Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(8,152)
- Faculty Publications (2,212)
- 2017
- Working Paper
Business History, the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence
By: Geoffrey Jones
This working paper provides a business history perspective on debates about the Great Divergence, the rise of the income gap between the West and the Rest, and the more recent Great Convergence, which has seen a narrowing of that gap. The literature on the timing and... View Details
- July 2017 (Revised July 2018)
- Case
Upwork: Creating the Human Cloud
By: Dylan Minor and David Yoffie
Stephane Kasriel, the new CEO of Upwork, the leading platform for freelance labor, needs to decide on how to redesign its business model. While the firm has been growing rapidly since the merger of Odesk and eLance, the newly combined firm continues to face problems of... View Details
- 2017
- Article
Affective, Cognitive and Behavioral Trajectories of Change Recipients in Global Organizations
By: B. S. Reiche, T. B. Neeley and N. Overmeyer
Research rarely addresses how change recipients respond to radical change across affective, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions over time. We examined a radical change in a recently acquired subsidiary of a U.S.-based global organization over a two-year period. With... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Knowledge Flows within Multinationals—Estimating Relative Influence of Headquarters and Host Context Using a Gravity Model
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Mike Horia Teodorescu and Tarun Khanna
From the perspective of a multinational subsidiary, we employ the classic gravity equation in economics to model and compare knowledge flows to the subsidiary from the MNC headquarters and from the host country context. We also generalize traditional economics gravity... View Details
- 2017
- Chapter
Platforms, Open/User Innovation, and Ecosystems: A Strategic Leadership Perspective
By: Elizabeth J. Altman and Michael Tushman
Platform, open/user innovation, and ecosystem strategies embrace and enable interactions with external entities. Firms pursuing these approaches conduct business and interact with environments differently than those pursuing traditional closed strategies. This chapter... View Details
- June 2017
- Case
Waze Connected Citizens Program
By: Mitchell Weiss and Alissa Davies
Di-Ann Eisnor, Director of Growth at Waze, founded the company’s Connected Citizens Program (CCP), a data-sharing partnership that provided officials with traffic incident and congestion data. Since 2015, her program had enabled officials in Kentucky and elsewhere to... View Details
Keywords: Public Entrepreneurship; Waze; Public-Private Partnerships; Scaling Technology Ventures; Di-Ann Eisnor; Paige Fitzgerald; Noam Bardin; Ehud Shabtai; Cities; Traffic; Crowdsourcing; API; Scaling Innovation; Entrepreneurship; Public Sector; Information Technology; Transportation; Growth Management; Transportation Industry; Israel; Indonesia; United States; Brazil; Los Angeles; Kentucky
- June 2017
- Teaching Note
Project Sun Devil and Project Paris
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Alexander W. Schultz
Tony Lee is preparing to present a project to the investment committee of Howard Street Capital. He will be recommending an investment in Project Sun Devil, a high-quality 225-unit student housing rental property near Tempe, Arizona. Tony Lee will compete for capital... View Details
Keywords: General Management; Financial Analysis; Return On Assets; Accounting; Performance Measurement; Financial Ratios; Return On Equity; Financial Statements; Profitability Analysis; Portfolio Investment; Portfolio Management; Real Estate; Property; Investment Portfolio; Investment Return; Analysis; Real Estate Industry; United States
- Article
Beyond the Target Customer: Social Effects in CRM Campaigns
By: Eva Ascarza, Peter Ebbes, Oded Netzer and Matthew Danielson
Customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns have traditionally focused on maximizing the profitability of the targeted customers. The authors demonstrate that in business settings characterized by network externalities, a CRM campaign that is aimed at changing the... View Details
- Article
Repositioning and Cost-Cutting: The Impact of Competition on Platform Strategies
By: Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu
Organizational structures are increasingly complex. In particular, more firms today operate as multi-sided platforms. In this paper, we study how platform firms use repositioning and cost-cutting in response to competition, elucidate external and internal factors that... View Details
- 2019
- Chapter
Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)
Return on invested capital (ROIC) is a financial measure of the profitability of a firm or business unit. If it is greater than the business's cost of capital, then reinvestment of earnings increases shareholder VALUE. The ROIC also determines a maximum self-sustaining... View Details
- June 2017
- Article
The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital
By: Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana
This paper traces the career of Michael Jensen, a Chicago finance PhD turned Harvard Business School professor to reveal the intellectual and social conditions that enabled the emergence and institutionalization of what we call the “neoliberal common sense of capital,”... View Details
- May 2017
- Case
CNS Worldwide
By: Robert J. Dolan and Karthik Easwar
CNS Worldwide has long been the market share leader in the IaaS cloud server market, yet it has remained unprofitable for years. Industry capacity utilization is low, and prices have declined over 70% over the last decade. CNS is considering withdrawing from the market... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Digital Agility: The Impact of Software Portfolio Architecture on IT System Evolution
By: Alan MacCormack, Robert Lagerström, Martin Mocker and Carliss Y. Baldwin
The modern industrial firm increasingly relies on software to support its competitive position. However, the uncertain and dynamic nature of today’s global marketplace dictates that this software be continually evolved and adapted to meet new business challenges. This... View Details
- May 2017 (Revised November 2017)
- Teaching Note
BrightStar Care: The Evolution of a Leadership Team
By: Boris Groysberg, Colleen Ammerman and Olivia Hull
Teaching Note for HBS No. 417-020. View Details
Keywords: Health Care Services; Entrepreneurs; Board Of Directors; Boards Of Directors; Health Care Industry; Growth Strategy; Organizational Change; Brand Positioning; Entrepreneurial Organizations; Entrepreneurial Management; Franchising; Family-owned Business; Home Health Care; Managing Growth; Management Styles; Organizational Development; Talent Management; Women Executives; Women And Leadership; Business Startups; Family Business; Small Business; Talent And Talent Management; Governing And Advisory Boards; Health Care And Treatment; Human Capital; Leadership Development; Leadership Style; Business Or Company Management; Growth And Development Strategy; Management Analysis, Tools, And Techniques; Management Skills; Management Style; Management Succession; Management Systems; Management Teams; Brands And Branding; Marketing Strategy; Strategy; Health Industry
- May 2017
- Case
Pho Hoa Dorchester
By: Leonard A. Schlesinger, Michael Raiche and Roger Zhu
Pho Hoa is a traditional, family-owned Vietnamese restaurant in Dorchester, Massachusetts that opened in 1992. As he approached retirement in recent years, the founder/owner has scaled down his involvement in the day-to-day operations, leading to a number of... View Details
Keywords: Pho Hoa; Tam Le; Small Business; Restaurants; Dorchester; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Organization; Family Business; Change Management; Transition; Diasporas; Cash Flow; Food; Employment; Wages; Working Conditions; Leading Change; Business Processes; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Structure; Ownership Stake; Franchise Ownership; Family and Family Relationships; Food and Beverage Industry; Viet Nam; Massachusetts; Boston; Eastern United States
- May 2017
- Teaching Note
Partners Group: Ain't No Mountain High Enough
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
- May 2017
- Case
Four Products: Predicting Diffusion (2017)
By: John Gourville
One job of product managers, marketers, strategic planners, and other corporate executives is to predict what the demand will be for a new product. This task is easier for certain classes of new products than for others. For new consumer package goods, for instance,... View Details
- May 2017
- Case
Promontory, Inc.
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Amy Handlin
Promontory, Inc. is a small, privately owned firm in the promotional products (specialty advertising) industry. After starting the firm two years ago with the intention of pursuing a high-quality/high-price strategy, the CEO is seeking methods of increasing sales... View Details
- 2017
- Chapter
Entrepreneurship in Larger Companies
By: William R. Kerr
Entrepreneurship in large and established companies is vital for their long-term success. Incumbent firms face many challenges ranging from global competition to digitization. In times past, being caught flat-footed might have set a company back several years, but it... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Entrepreneurship
- May 2017
- Article
The Reference Wars: Encyclopædia Britannica's Decline and Encarta's Emergence
By: Shane Greenstein
The experience of Encyclopædia Britannica provides the canonical example of the decline of an established firm at the outset of the digital age. Competition from Microsoft’s Encarta in 1993 led to sharp declines in the sales of books, which led to the distressed sale... View Details