagle
Knowledge work is becoming increasingly challenging as pace of change in the knowledge frontier is increasing. Organizations have created multiple mechanisms to minimize knowledge gaps and increase learning such internal training, mentorship programs as well as... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Why Do User Communities Matter for Strategy?
By: Sonali K. Shah and Frank Nagle
User communities represent a unique organizing structure for the exchange of ideas and knowledge. They are organizations composed primarily of users working collaboratively, voluntarily, and with minimal oversight to freely and openly develop and exchange knowledge... View Details
- 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