Publications

February 2009 (Revised March 2013)
Case

Shanghai Diligence Law Firm (A)

By: Robert G. Eccles and Catherine Zhang

Shanghai Diligence Law Firm, started in January 2006, is a rapidly growing law firm in China's burgeoning legal services market. In addition to the usual challenges facing all professional service firms (picking and retaining talent and building a desired client... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Compensation and Benefits; Retention; Growth and Development Strategy; Service Operations; Motivation and Incentives; Legal Services Industry; China

February 2014
Case

Interview with Joe Kennedy, Pandora Media

By: Willy C. Shih

Joe Kennedy is the emeritus president of Pandora Media. In this interview, he discusses some of the challenges he faced in leading the company. View Details

Keywords: Pandora; Internet Radio; Pandora Media; Streaming; Music Industry; Music Entertainment; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Internet and the Web; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; United States; California

30 Nov 2020
Research & Ideas

COVID Not Slowing VC Investment

The COVID-19 pandemic has battered industries around the world, but one sector's prospects aren’t so bleak: venture capital. Startup backers—and private-equity managers in general—say that half of their... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost; Financial Services; Banking

08 Aug 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

Parmigiano-Reggiano, Jane Austen, and Other Things You Didn't Know About Finance

Startups welcome growth but are often strangled by it. This podcast discusses how entrepreneur Vijay Shekhar Sharma is meeting this challenge with his mobile payments company Paytm. Why Millennials Flock to Fintech for Personal Investing... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Financial Services

January 2005 (Revised April 2006)
Case

Stonewall Kitchen

By: Myra M. Hart, Victoria Winston, Kristin Lieb, Kenna Wyllie Baudin, Alison Bell and Leslie Simmons

Jonathan King and Jim Stott, the founders of Stonewall Kitchen, started out in 1992 with a simple business selling jams and jellies at local farmers' markets. By 2004, they had grown the company into a $25 million organization with 250 employees. They expanded their... View Details

Keywords: Strategic Planning; Food; Expansion; Business Growth and Maturation; Entrepreneurship; Financing and Loans; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Retail Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States

12 Oct 1999
Research & Ideas

Bright Ideas: The Creative Power of Groups

Business School Press), a new book by HBS professor Dorothy Leonard and Professor Walter Swap of Tufts University. The authors not only disprove the stereotypical perception of group creativity as an oxymoron but show how the group creative process can be successfully... View Details

Keywords: by Laurie Joan Aron

22 May 2020
In Practice

Post-COVID Health Care: More Screens, Less Red Tape?

improvisation to viable ways of operating that can function indefinitely. Neither management scholars nor health care providers have access to an off-the-shelf solution for how to do this. But through a collaborative approach, we may be... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

July 2020 (Revised September 2020)
Case

MobSquad

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, William R. Kerr and Susie L. Ma

Irfhan Rawji (MBA 2004) launched MobSquad in October 2018 to help American tech start-ups retain hard-to-find talent, many of whom struggled with U.S. work visa issues, such as software engineers with experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data... View Details

Keywords: Work Visas; H1-B; Business Ventures; Business Startups; Labor; Human Capital; Human Resources; Crisis Management; Employment Industry; Canada; United States

December 2008 (Revised January 2011)
Case

Arcadia Biosciences: Seeds of Change

By: Arthur A. Daemmrich, Forest L. Reinhardt and Mary Louise Shelman

Arcadia Biosciences is an entrepreneurial California agricultural biotech company seeking to earn carbon credits by modifying commodity crops for use in China and India. Eric Rey, Arcadia's CEO, faced a strategic inflection point in early September 2008. The company... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Environmental Sustainability; Science-Based Business; Climate Change; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Biotechnology Industry; China; India; California

March 1995 (Revised May 1997)
Case

Stonyfield Farm: September 1994

Samuel Kaymen and Gary Hirshberg founded Stonyfield Farm in 1983, in part to demonstrate that "environmentally and socially responsible businesses can also be profitable." In 1994, the company has grown to over $21 million in revenues, derived mainly from refrigerated... View Details

Keywords: Growth Management; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Food; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; New Hampshire; California; Russia

May 2008 (Revised August 2009)
Case

Intel NBI: MXP Digital Media Processor

By: Willy C. Shih and Thomas Thurston

"Gila" was a high-performance image processor project housed in Intel's New Business Initiatives (NBI) group. NBI was an incubator for corporate entrepreneurs, and it had an established methodology for ensuring a degree of autonomy while these ventures got started. But... View Details

Keywords: Business Divisions; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Change Management; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Integration; Semiconductor Industry; United States

02 Aug 2024
HBS Case

How a Mission to Cut Food Waste Launched a Multimillion-Dollar Venture

On a hectic Friday in October 2016, Josh Domingues wondered if he had made a mistake quitting the security of a well-paying job managing contracts for professional hockey players to start a new venture selling nearly expired groceries at discount prices. After all, a... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert; Technology; Information Technology

19 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

Codeacademy’s Delicate Work of Adding Monetization Without Crushing Mission

administration in the Entrepreneurial Management unit at Harvard Business School and a general partner at Flybridge Capital. He closely studies the startup environment and draws from his experience as a... View Details

Keywords: Re: Jeffrey J. Bussgang; Technology

24 Oct 2012
Research & Ideas

Want People to Save More? Send a Text

that if she lost her job, she couldn't pay her children's school fees or pay for a doctor," says Pomeranz, an assistant professor in entrepreneurial management at Harvard Business School. “How can we understand what projects work to... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard

13 Apr 2020
Research & Ideas

Small Businesses Are Worse Off Than We Thought

Beyond How to Manage Coronavirus Layoffs with Compassion (Harvard Business Review) Organizational Responses to COVID-19 and Climate Change: A Conversation with Rebecca Henderson (Environmental Insights) COVID-19 Business Impact Center... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Financial Services

March 2001 (Revised July 2002)
Case

WingspanBank.com (B): Should This Bird Still Fly?

By: Sandra J. Sucher and Stacy McManus

WingspanBank.com is launched to critical acclaim, but its fate is hardly certain. Bank One's new CEO, Jamie Dimon, must decide what to do with what is now a second Web site for the bank's current and prospective customers. View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Business Startups; Customers; Innovation and Management; Organizations; Complexity; Web Sites; Financial Services Industry

Find at Harvard

August 1997
Case

Orbital Sciences Corporation: ORBCOMM

By: Das Narayandas and John A. Quelch

In late 1993, Orbital Communications Corp. (OCC), a subsidiary of Orbital Sciences Corp., is developing a global two-way wireless data communications system, called "ORBCOMM," based on a 26-satellite constellation in low earth orbit. Service is scheduled to begin in... View Details

Keywords: Business Subsidiaries; Business Model; Business Startups; Price; Global Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Demand and Consumers; Partners and Partnerships; Salesforce Management; Telecommunications Industry