Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,332)
- Faculty Publications (254)
- 2023
- Chapter
Marketing Through the Machine’s Eyes: Image Analytics and Interpretability
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Flora Feng and Kannan Srinivasan
he growth of social media and the sharing economy is generating abundant unstructured image and video data. Computer vision techniques can derive rich insights from unstructured data and can inform recommendations for increasing profits and consumer utility—if only the... View Details
- March 2023
- Case
Woven Planet - Designing Software for the Car of the Future
By: Gary P. Pisano and Catherine Piner
Founded in 2021, Woven Planet Holdings—a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation—was developing Arene, an automotive software platform consisting of an operating system, development and simulation tools, and a cloud-based service that could store and analyze vehicle... View Details
- February 2023 (Revised March 2023)
- Case
Hey, Insta & YouTube, Are You Watching TikTok?
In early 2023, the entertainment app TikTok reached close to 1 billion users globally, placing it 4th behind the leading social networks of Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Featuring a sophisticated recommendation engine, TikTok mastered the art of keeping users... View Details
- January 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
OhmConnect: Energizing the Future
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller
Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households... View Details
Keywords: App Development; Renewable Energy; Electricity Usage; Regulations; VC; Technology; Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC); Scalability; Applications and Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business Model; Venture Capital; Energy Industry; United States; California; Texas; Europe
- January 2023
- Supplement
Apple: Privacy vs. Safety (B)
By: Henry McGee, Nien-hê Hsieh and Christian Godwin
In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, Apple and Google partnered to develop a contact tracing application that would collect information about users infected with the disease and notify those who they had been in contact with. While Apple/Google’s... View Details
Keywords: Iphone; Encryption; Data Privacy; Customers; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decision Making; Ethics; Values and Beliefs; Globalized Firms and Management; Government and Politics; Health; Health Pandemics; Leadership; Markets; Safety; Social Issues; Information Technology; Telecommunications Industry; Technology Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Electronics Industry; Health Industry; United States; Europe
- January 2023
- Case
Proday: Calling the Right Play
By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
Sarah Kunst knew the elements of a successful startup from her tenure at venture capital firms. In April 2018, however, her own app – Proday, a home fitness platform featuring exercises filmed by professional sports stars – was floundering. Kunst theorized that... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
Data-Driven COVID-19 Vaccine Development for Janssen
By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Michael Lingzhi Li, Xinggang Liu, Jennings Xu and Najat Khan
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred extensive vaccine research worldwide. One crucial part of vaccine development is the phase III clinical trial that assesses the vaccine for safety and efficacy in the prevention of COVID-19. In this work, we enumerate the first... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised September 2024)
- Case
Sword Health
By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Annelena Lobb and Carin-Isabel Knoop
Virgilio “V” Bento, CEO of Sword Health—a startup that provided virtual physical therapy to patients in self-insured firms via AI and sensor technology with supervision by a physical therapist with a doctorate—considered how to increase its U.S. market share. To do so,... 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
- November 2022 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Replika AI: Monetizing a Chatbot
By: Julian De Freitas and Nicole Tempest Keller
In early 2018, Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based chatbot Replika AI, was deciding how to monetize the app she had built. Launched in 2017, Replika was a consumer AI “companion app” developed by a team of AI software engineers originally based in... View Details
- August 2022
- Background Note
Retail Media Networks
By: Eva Ascarza, Ayelet Israeli and Celine Chammas
In 2022, retail media was one of the fastest growing segments in digital advertising. A retail media network (RMN) allows a retailer to use its assets for advertising. Retailers set up an advertising business by allowing marketers to buy advertising space across their... View Details
Keywords: Advertisers; Advertising Media; Media And Broadcasting Industry; Retail; Retail Analytics; Retail Promotion; Retailing; Ecommerce; E-Commerce Strategy; E-commerce; Marketing Communication; Targeting; Targeted Advertising; Targeted Marketing; Advertising; Marketing; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Media; Marketing Channels; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Advertising Industry; United States
- March 2022 (Revised July 2022)
- Teaching Note
Camera IQ and the Metaverse: Building Augmented Reality Brand Experiences
By: Jill Avery
Camera IQ, a camera marketing software company that empowered brands to create and launch augmented reality experiences (AREs) across social platforms, had just raised an additional $5 million to fund further product development and expand its marketing and sales... View Details
Keywords: Brand Management; Virtual Reality; Augmented Reality; B2B; E-commerce; Technology Platform; Marketing; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Digital Marketing; Internet and the Web; Growth Management; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Social Media; Applications and Software; Digital Platforms; Advertising Industry; United States
- March 2022 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Doubling Down: Elon Musk's Big Bets in 2022
By: David Yoffie and Daniel Fisher
2021 was a banner year for Elon Musk. CEO of the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, the aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, and a few smaller startups, Musk became the richest person on Earth after Tesla reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion and SpaceX a private... View Details
Keywords: Innovation and Management; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy; Information Infrastructure; Applications and Software; Transportation; Strategic Planning; Leadership Style; Leading Change; Goals and Objectives; Aerospace Industry; Auto Industry; Battery Industry; United States; Europe; China
- March 2022
- Article
Winner Takes All? Tech Clusters, Population Centers, and the Spatial Transformation of U.S. Invention
By: Brad Chattergoon and William R. Kerr
U.S. invention has become increasingly concentrated around major tech centers since the 1970s, with implications for how much cities across the country share in concomitant local benefits. Is invention becoming a winner-takes-all race? We explore the rising spatial... View Details
- February 23, 2022
- Article
Can WEB3 Bring Back Competition to Digital Platforms?
By: Christian Catalini and Scott Duke Kominers
Like the early Internet, blockchain and Web3 applications promise a new wave of decentralization and competition—yet at the same time, it is unclear which of the dynamics that drove concentration in online platforms and services will remain in force under the Web3... View Details
- February 2022
- Case
NFX Capital and Moov Technologies
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Nicole Tempest Keller
In July 2019, James Currier, a general partner at San Francisco-based NFX Ventures, was considering a seed stage investment of $1.5 million in Moov Technologies, a B2B marketplace for used industrial equipment. NFX was a venture capital firm focused on seed-stage... View Details
- January 2022
- Background Note
The Florange Law: Encouraging Long-Termism in Equity Markets?
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Tonia Labruyere
This note provides background information on a French law (“the Florange law”) passed in 2014 that the French government said would encourage long-term shareholdings. The note describes the law, what led to it, the reactions it evoked, and similar initiatives in other... View Details
- December 2021
- Case
Burning Glass Technologies: From Data to Product
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Amy Klopfenstein
In May 2021, Matt Sigelman, CEO of Burning Glass Technologies, a company that provided labor market analytics for a variety of markets, navigates his company’s transition from data company to product company. Burning Glass originated as a service that used artificial... View Details
Keywords: Information Technology; Applications and Software; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Strategy; Expansion; Business Strategy; Labor; Employment; Human Capital; Jobs and Positions; Job Design and Levels; Job Search; Human Resources; Selection and Staffing; Recruitment; Employees; Retention; Competency and Skills; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Analytics and Data Science; Business Model; Technology Industry; North and Central America; United States
- 2021
- Working Paper
Winner Takes All? Tech Clusters, Population Centers, and the Spatial Transformation of U.S. Invention
By: Brad Chattergoon and William R. Kerr
U.S. invention has become increasingly concentrated around major tech centers since the 1970s, with implications for how much cities across the country share in concomitant local benefits. Is invention becoming a winner-takes-all race? We explore the rising spatial... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Overcoming the Cold Start Problem of CRM Using a Probabilistic Machine Learning Approach
By: Nicolas Padilla and Eva Ascarza
The success of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs ultimately depends on the firm's ability to understand consumers' preferences and precisely capture how these preferences may differ across customers. Only by understanding customer heterogeneity, firms can... View Details