Publications

2009
Working Paper

Taking a 'Deep Dive': What Only a Top Leader Can Do

By: Howard H. Yu and Joseph L. Bower

Unlike most historical accounts of strategic change inside large firms, empirical research on strategic management rarely uses the day-to-day behaviors of top executives as the unit of analysis. By examining the resource allocation process closely, we introduce the... View Details

Keywords: Leading Change; Management Practices and Processes; Resource Allocation; Business Processes; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure

March 2023
Case

Ownership Works: Scaling a Profitable Social Mission

By: Ethan Rouen, Dennis Campbell and Andrew Robinson

Pete Stavros was on a high after his latest experiment with employee ownership. As the head of industrial investments for KKR, Stavros orchestrated the sale of CHI Overhead Doors, which turned into KKR’s best investment in more than two decades and created $360 million... View Details

Keywords: Employee Ownership; Knowledge Sharing; Nonprofit Organizations

April 2020 (Revised February 2023)
Case

GitLab and the Future of All-Remote Work (A)

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Emma Salomon

GitLab is arguably one of the world’s largest “all-remote” companies. Started in 2011 and with more than 1,000 employees at present, it has no physical offices and all employees, including the entire C-Suite, work remotely from all parts of the world. The case... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Internet and the Web; Technology Adoption; Value Creation; Business Model; Organizational Structure

September 2017
Article

The Advocacy Trap: When Legitimacy Building Inhibits Organizational Learning

By: Tiona Zuzul and Amy C. Edmondson

This paper describes a relationship between legitimacy building and learning for a new firm in a nascent industry. Through a longitudinal study of a new firm in the nascent smart city industry, we found that the firm failed to make progress on important internal... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Learning; Advocacy; Organizations; Learning; Organizational Culture; Entrepreneurship

September 2019
Case

JTC: Stronger Together with Shared Ownership

By: Ethan Bernstein and Daniela Beyersdorfer

Nigel Le Quesne, CEO of Jersey-based financial services firm JTC, firmly believed that "shared ownership" was at the heart of his company’s successful track record. The firm had seen its revenues, profits, and number of clients and staff grow steadily throughout its... View Details

Keywords: Ownership; Employee Ownership; Leadership Style; Compensation and Benefits; Organizational Culture; Employee Stock Ownership Plan; Going Public; Mission and Purpose; Management Practices and Processes; Human Resources; Financial Services Industry; Channel Islands; Europe; United States

2016
Working Paper

Markets for Ideas: Prize Structure, Entry Limits, and the Design of Ideation Contests

By: Pavel Kireyev

Contests are a popular mechanism for the procurement of innovation. In marketing, design, and other creative industries, firms use freelance marketplaces to organize contests and obtain high-quality ideas for ads, new products, and even business strategies from... View Details

Keywords: Idea Generation; Crowdsourcing; Contest Design; Structural Estimation; Motivation and Incentives; Competition; Innovation and Invention

08 Jun 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Location Choices Under Strategic Interactions

Keywords: by Juan Alcacer

August 2007
Case

Lightspeed Venture Partners -- International Expansion

By: Krishna G. Palepu and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld

Looks at various international expansion models for a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley. Lightspeed Venture Partners believed that India had tremendous potential for venture capital returns--the question was how best to tap into that potential while also... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Expansion; Investment Return; Global Strategy; Emerging Markets; Investment; International Finance; Organizational Structure; India; Israel

26 Jan 2009
Research & Ideas

Where is Home for the Global Firm?

firms to particular nation-states. In my paper "The Decentering of the Global Firm," I describe how these changes represent a natural extension of trends that have been operative for decades in how firms... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

30 May 2005
Research & Ideas

Germany’s Pioneering Corporate Managers

communism as a result of too many layers of bureaucracy and not enough market (true enough). But I then tell students that I made a mistake and that this chart actually represents the managerial organizations of one of the most successful... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

March 2004 (Revised April 2004)
Case

Transforming Mitsubishi Corporation, 2004

By: Michael Y. Yoshino and Haruki Umezawa

A leading Japanese general trading company with an extensive global presence is in the process of transformation. For some time, in response to the rapidly changing business environment, the company has made serious efforts to transform itself from an organization... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Transformation; Change Management; Problems and Challenges; Diversification; Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Globalized Firms and Management

2006
Working Paper

On the Origin of Shared Beliefs (and Corporate Culture)

By: Eric J. Van den Steen

This paper shows why members of an organization often share similar beliefs. I argue that there are two mechanisms. First, when performance depends on making correct decisions, people prefer to work with others who share their beliefs and assumptions, since such... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Culture; Employees; Values and Beliefs; Mathematical Methods

06 Nov 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, November 6, 2018

forthcoming Management Science Patent Trolls: Evidence from Targeted Firms By: Cohen, Lauren, Umit Gurun, and Scott Duke Kominers Abstract—We provide the first large-sample evidence on the behavior and impact of nonpracticing entities... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

30 Oct 2005
Research & Ideas

Tuning Jobs to Fit Your Company

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, professor Robert Simons wrote about how organizations can design jobs for maximum performance. In this excerpt, Simons discusses what he terms the four basic "spans" of a job—control,... View Details

Keywords: by Robert Simons

2025
Working Paper

Enhancing Treatment Effect Prediction on Privacy-Protected Data: An Honest Post-Processing Approach

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

As firms increasingly rely on customer data for personalization, concerns over privacy and regulatory compliance have grown. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong individual-level protection by injecting noise into data before collection. While... View Details

Keywords: Targeted Intervention; Conditional Average Treatment Effect Estimation; Differential Privacy; Honest Estimation; Post-processing; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior; Marketing

Spring 2014
Article

Ex-Ante Agreements in Standard Setting and Patent Pool Formation

By: Gaston Llanes and Joaquin Poblete

We present a model of standard setting and patent-pool formation. We study the effects of alternative standard-setting and pool-formation rules on technology choice, prices, and welfare. We find three main results. First, we show that allowing patent pools may reduce... View Details

Keywords: Standard Setting; Patent Pools; Royalty Stacking; Ex-ante Agreements; Coalition Formation; Motivation and Incentives; Patents; Agreements and Arrangements; Standards

October 2013
Article

Corporate Venturing

By: Josh Lerner

For decades, large companies have been wary of corporate venturing. But as R&D organizations face pressure to rein in costs and produce results, companies are investing in promising start-ups to gain knowledge and agility. The logic of corporate venturing is... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Knowledge Acquisition; Corporate Strategy; Research and Development; Business Startups; Innovation and Invention