Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(559)
- Faculty Publications (81)
- Article
Navigating Talent Hot Spots
By: William R. Kerr
Innovation clusters like San Francisco and Boston have long had an outsize impact on the global economy, and their influence keeps growing. In 2017, for instance, America’s ten largest tech hubs accounted for 58% of U.S. patents. Globally, cities such as Tokyo, Paris,... View Details
- June 2018
- Case
Candor at Clever
By: Ethan Bernstein and Om Lala
Clever, a high-growth EdTech company based in San Francisco, had grown quickly in market share and headcount. As with many high-growth companies, however, early employees (many of whom had never managed people before) had been given the opportunity to manage teams, and... View Details
Keywords: Performance Feedback; Talent Development And Retention; Talent Management; Feedback; Difficult Conversations; Radical Candor; Scaling Start-ups; Scaling And Growth; Developing Effective Managers; Effective Managers; First-time Managers; Kim Scott; Clever; Bay Area; Silicon Valley; Interpersonal Communication; Talent and Talent Management; Human Resources; Leadership Development; Management Practices and Processes; Management Skills; Management Style; Organizations; Organizational Culture; Performance Evaluation; Conflict and Resolution; Technology Industry; Education Industry; San Francisco; United States
- May 2018 (Revised October 2018)
- Case
Urban Us
By: Mitchell Weiss and Phoebe Peronto
Shaun Abrahamson and Stonly Baptiste aimed to invest in what they called "urbantech superheroes." At Urban Us, the seed-stage urban technology-focused venture capital firm the two started in 2012, they looked for startups innovating around the future of cities. By... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised August 2019)
- Case
The Rise Fund: TPG Bets Big on Impact
By: Vikram S. Gandhi, Caitlin Reimers Brumme and Sarah Mehta
It is March 2017, and TPG, a global alternative investment firm with $74 billion assets under management, has recently launched its inaugural impact-investing fund—the $2 billion Rise Fund. In an effort to “take the religion out of impact investing,” Maya Chorengel,... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
The Tax Man: Taxes in Private Equity Real Estate
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz, Timothy J. Becker, Ricardo Andrade and Sayiddah F. McCree
In January 2018, Caelan Langan, an associate at KSW Partners LLC (“KSW”), was asked by Katherine Scott, the partner for whom he worked, to recommend a proposed structure to acquire a prominent office building in San Francisco for their most recent fund. Caelan was... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
Rise of the Drones: Identified Technologies
By: Andy Wu and George Gonzalez
The founder and CEO of Identified Technologies, a Pittsburgh-based drone software and services company, faces a dilemma when San Francisco–based DroneDeploy begins to disrupt the industry with its drone software platform. Identified Technologies needs to consider... View Details
- January 2017 (Revised October 2021)
- Case
Delivering the Goods at Shippo
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Jeffrey F. Rayport and Olivia Hull
Laura Behrens Wu, CEO of software start-up Shippo, prepares her pitch for a Series A funding round following a successful seed round. Customer adoption of Shippo’s e-commerce dashboard application, which allows small and medium retailers to compare delivery rates... View Details
Keywords: Application Program Interface; API; API Strategy; Customer Cohorts; Churn; Retention; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Strategy; Transition; Customer Focus and Relationships; Technological Innovation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Valuation; Shipping Industry; Technology Industry; Retail Industry; San Francisco; California; United States
- January 2017
- Supplement
Hello Alfred: Come Home Happy — Operating the Business Model Exercise
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Christopher Payton
On a mission to "automate the on-demand economy," Harvard Business School classmates Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck launched Hello Alfred in 2013 to provide subscribers with an "Alfred" to complete various chores for a monthly fee. In early 2016, the company has built... View Details
- December 2016
- Case
thredUP: Think Secondhand First
By: Thomas Eisenmann, Allison Ciechanover and Jeff Huizinga
In the fall of 2016, the management team at thredUP, the largest U.S. online retailer of second hand clothing, is deciding whether to expand into international markets. Over the past 12 months the 7-year-old startup, which had raised over $130 million in venture... View Details
- October 2016 (Revised March 2019)
- Case
Carrum Health: Scaling Bundled Payments
By: Robert S. Huckman and Sarah Mehta
Founded in 2014, Carrum Health helped self-insured employers located in three markets (San Diego, California; Seattle, Washington; and San Francisco, California) save money on their employees’ planned surgeries. It did so by contracting directly with top-quality... View Details
Keywords: Health Financing; Health Insurance; Value-based Healthcare Reimbursements; Bundled Payments; Innovation; Scale; Health; Health Care and Treatment; Cost Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Decision Choices and Conditions; Health Industry; California; San Francisco; San Diego; Seattle
- Article
Invention and Agglomeration in the Bay Area: Not Just ICT
By: Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb and Shane Greenstein
We document that the Bay Area rose from 4% of all successful US patent applications in 1976 to 16% in 2008. This is partly driven by the increase in the prevalence of information and communication technology; however, even for patents unrelated to information and... View Details
- March 2016 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
Hello Alfred: Come Home Happy
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Carin-Isabel Knoop
On a mission to "automate the on-demand economy," Harvard Business School classmates Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck launched Hello Alfred in 2013 to provide subscribers with an "Alfred" to complete various chores for a monthly fee. In early 2016, the company has built... View Details
- January 2016
- Case
Open Innovation at Fujitsu (A)
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey
This case study examines the open innovation journey at Fujitsu, a global information and communication technology company. The case ends with the location decision between Tokyo, Japan, downtown San Francisco or Sunnyvale, California, regarding establishing a small... View Details
Keywords: Open Innovation; Collaboration; Culture Change; Leadership; Japan; United States; Inter-organizational Relationships; Teaming; Maker Movement; Nascent Industries; Change Management; Leading Change; Organizational Culture; Emerging Markets; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Sunnyvale; Tokyo; San Francisco
- February 2015
- Case
Founder Field Day
By: Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, Ramana Nanda and Nathaniel Burbank
Branded as the "Millennial firm for Millennials," Mike Rothenberg founded Rothenberg Ventures (RV) in 2012 while earning his MBA at the Harvard Business School (HBS). Over the following 24 months, Rothenberg raised $20 million and built a venture capital firm that made... View Details
- January 2015 (Revised March 2015)
- Case
San Francisco, 2015 #tech #inequality
By: Clayton Rose, Allison Ciechanover and Kunal Modi
In December 2013 a group of angry protesters blocked one of the commuter buses provided by the large Silicon Valley firms (known as "Google buses") which was stopped in San Francisco on its way to the company's headquarters 40 miles south. The protests were a tangible... View Details
- October 2014 (Revised May 2015)
- Case
HandsOn Bay Area: Scaling Up Community Service
By: James Heskett
HandsOn Bay Area, an organization devoted to the performance of (and development of leaders for) community service, is undergoing a significant (and internally controversial) shift in its business model from "retail" projects involving individual volunteers to... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
The Organizational and Geographic Drivers of Absorptive Capacity: An Empirical Analysis of Pharmaceutical R&D Laboratories
By: Francesca Lazzeri and Gary P. Pisano
Scholars and practitioners alike now recognize that a firm's capacity to assimilate and use know-how from external sources—what Cohen and Levinthal (1990) called "absorptive capacity"—plays a central role in innovation performance. In recent years, a common strategy... View Details
- December 2012
- Article
The Microwork Solution: A New Approach to Outsourcing Can Support Economic Development—and Add to Your Bottom Line
By: Francesca Gino and Bradely R. Staats
What's the best way to lift people out of poverty? The social entrepreneurs in the new "impact sourcing" industry believe the answer is providing work, not aid. Their organizations hire people at the bottom of the pyramid to perform digital tasks such as transcribing... View Details
- October 2011 (Revised August 2017)
- Case
PunchTab, Inc.
By: Ramana Nanda, William R. Kerr and Lauren Barley
PunchTab was a Silicon Valley startup, founded in 2011, that was developing an Internet-based turnkey customer loyalty program for website owners, mobile applications developers, and brands. Founder/CEO Ranjith Kumaran must make strategic decisions about how to fund... View Details
- September 2011 (Revised March 2014)
- Case
Airbnb
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Evan W. Richardson
Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, the three founders of Airbnb, an online private accommodation rental market, stared at each other across the kitchen table in their San Francisco apartment. It was March of 2009. A single sheet of paper sat on the table... View Details