Publications

18 Apr 2023
Research & Ideas

The Best Person to Lead Your Company Doesn't Work There—Yet

Companies looking for the best possible leaders—and leaders looking to become CEOs—would do well to heed the model of private-equity (PE) backed companies, which often look outside their ranks when hiring... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Financial Services

27 Sep 2018
Research & Ideas

Religion in the Workplace: What Managers Need to Know

should be careful to respect a range of religious expressions. Take the case of auto parts retailer AutoZone, which agreed to pay $75,000 for telling an employee he couldn’t... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Food & Beverage; Apparel & Accessories

Simulation

Going to the Dentist: Futuredontics

By: Gerald Zaltman

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment

Article

From Thinking Too Little to Thinking Too Much: A Continuum of Decision Making.

By: Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton

Due to the sheer number and variety of decisions that people make in their everyday lives-from choosing yogurts to choosing religions to choosing spouses-research in judgment and decision making has taken many forms. We suggest, however, that much of this research has... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Cognition and Thinking; Judgments; Research; Problems and Challenges

Find at Harvard

2025
Working Paper

Bringing Science to Market: Knowledge Foundations, Inventor-Founders, and Performance

By: Justine Boudou and Maria Roche

In this paper, we examine how a startup’s knowledge foundations—embedded in its core technology—influence its performance in the exit market. Using a dataset of 1,006 biomedicine startups founded between 2005 and 2015, we focus on two key factors: (1) the degree of... View Details

Keywords: Firm Performance; Knowledge Foundations; Exits; Academic Startups; Inventor-founder; Specialized Scientific Knowledge; Competitive Advantage; Value Creation; Research; Information Publishing; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship

21 Oct 2022
Research & Ideas

People Trust Business, But Expect CEOs to Drive Social Change

Public trust in business remains relatively unshaken amid economic turbulence and a lingering pandemic, even as faith in the media and government falters, but leaders could do more to address social issues, a new global opinion survey shows. However, not everyone... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

2023
Working Paper

Data Governance, Interoperability and Standardization: Organizational Adaptation to Privacy Regulation

By: Sam (Ruiqing) Cao and Marco Iansiti

The increasing availability of data can afford dynamic competitive advantages among data-intensive corporations, but governance bottlenecks hinder data-driven value creation and increase regulatory risks. We analyze the role of two technological features of data... View Details

Keywords: Organizations; Information Technology; Performance Productivity; Growth and Development; Transformation

SSRN

October 2009 (Revised August 2014)
Case

Tengion: Bringing Regenerative Medicine to Life

By: Elie Ofek and Polly Ross Ribatt

Tengion is a young biotech company that is at the frontier of regenerative medicine—a nascent field that seeks to promote the creation of new cells and tissue to repair or replace tissue or organ function lost due to age, disease, damage, or congenital defects. In late... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Financial Crisis; Entrepreneurship; Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Product Launch; Product Development; Research and Development; Biotechnology Industry; United States

Educators

29 Nov 2021
Research & Ideas

How Bonuses Get Employees to Choose Work Over Family

send a signal that, not only do you care about the time workers spend on productive tasks,” Whillans says, “but also that you care about the quality of their life outside of work.” About the Author Rachel... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Kim Raczka

October 2023
Case

Hey Jane: Delivering Abortion Pills to the Doorstep

By: Rembrand Koning, Geraldine Pena-Galea and Sarah Mehta

This case tells the story of Hey Jane, a telehealth clinic founded in 2020 that provides virtual medication abortion services to eligible patients in nine U.S. states. By January 2023, the company had served more than 20,000 patients and raised nearly $10 million in... View Details

Keywords: Operations; Business Startups; Health Care and Treatment; Growth and Development Strategy; Health Industry; Technology Industry; United States

Educators

Article

How to Launch Your Digital Platform: A Playbook for Strategists

By: Benjamin Edelman

The ubiquity of Internet access has caused a sharp rise in the number of businesses offering platforms that connect users for communication or commerce. Entrepreneurs are particularly drawn to these platforms because they create significant value and have modest... View Details

Keywords: Platforms; Launch; Mobilization Strategy; Two-Sided Platforms; Network Effects; Adoption; Entrepreneurship; Information Technology Industry; Advertising Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Transportation Industry; Financial Services Industry

22 Oct 2021
Research & Ideas

Want Hybrid Work to Succeed? Trust, Don’t Track, Employees

workers during the pandemic. “You have to trust that they are intelligent enough and well-intentioned enough to get work done no matter what it takes,” she says. This means managers should be View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

26 Jul 2004
Research & Ideas

A Better Way to Negotiate: Backward

and agendas may surface that are better dealt with privately in a careful order. Large, open meetings may help opponents to identify each other, meet, join forces, and thus mount a more powerful combined... View Details

Keywords: by James K. Sebenius

07 Dec 2021
Op-Ed

Want to Build Better Leaders? Focus on Mindset, Skills, Knowledge

want to respond to the next challenge they encounter? Harness knowledge. The work done at this tier is the culmination of the progress made in the two previous tiers and the execution of their technical... View Details

Keywords: by Hise Gibson and Shawnette Rochelle

23 Jan 2012
Research & Ideas

Break Your Addiction to Service Heroes

that there are a lot of heroic people in service organizations who feel compelled to be the best at everything. That's particularly evident in mission-driven and health care organizations, where managers... View Details

Keywords: by Deborah Blagg; Service

31 Jul 2006
Research & Ideas

When Not to Trust Your Gut

recall when someone else was faced with a similar situation or to collect data on what you should rationally expect. In addition, ask yourself this simple question: If someone I cared about asked me for my... View Details

Keywords: by Max H. Bazerman & Deepak Malhotra

August 2008 (Revised September 2009)
Case

Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll: The MTV Approach to Tackling HIV/AIDS

By: Tarun Khanna, Sonali R. Bloom and David E. Bloom

This case explores the role that MTV, with its heavy diet of music and general youth-oriented media content, plays in spreading public-service messaging to contain the scourge of HIV/AIDS worldwide. There is a focus especially on its efforts in several emerging... View Details

Keywords: For-Profit Firms; Developing Countries and Economies; Multinational Firms and Management; Health Care and Treatment; Emerging Markets; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Corporate Strategy; Health Industry; Africa

Educators