Publications

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June 2010
Case

The Shaw Group Inc.: Entrepreneurial Innovation

By: Lynda M. Applegate and Edward Watson

The case describes the founding and evolution of the Shaw Group through acquisition. The case is set at the time that the company is redesigning its business processes, organization, and information technology infrastructure to support aggressive growth and increased... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention; Leadership; Growth and Development Strategy; Infrastructure; Business Processes; Organizational Design; Information Technology

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2022
Article

Data Poisoning Attacks on Off-Policy Evaluation Methods

By: Elita Lobo, Harvineet Singh, Marek Petrik, Cynthia Rudin and Himabindu Lakkaraju

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are a crucial tool for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where exploration is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. However, the extent to which such methods can be trusted under adversarial threats... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Cybersecurity; Mathematical Methods

Keywords: Professor Elton Mayo: Professor Fritz Roethlisberger; George M. Moffett Professor of Agriculture and Business, Professor Emeritus Ray A. Goldberg; Professor Abraham Zaleznik; Professor Alfred Chandler; Professor Michael Porter; Professor Robert S. Kaplan; Professor Michael C. Jensen; Professor C. Roland Christensen; Professor Robert Menton; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

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01 Sep 2012
News

An Intellectual Capital: Some Influential HBS Ideas, at a Glance

The Balanced Scorecard, an influential book on strategic performance management and control. 1997 Robert Merton and Myron Scholes win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for a new method to determine the value View Details

October 2023
Case

Leading Transformation at IHCL

By: Krishna G. Palepu, V.G. Narayanan and Malini Sen

In November 2017, Puneet Chhatwal, took charge as MD and CEO of IHCL, popularly referred to as the Taj Hotels. Despite being India’s largest hospitality company by market capitalization and respected for its values and service, IHCL had made losses for the last seven... View Details

Keywords: Turn Around Management; Hospitality Industry; Brand Management; Financial Strategy; Business Model; Restructuring; Asset Management; Leadership Style; Crisis Management; Brands and Branding; Product Positioning; Segmentation; Asia; India

2015
Article

The Corporate Headquarters in the Contemporary Corporation: Advancing a Multimarket Firm Perspective

By: Markus Menz, Sven Kunisch and David J. Collis

The corporate headquarters (CHQ) is the central organizational unit in the contemporary corporation and is critical for value creation in the overall firm. Since the early 1960s, a significant body of research on the CHQ has evolved along two separate but related... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Headquarters; Corporate Center; Corporate Parent; Corporate Strategy; Multimarket Firm; Multibusiness Firm; Multinational Corporation; Management; Organizations; Strategy

05 Nov 2009
Research & Ideas

A Market for Human Cadavers in All but Name?

however, that it should not be a political one. The role of scholars is to provide the empirical input to inform the political debate. References Agthong, S., and V. Wiwanitkit. 2002. "Cadaver donation:... View Details

Keywords: by Michel Anteby; Health

September 1991 (Revised March 2005)
Case

WPP Group and Its Acquisitions

By: William J. Bruns Jr.

WPP Group acquired J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather, paying high premiums in relation to earnings. In each acquisition the goodwill acquired was immediately charged off against owners' equity. Then, WPP Group established a value for the brand names of the two... View Details

Keywords: Goodwill Accounting; Accounting; Brands and Branding; Product Positioning; Market Transactions; Equity; Private Equity; Relationships; Mergers and Acquisitions; Management Style; Consumer Products Industry; United States; United Kingdom

2016
Chapter

How Moral Flexibility Constrains Our Moral Compass

By: F. Gino

Cheating, fraud, deception, uncooperative actions, and many other forms of unethical behavior are among the greatest personal and societal challenges of our time. While the media commonly focuses on the most sensational scams (e.g., Enron, Bernard Madoff), less... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Organizations; Attitudes

January 2019 (Revised October 2019)
Case

Rural Taobao: Alibaba's Expansion into Rural E-Commerce

By: Tarun Khanna, Ryan Allen, Adam Frost and Wesley Koo

Alibaba's Rural Taobao initiative had been launched in 2014 as a public service initiative to increase e-commerce adoption in China’s remote rural areas. In the first two iterations of the initiative, dubbed “1.0” and “2.0,” Alibaba had partnered with local businesses... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Business Growth; Ecommerce; Corporate Social Responsibility; Business And Government; Emerging Market; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Emerging Markets; Rural Scope; Growth and Development Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Government Relations; Decision Making; E-commerce; China

July 2008 (Revised September 2008)
Case

Work is Good: Branding the Employ+Ability Mission

By: Lynda M. Applegate, Monica Higgins and Susan Saltrick

Employ+Ability, a small company employing developmentally disabled adults, finds itself competing with low-cost producers of its core products-therapeutic hot and cold packs. How might an innovative branding campaign, centered on the company's core value of "Work Is... View Details

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Values and Beliefs; Brands and Branding; Competition

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April 2019
Article

Score Blending: How Scale Response Grouping Biases Perceived Standing

By: Ryan Hauser and Norbert Schwarz

Numerical values—from test scores to credit scores—inform us of our relative standing and can shape our decisions. The values are usually presented in a continuous format (which places scores on a single line) or a grouped format (which separates scores into several... View Details

Keywords: Decision-making; Scale; Decision Making; Perception

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2015
Working Paper

Bottlenecks, Modules and Dynamic Architectural Capabilities

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

How do firms create and capture value in large technical systems? In this paper, I argue that the points of both value creation and value capture are the system's bottlenecks. Bottlenecks arise first as important technical problems to be solved. Once the problem is... View Details

Keywords: Architecture; Architectural Knowledge; Dynamic Capabilities; Bottleneck; Modularity; Organization Design; Organization Boundaries; Property Rights; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure

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21 Jan 2021
Video

Laila Tyabji

Laila Tyabji, Chairperson of Dastkar, an NGO supporting traditional Indian craftspeople, explains her start-up process without a background or experience in management and how it happened in an informal and organic way. View Details

18 Jun 2012
News

Web Sites Illuminate Unknown Artists

March 2024 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Masterpiece for the Masses: The First Art Exchange ARTEX

By: Lauren Cohen, Anastasiya Siroochenko (Siro) and Sophia Pan

Yassir Benjelloun-Touimi, CEO of ARTEX, aspired to marry the world of art and finance. Hoping to promote transparent, fractionalized ownership of renowned artwork, the founder had spent years contemplating the birth of an art stock market. This exchange would allow... View Details

November 2012 (Revised May 2013)
Case

ASUSTeK and the Google Nexus 7 Tablet

By: Willy C. Shih and Jyun-Cheng Wang

Days after Jerry Shen introduced a new tablet computer at the Consumer Electronics Show, a Google meeting convinced him to go with a lower price point and co-branding as the Nexus 7. While his company would have a premier position at launch, companies like Samsung... View Details

January 2021 (Revised June 2023)
Case

Biobot Analytics

By: Raymond Kluender, Joshua Krieger and Mitchell Weiss

In 2017, Newsha Ghaeli and Mariana Matus were deciding whether to leave their labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put other job opportunities aside, and dive full-time into founding a wastewater analysis start-up, Biobot. Ghaeli, an architect, and Matus,... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Information Technology; City; Analytics and Data Science; Personal Development and Career; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States; Kuwait; Korean Peninsula