Publications

28 May 2015
News

Breaking the Death Grip of Legacy Technologies

2018
Book

Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business

By: Sunil Gupta

Disruption and transformation get a lot of hype and for good reason. Digital technologies have disrupted entire industries and incumbents have often struggled in this new world. Typical approaches used by legacy players such as using technology to improve efficiency,... View Details

Keywords: Marketing; Information Technology; Transformation; Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Value Creation; Customer Focus and Relationships; Organizational Structure; Digital Strategy

December 2014
Article

Private Equity, Jobs, and Productivity

By: Steven J. Davis, John Haltiwanger, Kyle Handley, Ron Jarmin, Josh Lerner and Javier Miranda

Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses. To investigate this claim, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Leveraged Buyouts; Performance Productivity; Jobs and Positions; United States

06 Dec 2017
Working Paper Summaries

Trials and Terminations: Learning from Competitors' R&D Failures

Keywords: by Joshua Lev Krieger

September 2016
Case

Partners Group: Ain't No Mountain High Enough

By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Ricardo Andrade

Partners Group (PG), a Swiss-based PE manager, initiated a series of strategic shifts and evolved from a predominately fund-of-funds manager into a large, multi-asset class PE firm focused on direct investments. PG was the first PE firm to go public in 2006. A number... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Management Practices and Processes; Entrepreneurship

Educators

July–August 2021
Article

Why Do So Many Strategies Fail?

By: David J. Collis

THE PROBLEM: Seemingly successful new companies struggle to turn a healthy profit. Established firms get disrupted by upstarts. Companies that excel at serving their markets can’t adapt when customers’ tastes shift. THE ROOT CAUSE: All too often, business leaders focus... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Strategic Planning; Business Model; Value; Value Creation; Opportunities

June 1996
Case

Black Magic and the America's Cup: The Victory

Chronicles New Zealand's participation in successive America's Cup regattas, culminating in its decisive 1995 victory. Allows for discussion of how an organization from a small nation can beat the world's best in a technologically, organizationally, and managerially... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Sports; Business and Government Relations; Sports Industry; New Zealand

22 Mar 2024
Research & Ideas

Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted

What does it take to put a price tag on open source software (OSS), a resource so critical to the global economy that some 96 percent of commercial programs include some code created, tinkered with, or distributed for free by public-facing tech forums? A View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Computer; Information Technology; Technology

08 May 2013
Research & Ideas

A Company’s Evolving View of Gender Equity

gender-related themes from media outlets including the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. This allowed them to trace how, when, and why the firm evolved in its focus on gender. They also created a time... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Accounting

14 Nov 2005
Research & Ideas

How Can Start Ups Grow?

published by the Academy of Management (August, 2005) as part of its Best Paper Proceedings. Her research on how young firms grow is based on data looking at new advertising agencies in View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Advertising

July 2012
Case

Performance Management at Vitality Health Enterprises, Inc.

By: John Bingham and Michael Beer

Vitality Health Enterprises, a medium-sized firm that manufactures health and personal care products, has experienced six straight quarters of strong revenue growth. James Hoffman, the new Senior Vice President of Human Resources, fears that the chain of success is... View Details

Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Motivation and Incentives; Compensation and Benefits; Talent and Talent Management; Health Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Manufacturing Industry; United States

Educators

October 1995
Article

Start-ups, Spin-offs, and Internal Projects

By: James J. Anton and Dennis Yao

We examine the incentive problem confronting a firm and employee when the employee privately discovers a significant invention and faces a choice between keeping the invention private and leaving the firm to form a new company (start-up), or transferring knowledge and... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Projects; Motivation and Incentives; Rights; Employees; Innovation and Invention; Compensation and Benefits; Knowledge Sharing; Capital; Profit

August 2017
Article

Is the SEC Captured? Evidence from Comment-Letter Reviews

By: Jonas Heese, Mozaffar Khan and Karthik Ramanna

SEC oversight of publicly listed firms ranges from comment letter (CL) reviews of firms’ reporting compliance to pursuing enforcement actions against violators. Prior literature finds that firm political connections (PC) negatively predict enforcement actions,... View Details

Keywords: Comment Letters; Political Connections; Regulatory Capture; SEC Enforcement; Government Administration; Business and Government Relations; Government and Politics

SSRN

April 2004 (Revised March 2008)
Case

Precise Software

By: Paul A. Gompers and Sara Bergson

Yossi Sela, general partner at Gemini Venture capital, considers a new investment in Precise Software. The firm is at a crisis point, and Sela needs to decide whether he will fire the firm's chief executive officer. Conflicts between the American CEO and the Israeli... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Investment; Resignation and Termination; Crisis Management; Managerial Roles; Conflict and Resolution; Israel; United States

Educators

2023
Working Paper

Organizational Responses to Product Cycles

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Vittorio Bassi, Anant Nyshadham, Jorge Tamayo and Nicolas Torres

Product cycles entail the mass production of new—and often increasingly complex—products on a regular basis. How do firms manage these changes? We use granular daily data from a leading automobile manufacturer to study the organizational impacts of introducing new... View Details

Keywords: Training; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Knowledge Management; Production; Product; Organizational Structure; Auto Industry; Argentina

August 2018
Article

Growth Through Heterogeneous Innovations

By: Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr

We build a tractable growth model where multi-product incumbents invest in internal innovations to improve their existing products, while new entrants and incumbents invest in external innovations to acquire new product lines. External and internal innovations generate... View Details

Keywords: Endogenous Growth; Innovation; Citations; Scientists; Entrepreneurs; External; Internal; Patents; Innovation Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Economic Growth; Research and Development; Science

May 2007
Article

Location Strategies and Knowledge Spillovers

By: Juan Alcacer and Wilbur Chung

Given the importance of proximity for knowledge spillovers, we examine firms' location choices expecting differences in firms' strategies. Firms will locate to maximize their net spillovers as a function of locations' knowledge activity, their own capabilities, and... View Details

Keywords: Business Strategy; Corporate Strategy; For-Profit Firms; Knowledge Management; Research and Development; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Disruptive Innovation; Five Forces Framework; Cost Management; Technology; Competition; United States