Publications

October 2002 (Revised May 2004)
Case

Intuit's New CEO: Steve Bennett

By: William A. Sahlman and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld

Describes the transition to a new CEO at Intuit, a successful software and financial services firm in California. The new CEO must decide what to change and how fast. He must also navigate within a culture everyone believes to be successful but he envisions can be... View Details

Keywords: Management Succession; Entrepreneurship; Organizational Culture; Applications and Software; Management Teams; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; California

March 2018
Teaching Note

Augmedix

By: Frank V. Cespedes

Teaching Note for HBS No. 817-048. Augmedix provides a service that live-streams video of patient appointments to a remote scribe, freeing up significant physician time from electronic medical record data-entry tasks. The venture is confronting decisions in areas such... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Sales; Management; Marketing Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Technology Adoption; Customers; Segmentation; Technology Industry; Technology Industry; United States

26 Sep 2024
HBS Case

If a Car Can Drive Itself, Can It Make Life-or-Death Decisions?

networks and emergent behavior, Badaracco proposes a roadmap for thinking about ethical ways to delegate decisions to machines. “It’s a potentially catastrophic mistake, with technology like this, to have... View Details

Keywords: by Tom Quinn; Technology; Technology

06 Dec 2018
Cold Call Podcast

Honda Created a Civic for Very Light Jets. How High Will It Fly?

Keywords: Re: Gary P. Pisano; Aerospace

19 Nov 2001
Research & Ideas

Wrapping Your Alliances In a World Wide Web

systems. That translates into long and inconsistent lead times." 50 A number of technology providers are offering Internet-based products that address exactly this problem. Some of them concentrate on... View Details

Keywords: by Andrew McAfee

December 2003 (Revised April 2004)
Case

Dragon's Teeth Vineyards

By: Alan D. MacCormack, Marius Leibold, Sven Voelpel and Kerry Herman

Dragon's Teeth Vineyards (DTV) is a South African wine producer that is considering whether to use genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in its wine-making process. GMOs promise to lower the costs of wine production significantly through increased yields and reduced... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Genetics; Transition; Brands and Branding; Product Development; Product Design; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Technology Adoption; Food and Beverage Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; South Africa

May 1996 (Revised March 2005)
Case

Bombardier TEG (A)

By: Stephen P. Bradley and Takia Mahmood

Bombardier, a Canadian manufacturer of passenger railcars and market leader in the United States, faces aggressive competition from a new entrant, U.S.-owned Morrison Knudsen, that has come into the industry with closely related capabilities in engineering and... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Goals and Objectives; Strategy; Competition; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Rail Transportation; Manufacturing Industry; Rail Industry; Canada; United States

August 2023
Article

Explaining Machine Learning Models with Interactive Natural Language Conversations Using TalkToModel

By: Dylan Slack, Satyapriya Krishna, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Sameer Singh

Practitioners increasingly use machine learning (ML) models, yet models have become more complex and harder to understand. To understand complex models, researchers have proposed techniques to explain model predictions. However, practitioners struggle to use... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Technological Innovation; Technology Adoption

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16 Feb 2012
Op-Ed

Nitin Nohria: Why US Competitiveness Matters

Chinese care about China, of course, but they are rooting for America as well” Management educators talk frequently about best practices and use case studies to illustrate by example. For more than a century... View Details

Keywords: by Nitin Nohria

Career Coach

Minal Mehta

Minal (Harvard Business School ‘10, Stanford ‘03) has over two decades of experience in the technology industry. Most recently, she was the cofounder and CEO of AllTakes, a venture-backed online platform... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Technology; Technology

January 2018
Case

Flying into the Future: HondaJet

By: Gary P. Pisano and Jesse Shulman

This cases examine Honda’s diversification into the light jet market. In 1985, Honda initiated a secret program to develop a small jet. Over the years, the program had many ups and downs (it was almost canceled several times). Then, a breakthrough in the configuration... View Details

Keywords: Diversification; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Innovation and Management; Air Transportation Industry

February 2023 (Revised February 2024)
Case

Doing Business in Istanbul, Turkey

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Leonard A. Schlesinger, Namrata Arora and Umut Arslan

This case examines the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Turkey. It highlights Turkey's economic transformation in the decades leading up to 2024 in the context of its history, culture, and politics. The case gives an overview of some of the main... View Details

Keywords: Business History; Business and Government Relations; Technological Innovation; Foreign Direct Investment; Economic Growth; Financial Crisis; Technology Industry; Technology Industry; Turkey

2024
Working Paper

Cephalosporins—Fighting Hospital Infections: Case Histories of Transformational Advances

By: Amar Bhidé, Srikant Datar and Katherine Stebbins

This case history describes the development of three generations of cephalosporins – antibiotics that have significantly reduced hospital infections. Specifically, we chronicle how: 1) Early (pre-cephalosporin) antibiotics were developed in the first half of the 20th... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Technology Adoption; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Invention; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

SSRN

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July 2019
Case

Autonomous Vehicles: Smooth or Bumpy Ride Ahead?

By: Elie Ofek and Akhil Waghmare

In early 2019, transportation was set to undergo a major transformation with the advent of autonomous vehicles (AVs), also referred to as driverless cars, which were nearing completion from an R&D and testing phase. Yet many questions remained open regarding exactly... View Details

Keywords: Transportation; Technological Innovation; Disruptive Innovation; Transformation; Technology Adoption; Business Model; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Transportation Industry; Auto Industry

17 Feb 2015
HBS Case

HBS Cases: The Battle for San Francisco

been a draw for innovators of a different sort—technology workers who began populating the suburbs of the South Bay, which came to be known as Silicon Valley, in the 1970s and '80s. In recent years, they... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Technology

November 2000
Case

FireDrop

By: William A. Sahlman and Michael J. Roberts

Describes the evolution of FireDrop, a new venture-backed company that has developed a new platform for e-mail communication. The FireDrop application--called a Zaplet--allows for e-mails to be continually updated so they are current when read (rather than when sent).... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Internet and the Web; Communication Technology; Venture Capital; Technological Innovation; Information Technology Industry

2024
Working Paper

Tamoxifen—Reducing Breast Cancer Risks: Case Histories of Transformational Advances

By: Amar Bhidé, Srikant Datar and Katherine Stebbins

We describe the development of tamoxifen, considered a “gold standard” treatment for millions of breast cancer patients. Specifically, we describe breast cancer treatments before tamoxifen’s development; the initial development of tamoxifen from 1960 to 1973;... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Strategy; Technology Adoption; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

SSRN

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December 1996 (Revised June 1998)
Case

Midnight Networks, Inc.

By: H. Kent Bowen and Marilyn Matis

Midnight Networks, Inc., is a small computer network validation company. This case describes how the five founders built their business from operations earnings and how they established "best practices" operational processes to run their firm successfully. Operational... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Entrepreneurship; Business or Company Management; Operations; Organizational Culture; Applications and Software; Business Startups; Business Growth and Maturation; Information Technology Industry; Massachusetts

August 2022
Case

SuperRare: Turning an NFT Marketplace into a DAO

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Scott Duke Kominers and Amy Klopfenstein

In June 2021, John Crain and Jonathan Perkins, the founders of SuperRare, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), contemplate whether to transform their company into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Crain and Perkins founded SuperRare in 2018 to... View Details