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- 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
- February 2017
- Supplement
The De Beers Group: Exploring the Diamond Reselling Opportunity
By: Benjamin C. Esty, Daniel P. Gross and Lauren G. Pickle
In September 2014, Tom Montgomery (SVP of strategic initiatives at the De Beers Group) and his team launched a pilot program in the United States to explore the $1 billion diamond market for pre-owned (recycled) diamonds. According to Montgomery, the motivation for the... View Details
Keywords: Diamonds; Go-to-market Strategy; Secondary Market; Willingness To Pay; Pilot Program; Strategy Development; Strategy Execution; Scope; Marketing; Advertising; Branding; Customer Value; Pawn Shops; Jewelry; Supply And Demand; Corporate Strategy; Business Strategy; Vertical Integration; Advertising Campaigns; Value Creation; Mining Industry; Mining Industry; Mining Industry; Mining Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Africa; Botswana; South Africa; Namibia
- February 2017 (Revised May 2018)
- Case
The Flint, Michigan Sit-Down Strike
By: Tom Nicholas, Christopher T. Stanton and Matthew Preble
For roughly six weeks between late December 1936 and February 1937, a major strike at several critical General Motors (GM) plants in Flint, Michigan, essentially halted the corporation’s U.S. production and resulted in significant gains for the nascent United... View Details
Keywords: Industrial Unionism; Craft Unionism; Welfare Capitalism; General Motors; Labor; Labor Unions; Labor and Management Relations; Wages; Working Conditions; Government Legislation; Business History; Business and Government Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Business and Community Relations; Mining Industry; Mining Industry; Mining Industry; Mining Industry; United States; Michigan
- February 2017 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
The De Beers Group: Exploring the Diamond Reselling Opportunity
By: Benjamin C. Esty, Daniel P. Gross and Lauren G. Pickle
In September 2014, Tom Montgomery (SVP of strategic initiatives at the De Beers Group) and his team launched a pilot program in the United States to explore the $1 billion diamond market for pre-owned (recycled) diamonds. According to Montgomery, the motivation for the... View Details
Keywords: Diamonds; Go-to-market Strategy; Secondary Market; Willingness To Pay; Pilot Program; Strategy Development; Strategy Execution; Scope; Marketing; Advertising; Branding; Customer Value; Pawn Shops; Jewelry; Supply And Demand; Corporate Strategy; Business Strategy; Vertical Integration; Advertising Campaigns; Value Creation; Mining Industry; Mining Industry; Mining Industry; Mining Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Africa; Botswana; South Africa; Namibia
- Article
National Image as a Competitive Disadvantage: The Case of the New Zealand Organic Food Industry
By: Geoffrey Jones and Simon Mowatt
This article examines why organic agriculture and food consumption developed more strongly in some countries than others between the 1970s and the 2000s. The focus is the limited growth of the New Zealand organic sector, which contrasts with countries such as Denmark,... View Details
- May 2016 (Revised April 2019)
- Case
Olivia Lum: Wanting to Save the World
By: Geoffrey Jones and Essie Alamsyah
This case considers the entrepreneurial career of Olivia Lum, who founded the Singaporean water company Hyflux in 1989. An orphan born in Malaysia, Lum provides a rare case of an entrepreneurial success in a country whose economic success has primarily rested on... View Details
Keywords: Industrial Organization; Chinitz; Agglomeration; Clusters; Cities; Mine; Environmental Management; Operations Management; Sustainable Operations; Environmental Regulation; Entrepreneurship; Globalization; History; Operations; Management; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology Industry; Utilities Industry; China; Singapore
- 2016
- Book
Antonio Serra and the Economics of Good Government
By: Rosario Patalano and Sophus A. Reinert
Little is known of Antonio Serra except that he wrote his extraordinary 1613 Short Treatise on the Causes That Make Kingdoms Abound in Gold and Silver even in the Absence of Mines in a Neapolitan jail and that he died there soon afterwards. However, the... View Details
- 2016
- Case
Africa Strategy of China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group
By: F. Warren McFarlan, Jie Jiao, Dayong Yang and Shanshan Cao
Founded in 1983, China Nonferrous Metal Mining (Group) Co., Ltd. ("CNMC") is one of the earliest and largest global Chinese nonferrous metal industrial enterprises. It has investments and projects in 27 countries and trade networks in nearly 100 countries with a... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised March 2018)
- Case
Labor, Capital, and Government: The Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902
By: David Moss and Marc Campasano
In late October 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt felt relieved after months of anxiety and uncertainty. Workers in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal industry had been on strike for five months, threatening to leave eastern cities in the cold without enough heating fuel... View Details
- Article
Mining Big Data to Extract Patterns and Predict Real-Life Outcomes
By: Michal Kosinki, Yilun Wang, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Jure Leskovec
- 2015
- Book
The Impact of Globalization on Argentina and Chile: Business Enterprises and Entrepreneurship
By: Geoffrey Jones and Andrea Lluch
This book compares the effects of globalization on two Latin American countries, Argentina and Chile, over time. The chapters examine the impact of multinationals, the growth of business groups, and the conflicted relations between business and government. The book... View Details
- October 2015
- Teaching Note
Molycorp: Financing the Production of Rare Earth Minerals (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott Mayfield
Molycorp, the western hemisphere's only producer of rare earth minerals, was in the middle of a $1 billion capital expenditure project in its effort to become a vertically integrated supplier of rare earth minerals, oxides, and metals. Yet it had just reported lower... View Details
Keywords: Convertible Debt; Uncertainty; Competition; Startup; China; Supply ＆ Demand; Growth; Rare Earth Minerals; Discounted Cash Flows; Mining; Payoff Diagrams; Option Pricing; Capital Budgeting; Capital Structure; Cash Flow; Financial Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Vertical Integration; Valuation; Metals and Minerals; Mining Industry; Mining Industry; Canada; California
- October 2015 (Revised January 2017)
- Case
UPower Technologies Inc.
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, William A. Sahlman and Liz Kind
The UPower founders, Jake DeWitte and Caroline Cochran, were recent graduates from MIT's Nuclear Science and Engineering Department. They chose to attend Palo Alto–based Y Combinator's accelerator program to focus on building a "mini" nuclear reactor that would produce... View Details
Keywords: Nuclear; Nuclear Energy; Nuclear Power; Energy Markets; New Nuclear; Entrepreneurial Finance; Entrepreneurial Marketing; Business ＆ Government Relations; Off-grid; Energy; Renewable Energy; Energy Generation; Energy Sources; Entrepreneurship; Marketing; Business and Government Relations; Energy Industry; Utilities Industry; United States
- Article
Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines
By: Edward L. Glaeser, Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr
We study entrepreneurship and growth through the lens of U.S. cities. Initial entrepreneurship correlates strongly with urban employment growth, but endogeneity bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near cities led to specialization in... View Details
- 2015
- Article
Scalable Detection of Anomalous Patterns With Connectivity Constraints
By: Skyler Speakman, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill
We present GraphScan, a novel method for detecting arbitrarily shaped connected clusters in graph or network data. Given a graph structure, data observed at each node, and a score function defining the anomalousness of a set of nodes, GraphScan can efficiently and... View Details
- March 2015
- Case
Statoil: Transparency on Payments to Governments
By: George Serafeim
The Statoil case describes the challenge of increasing transparency, in extractive industries, around host county government payments. The case describes Statoil's reasoning behind voluntarily disclosing host country government payments, and the events that led to this... View Details
Keywords: Corruption; Disclosure; Disclosure Strategy; Regulation; Industry Self-regulation; Corporate Governance; Corporate Accountability; Bribery; Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility; Government Legislation; Cost vs Benefits; Corporate Disclosure; Mining; Mining Industry; United States
- March 2015 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Putting the Guiding Principles into Action: Human Rights at Barrick Gold (A)
By: Rebecca Henderson and Nien-he Hsieh
In 2010, Human Rights Watch, a well-regarded international NGO, approached Barrick Gold asserting that members of the company’s security force at the Porgera Gold Mine in Papua New Guinea had on multiple occasions raped women who were trespassing onto the mine’s waste... View Details
- February 2015 (Revised March 2016)
- Case
China Shenhua Energy Company
By: Forest L. Reinhardt, G. A. Donovan and Keith Chi-ho Wong
A leading Chinese energy firm, active in coal mining and electric power generation, analyzes coal-to-liquids technology in light of energy security and environmental concerns. View Details
- January 2015
- Case
Chevron Under Fire
By: George Serafeim, Rebecca Henderson and Christine Snively
Oil giant, Chevron, faced numerous challenges on environmental, social and governance (ESG) grounds in the first decade of the 21st century, including some major lawsuits and actions by NGOs. The case describes those challenges and raises questions about what is the... View Details
- Article
Doing Business with Strangers: Reputation in Online Service Marketplaces
By: Antonio Moreno and Christian Terwiesch
Online service marketplaces allow service buyers to post their project requests and service providers to bid for them. To reduce the transactional risks, marketplaces typically track and publish previous seller performance. By analyzing a detailed transactional data... View Details