Publications

Blog Post

Innovation in Health Care Education: A Call to Action

By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Vasant Kumar, Kevin Schulman and Karen Staman

Health care administration educators are at a crossroads: the health care sector is rife with inefficiencies, erratic quality, unequal access, and sky-high costs, complex problems which call for innovative solutions, and yet, according to our content analysis of top... View Details

Keywords: Health Care; Health Care Education; Education; Health; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; Health Industry

October 2001 (Revised November 2001)
Case

Provident Life and Accident Insurance: The Acquisition of Paul Revere

By: Mihir A. Desai, Frank Williamson, Mark Veblen and Yuming Zou

Provident Life & Accident Insurance Co. has made an initial bid to acquire a primary competitor, Paul Revere, from conglomerate, Textron. The due diligence process uncovers a significant block of problematic disability insurance policies. Provident is forced to assess... View Details

Keywords: Insurance; Financial Management; Mergers and Acquisitions; Policy; Investment; Business Strategy; Cash Flow; Price; Bids and Bidding; Financial Reporting; Business Conglomerates; Insurance Industry; Insurance Industry

August 1994 (Revised November 1994)
Case

Saturn: A Different Kind of Car Company

Saturn was General Motors' (GM) response to Japanese companies' dominance of the small car market during the mid-1980s. In the three-and-a-half years since its first sedan rolled off the assembly line, the Saturn Corp. had accumulated an impressive list of... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Advantage; Auto Industry; Auto Industry

September 2022
Article

The Power and Limits of Expertise: Swiss–Swedish Linking of Vehicle Emission Standards in the 1970s and 1980s

By: Mattias Näsman and Sabine Pitteloud

Recent decades have witnessed increased public concern about vehicle emissions and growing frustration with political inaction and business preferences for the status quo. This article provides historical perspective on such regulatory dynamics by analyzing the Swiss... View Details

Keywords: Business And The Environment; Business And Society; Emission Reduction; Automobiles; Standard Setting; Norm-enforcement; Regulation; Expertise; Experts; Business and Government Relations; Environmental Regulation; Standards; Auto Industry; Switzerland; Sweden

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October 1991 (Revised November 1993)
Case

Philips' Compact Disc Introduction (A)

Asks that students adopt the perspective of Philips in 1979, after technical development of the CD was complete, but three years before it was introduced commercially. At that time, Philips' management had to decide whether to attempt to establish a CD standard through... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Market Entry and Exit; Product Launch; Standards; Product Development; Technology Industry

October 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Case

Ball: EVA Driving the World's Leading Can Manufacturer (A)

By: Jonas Heese and Susan Pinckney

The case describes Ball’s multi decade history of using Economic Value Added to drive decision making and workforce compensation. In 2016, the company acquired Rexam PLC and became the world’s leading metal beverage container company. Consumer demand for varied... View Details

Article

Governments as Owners: State-Owned Multinational Companies

By: Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra, Andrew Inkpen, Aldo Musacchio and Kannan Ramaswamy

The globalization of state-owned multinational companies (SOMNCs) has become an important phenomenon in international business (IB), yet it has received scant attention in the literature. We explain how the analysis of SOMNCs can help advance the literature by... View Details

Keywords: Multinational Corporation; State-owned Enterprises; State Capitalism; FDI; Internationalization; Government And Business; National Oil Companies; State Ownership; Multinational Firms and Management; Business Subsidiaries; Acquisition; Pharmaceutical Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; China; India; Europe

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12 Mar 2013
First Look

First Look: March 12

Research and Analysis (CFRA) on companies in the solar industry with a focus on First Solar Inc. In 2009, CFRA was concerned that First Solar, like much of the solar industry, was facing deterioration in... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2017
Working Paper

The Need for Speed: Effects of Uncertainty Reduction in Patenting

By: Mike Horia Teodorescu

Patents are essential in commerce to establish property rights for ideas and to give equal protection to firms that develop new technologies. Young firms especially depend on the protection of intellectual property to bring a product from concept to market. However,... View Details

Keywords: Startups; Natural Language Processing; Machine Learning; Patents; Business Startups; Risk and Uncertainty; Outcome or Result; Green Technology Industry

31 Oct 2023
HBS Case

Checking Your Ethics: Would You Speak Up in These 3 Sticky Situations?

analysis for a client and take a shortcut by relying on an artificial intelligence language model to develop some key insights. The client loves your report and praises the quality of your suggestions. Afterwards, however, you have a... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Consulting

November 2015 (Revised February 2016)
Supplement

Allianz Turkey: Focus on the Customer (B)

By: W. Earl Sasser and Gamze Yucaoglu

At the age of 39, Solmaz Altın took over the helm at Allianz Turkey. Solmaz quickly realized that, although the insurance market was thinly penetrated in Turkey, the company was operating in a very competitive environment with pressure on prices and, hence, cost... View Details

Keywords: Service Excellence; Customer Experience; Customer Service; Emerging Market; Customer Focus; Net Promoter Score; Customer Relationship Management; Competition; Leading Change; Service Operations; Emerging Markets; Customer Satisfaction; Insurance Industry; Turkey

April 1, 2012
Article

The Driver in Ford's Amazing Race

By: Nancy F. Koehn

In "American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company" (Crown Business: $26), Bryce G. Hoffman recounts the turnaround in careful, often gripping detail. Make no mistake, this is a story, not a structured analysis of Ford's transformation. Those... View Details

Keywords: Business History; Transformation; Manufacturing Industry; Manufacturing Industry; United States

January 2024
Article

A Cost Model for a Low Threshold Clinic Treating Opioid Use Disorder

By: Sarah E. Wakeman, Elizabeth Powell, Syed Shehab, Grace Herman, Laura Kehoe and Robert S. Kaplan

The US fee-for-service payment system under-reimburses clinics offering access to comprehensive treatments for opioid use disorder (OUD). The funding shortfall limits a clinic’s ability to expand and improve access, especially for socially marginalized patients with... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Cost; Equality and Inequality; Health Industry

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August 2021 (Revised February 2023)
Case

Fair Park Covid-19 Mass Vaccination Site (A)

By: Willy Shih

This case is an opportunity to apply the methods of the Toyota Production System (TPS) to the analysis of an everyday service application: administering Covid-19 vaccines. It describes the start-up of a drive-up Covid-19 mass vaccination site at the Texas State Fair... View Details

Keywords: Operations Improvement; Operations And Processes; Toyota Production System; COVID-19 Pandemic; Operations; Service Operations; Health Pandemics; Problems and Challenges; Goals and Objectives; Measurement and Metrics; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; United States; Texas

2009
Working Paper

Strategic Interactions in Two-Sided Market Oligopolies

By: Emmanuel Farhi and Andrei Hagiu

Strategic interactions between two-sided platforms depend not only on whether their decision variables are strategic complements or substitutes as for one-sided firms, but also -and crucially so- on whether or not the platforms subsidize one side of the market in... View Details

Keywords: Two-Sided Markets; Strategic Complements; Strategic Substitutes; Cost; Investment; Profit; One-Sided Platforms; Two-Sided Platforms; Duopoly and Oligopoly; Competitive Advantage