Publications

December 13, 2022
Article

What Elon Musk Can Learn from Steve Jobs’s Return to Apple

By: Andy Wu and Goran Calic

Changing the strategic direction of an existing company is among the hardest management challenges out there. Most attempts fail. In trying to remake Twitter, Elon Musk has a daunting task ahead of him. There’s precedent, however, for dramatically reimagining a major... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Corporate Strategy; Change Management; Transformation

17 Jul 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, July 17, 2018

Spring 2018 Journal of Cold War Studies The Enemy of My Enemy: The Soviet Union, East Germany, and the Iranian Tudeh Party's Support for Ayatollah Khomeini By: Friedman, Jeremy Abstract—This article examines the strategy of the Iranian Tudeh Party in concert with its... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

March 2021
Teaching Plan

The Black New Venture Competition

By: Karen G. Mills, Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Martin A. Sinozich and Gabriella Elanbeck

Black entrepreneurs encounter many unique obstacles when raising capital to start and grow a business, some stemming from deep systemic discrimination. During their second year at Harvard Business School (HBS), MBA students Kimberly Foster and Tyler Simpson decided to... View Details

17 Sep 2020
Blog Post

HBS Grads Launch Cybersecurity Nonprofit to Fight Infodemic

Bastian took a gap between RC and EC to launch an e-commerce startup in Indonesia. Upon selling the startup, he plunged himself in the world of fighting against disinformation and started humanID. Shuyao Kong (MBA 2020), a native Chinese, spent most of her career in... View Details

August 2015
Case

Yesware (A)

By: Shikhar Ghosh, Christopher Payton and Ali Huberlie

Matthew Bellows founded Yesware, a Boston-based tech startup, to solve a problem that he'd encountered as a sales manager: sales people hate entering data, rarely do it accurately, and almost always input data that can't be synthesized in a way that is useful for the... View Details

Keywords: Firing; Culture Change; Startup; Technology; Hiring; Entrepreneurship; Negotiation; Sales; Human Resources; Technology Industry; Boston

10 Jul 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, July 10, 2018

this article, the author suggests that tech pioneers would do well to heed a lesson he’s gleaned from his research in the developing world: For long-term success, companies must invest in the surrounding ecosystem. The author presents... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

13 Jan 2023
Blog Post

Video: Introduction to the Harvard MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences

capitalists and getting feedback. When you finish the program, you're in a great position to go out and immediately launch a new tech venture. Roberto Verganti: I mean, our focus is especially on how you frame a problem. If an... View Details

August 2016
Supplement

Videojet (B)

By: Raffaella Sadun, Bharat Anand and Eric Van den Steen

In 2005 Craig Purse, the CEO of Videojet, a company recently acquired by the conglomerate Danaher, is dealing with the unexpected failure of a new high tech printer just launched in the market. The new product exemplified the first real instance in which the Videojet... View Details

Keywords: Managerial Processes; Conglomerates; Diversification; Relational Contracts; Corporate Strategy; Manufacturing Industry

17 Jun 2022
News

In Defense of Online Anonymity

February 2018 (Revised August 2019)
Case

Amazon's HQ2 (A)

By: Karen Mills and Jan W. Rivkin

In September 2017, the Internet giant Amazon announced that it aimed to open a second headquarters in some city other than Seattle, its current home base. By 2032, the company projected, this “HQ2” would be home to as many as 50,000 high-paying tech jobs and up to $5... View Details

Keywords: Economic Development; Headquarters; Local Government; Incentives; Business Headquarters; Business and Government Relations; Development Economics

February 2024
Case

Vespucci Partners: The New World of Venture Capital in Hungary

By: Paul A. Gompers, Tonia Labruyere and Emilie Billaud

Julia Sohajda was the young, female founding partner of the Hungarian VC firm Vespucci Partners, which focused on investing at seed stage into Hungarian deep tech startups and prepare them for a launch in the U.S market. Vespucci's first fund had largely been comprised... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Business Startups; Investment Funds; Financing and Loans; Entrepreneurship; Financial Services Industry; Hungary; United States

01 Nov 2019
News

What Does It Mean to Lead?

July 2024
Case

Jacqueline Cook at Vendasta: Debating an IPO

By: Reza Satchu, Tom Quinn and Andrew Kosc

In May 2021, after a surge in demand for digital services that prompted high valuations for startups across the Canadian tech sector, Saskatchewan-based Vendasta entered the final stages of the initial public offering (IPO) process. COO Jacqueline Cook had invested her... View Details

April 18, 2023
Article

The Rebirth of Software as a Service

By: Frank V. Cespedes and Jacco van der Kooij

Traditional sales models focus on customer acquisition and the “funnel” or “pipeline” metrics that dominate talk about sales. But this approach falls short when applied to a recurring revenue business, where the customer life cycle looks more like a bowtie, not a... View Details

Keywords: Customers; Sales; Technology Industry

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24 Dec 2018
News

Indicators Of The Year: Immigration

April 2023 (Revised February 2024)
Case

AI Wars

By: Andy Wu, Matt Higgins, Miaomiao Zhang and Hang Jiang

In February 2024, the world was looking to Google to see what the search giant and long-time putative technical leader in artificial intelligence (AI) would do to compete in the massively hyped technology of generative AI. Over a year ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a... View Details

Keywords: AI; Artificial Intelligence; AI and Machine Learning; Technology Adoption; Competitive Strategy; Technological Innovation

April 2021 (Revised May 2021)
Case

Kitopi: The Brave New World of Cloud Kitchens

By: Antonio Moreno and Gamze Yucaoglu

The case opens in February 2021 as Mohamad Ballout, co-founder and CEO of Kitopi, a Dubai-based managed cloud kitchen platform, is looking over the company’s 2020 results. Propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, delivery orders had been on the rise globally and dine-in... View Details

Keywords: Cloud Kitchens; Food; Operations; Growth and Development Strategy; Decision Choices and Conditions; Food and Beverage Industry; Middle East; North Africa

One of the most popular conversations I have with entrepreneurs I work with is how to improve their recruiting and hiring strategy. I love when they dive into this topic early on because it’s one of the hardest parts of running any company, no matter how small or... View Details

November 2023
Case

Chai Point

By: Rembrand Koning, Daniel W. Elfenbein and Kanika Jain

Chai Point was an Indian food and beverage company focused on chai. It started in 2010 as a retail store network but soon expanded to corporate offices by developing an IoT-enabled automatic tea and filter coffee machine. By 2023, Chai Point had 170 stores and 5000... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Food; Resource Allocation; Vertical Integration; Expansion; Food and Beverage Industry; Technology Industry; Retail Industry; India