Publications

SSRN

February 2016 (Revised February 2017)
Case

Mattermark

By: Jeffrey Bussgang and Annelena Lobb

Mattermark, a software-as-a-service company that sold software allowing companies to access financial information about privately-held companies and startups, was at a turning point. CEO Danielle Morrill had to allocate investment funding from a Series A round. She... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Applications and Software; Business Startups; Marketing; Strategy; Technology Industry; United States

Research Summary

Antecedents and Consequences of Trust in Intraorganizational Relations: An International Comparison

This project moves the level of analysis to the intraorganizational level. The empirical context consists of internal relationships between the Information Systems (IS) function and the user groups. Are better project management techniques, better software development... View Details

January 2002 (Revised May 2003)
Case

ProfitLogic

By: Richard G. Hamermesh, Michael J. Roberts and Taslim Pirmohamed

Describes an "application software" company that has been through several evolutions--from consulting firm to applications service provider (ASP). The firm has received significant venture funding to pursue the ASP model but this has not worked, at least at the time... View Details

Keywords: History; Business Model; Venture Capital; Cash Flow; Decision Choices and Conditions; Balanced Scorecard; Information Technology Industry; Service Industry

July 2001 (Revised December 2001)
Case

American Express Interactive

By: Lynda M. Applegate

Follows the protagonist, Sonia Sharpe, as she and her American Express Interactive Team attempt to develop and market an interactive, on-line, corporate travel service in a highly competitive environment. Looks at the possible resources and partnerships a company needs... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Entrepreneurship; Partners and Partnerships; Growth and Development Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Product Positioning; Applications and Software; Technological Innovation; Global Strategy; Expansion; Information Technology; Vertical Integration; Financial Services Industry; Travel Industry

May 2003 (Revised October 2003)
Case

BEA Systems, Inc.: Constant Reinvention to Cope with Market Waves

Developed in 1995 as a specialist software vendor, BEA Systems, Inc. had already transformed itself twice from a transaction processing product company to a server application provider. By July 2002, it had become the fastest company in history to reach $1 billion in... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Digital Platforms; Business Growth and Maturation; Management Practices and Processes; Applications and Software; Entrepreneurship; Organizational Culture; Web Services Industry; Information Technology Industry

August 2018 (Revised July 2020)
Case

Revenue Recognition at HBP

By: Paul Healy and Siko Sikochi

In early 2014, Paul Bills, CFO of Harvard Business Publishing (HBP), sat down with David Wan, the company’s CEO, to discuss budget preparations for the coming year. Bills noted that the performance of Corporate Learning, one of HBP’s three business units, would be... View Details

Keywords: Accrual Accounting; Budgets and Budgeting; Revenue Recognition; Financial Reporting; Publishing Industry; Education Industry; United States

August 2015 (Revised December 2016)
Case

Apple Pay

By: Sunil Gupta, Shelle Santana and Margaret L. Rodriguez

On September 9, 2014, in front of a packed audience in Cupertino, CA, Tim Cook, the chief executive officer of Apple, announced the much anticipated launch of Apple Pay. "Our vision is to replace this [wallet] and we are going to start with payments." Cook then invited... View Details

15 Dec 2006
Working Paper Summaries

The Business of Free Software: Enterprise Incentives, Investment, and Motivation in the Open Source Community

Keywords: by Marco Iansiti & Gregory L. Richards; Video Game; Web Services

October 2014
Article

Hidden Structure: Using Network Methods to Map System Architecture

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack and John Rusnak

In this paper, we describe an operational methodology for characterizing the architecture of complex technical systems and demonstrate its application to a large sample of software releases. Our methodology is based upon directed network graphs, which allows us to... View Details

Keywords: Architecture; Modularity; Dominant Designs; Complexity; Product Design; Software

14 Nov 2006
First Look

First Look: November 14, 2006

source software ("OSS"). What drives companies with large, proprietary software portfolios to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in OSS? We approach this question by grouping a sample of OSS... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

September 2014 (Revised February 2017)
Case

Belk: Towards Exceptional Scheduling

By: Ethan Bernstein, Saravanan Kesavan, Bradley Staats and Luke Hassall

With 24,000 staff and over 300 stores, Belk Inc. sought to replace its entirely manual labor scheduling system with an automated software solution from Reflexis. Belk hoped the upgrade would simplify scheduling, reduce time employees spent in non-customer-facing roles,... View Details

2008
Working Paper

Variation in Experience and Team Familiarity: Addressing the Knowledge Acquisition-Application Problem

By: Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats

Prior work in organizational learning has failed to find a consistent effect of variation in experience on performance. While some studies find a positive relationship between these two variables, others find no effect or even a negative relationship. In this paper, we... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Learning; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Organizational Culture; Performance Improvement; Groups and Teams; Familiarity; India

Read Now

2020
Book

Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments

By: Stefan Thomke

Don’t fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you. When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition,... View Details

Keywords: Experimentation; Experiments; Market Research; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Customers; Research

10 Aug 2021
Cold Call Podcast

The Science of Sales Conversations with Gong’s Amit Bendov

Keywords: Re: Alison Wood Brooks

May 2014
Article

Right Up the Middle: How Israeli Firms Go Global

By: Jonathan Friedrich, Amit Noam and Elie Ofek

The article considers international business enterprises based in Israel and how they successfully expanded from their origins as small businesses. A common technique of those companies in which they focused on market entry in other countries whose markets were too... View Details

Keywords: Globalized Firms and Management; Israel