Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(672)
- Faculty Publications (96)
- March 2021
- Article
Increasing the Level of Abstraction as a Strategy for Accelerating the Adoption of Complex Technologies
By: Willy C. Shih
Many new technologies are complex and embody high levels of technical sophistication, and applying them should require significant knowledge and experience. Yet, the rapid adoption and incorporation of these technologies into other innovations seems inconsistent with... View Details
- December 2020 (Revised January 2022)
- Supplement
Michael Ku and Global Clinical Supply at Pfizer Inc.: Bringing Hope to Patients (B)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards
In 2011, Michael Ku became Pfizer’s Vice President of Global Clinical Supply (GCS) after the company had undergone three large-scale mergers and acquisitions. As Ku and his new leadership team set out to build a proactive, end-to-end, digital and physical clinical... View Details
Keywords: Digital Technology; Customer-centricity; Innovation; Customer Focus; Talent; Talent Management; Leadership; Innovation and Invention; Transformation; Organizational Culture; Customer Focus and Relationships; Change Management; Talent and Talent Management; Supply Chain; Mission and Purpose
- 2023
- Working Paper
Personalized Game Design for Improved User Retention and Monetization in Freemium Games
By: Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer and Julian Runge
One of the most crucial aspects and significant levers that gaming companies possess in designing
digital games is setting the level of difficulty, which essentially regulates the user’s ability to
progress within the game. This aspect is particularly significant in... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Hospital Allocation and Racial Disparities in Health Care
By: Amitabh Chandra, Pragya Kakani and Adam Sacarny
We develop a simple framework to measure the role of hospital allocation in racial disparities in health care and use it to study Black and white Medicare patients who are treated for heart attacks—a condition where virtually everyone receives care, hospital care is... View Details
- October 2020
- Case
Israelis, Palestinians and the Technology Bridge Between Them: A Work in Progress
By: Elie Ofek and Lia Weiner
In Israel of 2020 the demand for software engineers was endless. Meanwhile just miles away, Palestinian universities were graduating 3,000 engineers a year, and many of them could not find jobs in the still nascent Palestinian tech sector. Could these dots be... View Details
- September 2020
- Article
Creativity, Artificial Intelligence, and a World of Surprises
In recent years, progress has been made toward AI Creativity, which I define as the production of highly novel, yet appropriate, ideas, problem solutions, or other outputs by autonomous machines. I argue that organizational researchers of creativity and innovation... View Details
- September 2020
- Teaching Note
Miami's Tech Future (C): Reaching Another Miami
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Joyce J. Kim
The effects of Miami’s startup scene have not reached many “left-behind” lower-income Black communities, which are disproportionately affected by problems such as segregation and racial discrimination, lack of transportation access, crime, education quality, government... View Details
Keywords: Technology; Change; Transformation; Progress; Community; Scaling; Income Inequality; Racism; Community Impact; Community Relations; Change Management; Business Startups; Information Technology; Diversity; Race; Equality and Inequality; Social Issues; Business and Community Relations; Miami; Florida
- July 15, 2020
- Article
How to Get People to Actually Use Contact-Tracing Apps
By: Chiara Farronato, Marco Iansiti, Marcin Bartosiak, Stefano Denicolai, Luca Ferretti and Roberto Fontana
The broad adoption of contact-tracing apps would greatly help combat the spread of COVID-19. But a number of barriers—especially privacy concerns—have hindered progress in many countries that can’t or won’t mandate adoption. A solution is to start with small... View Details
- December 2019
- Article
What Is Different About Digital Strategy?: From Quantitative to Qualitative Change
By: Ron Adner, Phanish Puranam and Feng Zhu
The recent attention paid to the challenge of digital transformation signals an inflection point in the impact of digital technology on the competitive landscape. We suggest that this transition can be understood as a shift from the quantitative advances that have... View Details
- April 2019
- Supplement
Upwork in 2019
By: David Yoffie and Allison M. Ciechanover
Stephane Kasriel, the CEO of Upwork, the leading platform for freelance labor, updates his progress on how to redesign its business model in 2019. 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; Technology Industry; San Francisco; United States
- April 2018
- Case
Miami's Tech Future (Abridged): Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Leadership Challenges
By the middle of the 1990s, Miami’s reputation was changing. An influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants and major investments in the airport and seaport had changed the image of a sleepy southern city to the de facto business center of Latin America, a center for... View Details
- Article
Space, the Final Economic Frontier
After decades of centralized control of economic activity in space, NASA and U.S. policymakers have begun to cede the direction of human activities in space to commercial companies. NASA garnered more than 0.7% of GDP in the mid-1960s but is only around 0.1% of GDP... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
Transportation Cost and the Geography of Foreign Investment
By: Laura Alfaro and Maggie Chen
Falling transportation costs and rapid technological progress in recent decades have precipitated an explosion of cross-border flows in goods, services, investments, and ideas led by multinational firms. Extensive research has sought to understand the geographic... View Details
- November 2017 (Revised September 2020)
- Supplement
Miami's Tech Future (C): Reaching Another Miami
The effects of Miami’s startup scene have not reached many “left-behind” lower-income Black communities, which are disproportionately affected by problems such as segregation and racial discrimination, lack of transportation access, crime, education quality, government... View Details
Keywords: Technology; Change; Transformation; Progress; Scaling; Startup; Community Engagement; Community Impact; Community Relations; Future; Income Inequality; Business; Change Management; Business Startups; Information Technology; Diversity; Race; Equality and Inequality; Social Issues; Business and Community Relations; Miami; Florida
- October 2017 (Revised November 2017)
- Case
NYC311
By: Constantine E. Kontokosta, Mitchell Weiss, Christine Snively and Sarah Gulick
Joe Morrisroe, executive director for NYC311, had some gut instincts but no definitive answer to the question he was just asked by one of the mayor’s deputies: “Are some communities being underserved by 311? How do we know we are hearing from the right people?” Founded... View Details
Keywords: New York City; NYC; 311; NYC311; Big Data; Equal Access; Bias; Data Analysis; Public Entrepreneurship; Urban Informatics; Predictive Analytics; Chief Data Officer; Data Analytics; Cities; City Leadership; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Prejudice and Bias; Entrepreneurship; Public Sector; City; Public Administration Industry; New York (city, NY)
- April 2017
- Case
Planetary Resources Inc., Property Rights, and the Regulation of the Space Economy
By: Matthew Weinzierl and Angela Acocella
Planetary Resources, Inc. (PRI) had a bold, some said crazy, vision: to mine asteroids. One might have assumed that developing the right technology would be the greatest challenge facing PRI. But even if the fledgling company could develop and deploy the sophisticated... View Details
- 2017
- Chapter
Multinational Activity in Emerging Markets: How and When Does Foreign Direct Investment Promote Growth?
By: Laura Alfaro
Among the prominent economic trends in recent decades is the exponential increase in flows of goods and capital driven by technological progress and a falling number of restrictions. A key driver of this phenomenon has been the cross-border production, foreign... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Innovation Network
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit and William Kerr
Technological progress builds upon itself, with the expansion of invention in one domain propelling future work in linked fields. Our analysis uses 1.8 million U.S. patents and their citation properties to map the innovation network and its strength. Past innovation... View Details
- October 11, 2016
- Article
Innovation Network
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr
Technological progress builds upon itself, with the expansion of invention in one domain propelling future work in linked fields. Our analysis uses 1.8 million U.S. patents and their citation properties to map the innovation network and its strength. Past innovation... View Details