Publications

April 2020 (Revised April 2023)
Supplement

TransDigm in 2017: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher

TransDigm was a highly acquisitive company that manufactured a wide range of highly engineered aerospace parts for both military and commercial customers. Over the ten years ending in 2016, its stock price had increase ten times, and both EBITDA and revenues had grown... View Details

Keywords: Acquisition; Ethics; Private Equity; Financial Strategy; Growth Management; Performance Evaluation; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Horizontal Integration; Value Creation; Competitive Advantage; Aerospace Industry; Air Transportation Industry; United States

August 2001
Case

Charmed Technology

By: Youngme E. Moon

Charmed Technology, a California start-up known primarily for its high-profile fashion shows featuring "wearable" computers, has just released its first product. The "CharmIT" is being billed as the world's first affordable, wearable computer for consumers. The key... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Resignation and Termination; Technological Innovation; Marketing Strategy; Product Development; Luxury; Information Infrastructure; Value Creation; Computer Industry; Fashion Industry

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06 Apr 2020
News

Is China Ready for Leadership on the Global Stage?

Rajiv Lal

Rajiv Lal, is the Stanley Roth, Sr. Professor of Retailing at Harvard Business School. He is currently teaching an elective MBA course on the Business of Smart Connected Products/IOT. He has been responsible for the retailing curriculum and has served as the course... View Details

November 2022 (Revised March 2024)
Case

Replika AI: Monetizing a Chatbot

By: Julian De Freitas and Nicole Tempest Keller

In early 2018, Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based chatbot Replika AI, was deciding how to monetize the app she had built. Launched in 2017, Replika was a consumer AI “companion app” developed by a team of AI software engineers originally based in... View Details

Keywords: Mental Health; Subscriber Models; TAM; Monetization Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; AI and Machine Learning; Applications and Software; Product Positioning; Health Disorders; Technology Industry

October 3, 2023
Article

The Employer-Educator Partnership That Can Fill U.S. Jobs

By: Joseph Fuller and Manjari Raman

Middle-skills workers—those with less than a four-year college education but more than a high school diploma—make up more than 60% of U.S. workers over the age of 25. These workers are the life force that keeps America’s economic engine humming, but, increasingly, as... View Details

Keywords: Jobs and Positions; Higher Education; Recruitment

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2020
Other Teaching and Training Material

Leading the Charge: A Podcase about Product Management at Opower

By: Jeffrey Rayport and John J. Lafkas

The Opower podcase materials contain audio from professor Jeffrey Rayport's interview with Ben Foster, the former vice president of product management at Opower, and more recently the co-founder of Prodify. In the podcase, Ben discusses how product management works in... View Details

Keywords: Product; Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Customization and Personalization; Conflict Management; Software

February 2011 (Revised November 2012)
Case

Product Development at OPOWER

By: Thomas Eisenmann and Rob Go

OPOWER, a software startup that helps utilities engage their customers in ways that reduce energy consumption, is scaling rapidly. The company's new head of product management has designed a system to address a point of constant tension: whether to build custom... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Customer Relationship Management; Entrepreneurship; Growth Management; Product Development; Sales; Customization and Personalization; Energy Conservation; Environmental Sustainability; Information Technology Industry; Utilities Industry

2010
Chapter

The Agglomeration of U.S. Ethnic Inventors

By: William R. Kerr

The ethnic composition of US inventors is undergoing a significant transformation - with deep impacts for the overall agglomeration of US innovation. This study applies an ethnic-name database to individual US patent records to explore these trends with greater detail.... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Geographic Location; Patents; Ethnicity; City; Innovation and Invention; United States

SSRN

20 Feb 2017
News

MBAs in space: rocket science absorbs business school thinking

Cannibalization and Option Value Effects of Secondary Markets: Evidence from the US Concert Industry

We examine how reducing search frictions in secondary markets affects the value appropriated by firms in primary markets. We characterize two effects on primary-market firms caused by intermediaries entering secondary markets: the “cannibalization” and “option value”... View Details

December 2, 2021
Article

Former Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly: Empowering Workers to Create ‘Magic’

By: Hubert Joly and Adi Ignatius

Hubert Joly was behind an amazing turnaround at Best Buy. While everybody was saying he should lay people off to solve the company’s problems, Joly instead listened to the people working for him and found solutions that didn’t involve people losing their jobs.... View Details

Keywords: Purpose; Meaningful Work; Employee Empowerment; Mission and Purpose; Employees; Organizational Culture; Leadership

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November 2008 (Revised January 2017)
Case

Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke

By: Anthony Mayo and Shandi Onise Smith

As America struggled to regain its balance in the aftermath of the American Civil War, Maggie Lena Walker did her best to actively effect change by finding solutions to the social and economic problems facing blacks and especially black women. Taking charge of the... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leading Change; Ethnicity; Race; Social Entrepreneurship; Personal Development and Career; Welfare; Business and Community Relations; Gender; Banks and Banking

Michael Tushman holds degrees from Northeastern University (B.S.E.E.), Cornell University (M.S.), and the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. (Ph.D.). Tushman was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, from 1976 to 1998 where he was... View Details

Article

Matriarch: A Python Library for Materials Architecture

By: Tristan Giesa, Ravi Jagadeesan, David I. Spivak and Markus J. Buehler

Biological materials, such as proteins, often have a hierarchical structure ranging from basic building blocks at the nanoscale (e.g., amino acids) to assembled structures at the macroscale (e.g., fibers). Current software for materials engineering allows the user to... View Details

Keywords: Building Block; Category Theory; Hierarchical Protein Materials; Molecular Design; Open-Source Software; Structure Creation

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05 Sep 2006
First Look

First Look: September 5, 2006

sample company invested in marketing, ex ante, at levels close to those that would have maximized returns, observed ex post. Managing Creativity in Small Worlds Authors:Lee Fleming and Matt Marx Periodical:California Management Review 48, no. 4 (summer 2006) Abstract... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Research Summary

Technological Change and Competitive Strategy

Richard S. Rosenbloom continues to explore issues in the strategic management of technology and the relationship between technological change and competitive strategy. He is currently investigating the histories of radical technological innovations and their... View Details

June 2018 (Revised July 2018)
Teaching Note

Mark43

By: Thomas Eisenmann, Mitchell Weiss and Matt Higgins

Teaching Note for HBS No. 817-016. The founders of Mark43, an early-stage startup that provides software for law enforcement agencies, must decide whether to bid on a request for proposals (RFP) from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). On the one hand, LAPD would... View Details

Keywords: Sales; Customers; Entrepreneurship; Applications and Software; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Decision Making; Technology Industry; District of Columbia; Los Angeles

October 2001 (Revised March 2002)
Case

Siemens AG: Global Development Strategy (A)

By: Stefan H. Thomke and Ashok Nimgade

Describes how Siemens, the German electrical engineering giant, has developed and manages global R&D in its large Information and Communications Networks (ICN) division. In 1994, Siemens opened its Bangalore (India) center, which has now grown into one of its largest... View Details

Keywords: Global Strategy; Research and Development; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Product Development; Telecommunications Industry; Germany; Bangalore