Publications

November 2013
Case

Canyon-Agassi Investing in Charter Schools

By: Nicolas P. Retsinas, Nicole Shomair, Vernon Beckford and Lisa Strope

After an unusual round of doubles in May 2011, real estate investor Bobby Turner, Managing Partner, Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund (CACSFF) and Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder of Canyon Capital Realty Advisors, found himself at a loss for words. Turner was... View Details

Keywords: Charter Schools; Real Estate; Fund Raising; Social Entrepreneurship; Education; Real Estate Industry; United States

2012
Working Paper

Clusters, Convergence, and Economic Performance

By: Mercedes Delgado, Michael E. Porter and Scott Stern

This paper evaluates the role of regional cluster composition in the economic performance of industries, clusters, and regions. On the one hand, diminishing returns to specialization in a location can result in a convergence effect: the growth rate of an industry... View Details

Keywords: Industry Clusters; Performance; Economics

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11 Apr 2023
Research & Ideas

Is Amazon a Retailer, a Tech Firm, or a Media Company? How AI Can Help Investors Decide

health care, utilities, energy, real estate, and technology by as much as 2.5 percentage points on an annualized basis. The TOPICS method uses sophisticated financial models to spot hidden similarities in risk and return profiles among... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost; Consumer Products; Real Estate; Financial Services; Retail

30 May 2018
Research & Ideas

Should Retailers Match Their Own Prices Online and in Stores?

consumers use their mobile devices in store. Surprisingly, also when some undecided consumers look up products and prices on their smartphones while in a store, companies don’t necessarily lose out on earning higher profits. How so? Even if consumers can find a lower... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Retail

20 Dec 2022
Op-Ed

Employee Feedback: The Key to Retention During the Great Resignation

Kroger, Amazon, and many others have experienced similar conflicts. A recent study finds that “toxic culture”—unethical leadership behavior and disregard for employees’ health, diversity, financial security, and self-respect—is a far more... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Beer

19 Jan 2023
Research & Ideas

What Makes Employees Trust (vs. Second-Guess) AI?

holds in higher stakes settings such as medical diagnosis and treatment or credit lending.” That finding may be useful across industries from transportation to medicine as AI evolves and the quality—and quantity—of data climbs, DeStefano says. Researchers are working... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

06 Sep 2011
Research & Ideas

Cheese Moving: Effecting Change Rather Than Accepting It

with a decidedly un-mousy message. I Moved Your Cheese: For Those Who Refuse to Live as Mice in Someone Else's Maze is like Who Moved My Cheese? in that the new business fable also stars a cast of mice. But the similarity ends there. “In... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

09 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

It’s Time to Reset Decision-Making in Your Organization

Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. While these words seem similar in many respects, a key point of VUCA is that each of these terms describes a different situation that requires a specific response. Nathan Bennett, a professor with... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Sarah Abbott

19 Oct 2022
Op-Ed

Cofounder Courtship: How to Find the Right Mate—for Your Startup

entrepreneurs I know who are looking for cofounders, yet many don’t appreciate that this is a similar courtship to mating and partnership. Many entrepreneurs believe they must have a cofounder, and some are pressured by investors to have... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

31 Mar 2008
HBS Case

JetBlue’s Valentine’s Day Crisis

students in the class were affected by the JetBlue crisis, adds Huckman. "Russ seemed to view his visit as an opportunity to educate students who may be in similar roles in the not-too-distant future; he also saw it as a way to get... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Air Transportation

October 2019
Case

Agility Africa

By: Juan Alcacer, Caroline M. Elkins and Esel Çekin

This case illustrates the challenge and opportunities that firms face when developing and executing new business models in high-risk, low-infrastructure, low-trust countries. It features a global logistics group, Agility, that aimed to become the leader in supplying... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Business Model; Innovation and Invention; Expansion; Emerging Markets; Decision Choices and Conditions; Real Estate Industry; Distribution Industry; Africa

2019
Article

Reflections on 25 Years of Building Social Enterprise Education

By: James E. Austin and V. Kasturi Rangan

Purpose—This paper aims to reflect on 25 years of the Social Enterprise Initiative at the Harvard Business School, examining the processes and thinking involved at key stages of this pioneering Initiative’s implementation and... View Details

Keywords: Social Enterprise Initiative; Harvard Business School; Social Enterprise; Education; Programs

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October 2016
Article

Technical Debt and System Architecture: The Impact of Coupling on Defect-related Activity

By: Alan MacCormack and Daniel J. Sturtevant

Technical debt is created when design decisions that are expedient in the short-term increase the costs of maintaining and adapting this system in future. An important component of technical debt relates to decisions about system architecture. As systems grow and... View Details

Keywords: Information Infrastructure; Performance Efficiency; Applications and Software; Infrastructure

2020
Working Paper

Should Firms Move Talent from the Geographic Periphery to Hubs? A Strategic Human Capital Perspective

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Victoria Sevcenko and Tarun Khanna

A longstanding literature holds that firms should hire and move talent from the geographic periphery to hubs as a means to create value from human capital. They do so, however, at the risk of losing the worker to rivals located in the same geographic hub,... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Selection and Staffing; Employment; Residency; Technology Industry; India

21 Feb 2018
Research & Ideas

When a Competitor Abandons the Market, Should You Advance or Retreat?

the most similar to ours’—that means the same disease and same mechanism of action—‘and we’re ready to react when they have a result.’” (Acting on your competitor’s actions isn’t always so cut-and-dried, Krieger notes. Some projects are... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Pharmaceutical; Health

October 2023
Case

CornerUp: Digitizing the Corner Store

By: Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui, Stacy Straaberg and Diego Zainos De La Sota Riva

In July 2023, Jason Diaz, co-founder and CEO of CornerUp, assessed the progress of his business-to-business e-procurement software application (app) startup, founded in January 2022. CornerUp began as a fast-moving consumer packaged goods (FMCG) distributor in New York... View Details

Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Small Business; Transition; Decisions; Social Entrepreneurship; Geographic Location; Disruptive Innovation; Market Participation; Digital Platforms; Trust; Business Strategy; Expansion; Information Infrastructure; Internet and the Web; Technology Adoption; Value Creation; Technology Industry; United States

October 2022
Case

Afrigen Biologics: Vaccines for the Global South

By: Debora L. Spar and Julia Comeau

The majority of vaccines used on the continent of Africa (99%) are produced offshore. This makes African nations reliant on the West for major health care needs, a problem which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Afrigen Biologics (in partnership with the WHO)... View Details

Keywords: Vaccination; Vaccine; mRNA; COVID; COVID-19; Inequity; Hub-and-spoke; Health Care and Treatment; Health Pandemics; Production; Social Issues; Business and Government Relations; South Africa; Africa