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- December 2017 (Revised November 2018)
- Case
Tesla: Merging with SolarCity
By: Stuart C. Gilson and Sarah L. Abbott
In 2016, electric car manufacturer Tesla announced that it was making an offer to acquire solar panel manufacturer SolarCity in an all-stock offer worth $2.6 billion in Tesla stock. Tesla’s co-founder and CEO, Elon Musk, believed that the merger would generate... View Details
- December 2017 (Revised December 2018)
- Case
OCP Group
By: Kristin Fabbe, Forest Reinhardt, Natalie Kindred and Alpana Thapar
This case explores the strategy of OCP Group, the 95% state-owned Moroccan firm charged with managing the North African country’s vast reserves of phosphate. Phosphate was one of the most vital macronutrients for plant health, along with nitrogen and potassium, and... View Details
- December 2017 (Revised January 2018)
- Case
Alltech
By: David E. Bell and Natalie Kindred
Alltech was a Lexington, Kentucky–based producer of supplements for animal feed, with revenues of over $2 billion (projected to reach $3 billion in 2018), sales in 120 countries, 5,000 employees, and 100 manufacturing plants worldwide. For nearly four decades, Alltech... View Details
Keywords: Alltech; United States; Agribusiness; Agriculture; Animal; Animal Agriculture; Animal Feed; Livestock; Family Business; Vertical Integration; Strategy; Growth; Feed Additives; Feed Supplements; Kentucky; Growth Strategy; Family Businesses; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Acquisition; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Model; Change Management; Trends; Governance; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development; Intellectual Property; Leadership; Management; Markets; Organizational Culture; Private Ownership; Science; Quality; Risk and Uncertainty; Research; Sales; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States; Kentucky; Brazil; China
- 2017
- Working Paper
Creating the Market for Organic Wine: Sulfites, Certification, and Green Values
By: Geoffrey Jones and Emily Grandjean
This working paper examines the history of organic wine, which provides a case study of failed category creation. The modern organic wine industry emerged during the 1970s in the United States and Western Europe, but it struggled to gain traction compared to other... View Details
- December 2017
- Article
Overall Cost Comparison of Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Procedures with Endoscopist- or Anesthesia-Supported Sedation by Activity-Based Costing Techniques
By: Richard A. Helmers, James A. Dilling, Christopher R. Chaffee, Mark V. Larson, Bradly J. Narr, Derek A. Haas and Robert S. Kaplan
Endoscopic/Colonoscopic procedures are done either with gastroenterologist-administered conscious sedation or with anesthesia-administered sedation with propofol. Anesthesia-administered sedation has medical and patient benefits but is more expensive to administer. We... View Details
- November 2017 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
Measuring True Value at Ambuja Cement
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Suraj Srinivasan and Namrata Arora
The case discusses the measurement of social and environmental impact at Ambuja Cements, one of India’s leading cement companies. Ambuja is a leader in CSR activities and is attempting to quantify its impact, both positive and negative, using the “True Value” framework... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Real Exchange Rate, Innovation and Productivity
By: Laura Alfaro, Alejandro Cuñat, Harald Fadinger and Yanping Liu
We evaluate manufacturing firms' responses to changes in the real exchange rate (RER) using detailed firm-level data for a large set of countries for the period 2001–2010. We uncover the following stylized facts about regional variation of manufacturing firms'... View Details
- November 2017 (Revised October 2018)
- Case
Brandless: Disrupting Consumer Packaged Goods
By: Jill Avery
Brandless, an online direct-to-consumer seller of upscale private-label consumer packaged goods, offered consumers a limited assortment of values-conscious products delivered directly to their homes with the simplicity of one fixed $3 price point that promised an... View Details
Keywords: Brand; Brand Management; Retailing; Retailing Industry; Private Label; Direct To Consumer Marketing; Ecommerce; Digital Marketing; Consumer Packaged Goods; Startup; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Disruption; Food; Product Marketing; Marketing Channels; Consumer Behavior; Brands and Branding; Venture Capital; E-commerce; Consumer Products Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Retail Industry; United States; North America
- Fourth Quarter 2017
- Article
Optimal Tilts: Combining Persistent Characteristic Portfolios
By: Malcolm Baker, Ryan Taliaferro and Terry Burnham
We examine the optimal weighting of four tilts in U.S. equity markets from 1968 through 2014. We define a “tilt” as a characteristic-based portfolio strategy that requires relatively low annual turnover. This is a continuum, with small size (a very persistent... View Details
- 2017
- Report
Room to Grow: Identifying New Frontiers for Apprenticeships
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Matthew Sigelman
In the United States, apprentices are employed in just 27 occupations, mostly in skilled, physical trades. An analysis of job postings data shows that extending apprenticeships to more occupations provides an opportunity to expand employment and close the middle skills... View Details
- Article
The IT Transformation Health Care Needs
By: Nikhil R. Sahni, Robert S. Huckman, Anuraag Chigurupati and David M. Cutler
In recent years, health care organizations have made sizable investments in information technology. They’ve used their IT systems to replace paper records with electronic ones and to improve billing processes, thereby boosting revenue. But so far, IT has been of little... View Details
- October 2017 (Revised September 2022)
- Teaching Note
Fuyao Glass America: Sourcing Decision
By: Willy Shih
This case is about globalization: a Chinese company has decided to locate a production facility close to its customers in the U.S., but a recent contract bid means it will lose money, at least initially, by supplying product from that factory. The purpose of this case... View Details
- October 2017
- Teaching Note
Canadian Pacific's Bid for Norfolk Southern
By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott Mayfield
Teaching Note for HBS No. 216-057. View Details
- October 2017 (Revised November 2017)
- Case
Lovepop
By: Robert F. White, Ramana Nanda and Olivia Hull
As they prepare to graduate from Harvard Business School, the co-founders of greeting card company startup Lovepop need capital to cover the company’s operating costs and must choose between two seed financing offers. One offer is from an angel group and the other from... View Details
- October 2017
- Case
Pricing PatientPing
By: Frank V. Cespedes, Julia Kelley and Amram Migdal
In 2017, Jay Desai, the CEO of Boston-based health care technology company PatientPing, had to consider a number of interrelated pricing challenges. Founded in late 2013, PatientPing sold a software platform that allowed health care providers to receive real-time... View Details
- Article
A Field Experiment on Search Costs and the Formation of Scientific Collaborations
By: Kevin Boudreau, Tom Brady, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan, Anthony Hollenberg and Karim R. Lakhani
We present the results of a field experiment conducted at Harvard Medical School to understand the extent to which search costs affect matching among scientific collaborators. We generated exogenous variation in search costs for pairs of potential collaborators by... View Details
- October 2017
- Article
Elevating Repositioning Costs: Strategy Dynamics and Competitive Interactions
By: Anoop R. Menon and Dennis Yao
This paper proposes an approach for modeling competitive interactions that incorporates the costs to firms of changing strategy. The costs associated with strategy modifications, which we term “repositioning costs,” are particularly relevant to competitive interactions... View Details
- Article
Pseudo-Set Framing
By: Kate Barasz, Leslie John, Elizabeth A. Keenan and Michael I. Norton
Pseudo-set framing—arbitrarily grouping items or tasks together as part of an apparent “set”—motivates people to reach perceived completion points. Pseudo-set framing changes gambling choices (Study 1), effort (Studies 2 and 3), giving behavior (Field Data and Study... View Details
Keywords: Framing Effects; Gestalt Psychology; Judgment; Judgments; Decision Making; Perception; Behavior
- September 2017 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Intermountain Healthcare: Pursuing Precision Medicine
By: Richard G. Hamermesh, Kathy E. Giusti, Robert S. Huckman and Julia Kelley
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Intermountain Healthcare operates 23 hospitals and hundreds of clinics in Utah and Idaho and provides insurance to approximately 850,000 patients through its insurance arm, SelectHealth. In 2013, Intermountain, known for its commitment... View Details
- September 2017 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
Asset Allocation at the Cook County Pension Fund
By: Emil Siriwardane, Juliane Begenau and Yuval Gonczarowski
Nickol Hackett, chief investment officer of the Cook County Pension Fund, is responsible for investing the fund’s $9 billion worth of assets on behalf of the employees of Cook County, Illinois. Like many other defined-benefit pensions at the time, the Cook County... View Details