Publications

ULI Report Provides Wildfire, Energy, and Economic Resilience Strategies to Sonoma County

Sonoma County, Calif., can enhance its ability to withstand and recover from wildfires by re-envisioning its land use, energy, and housing policies through a cooperative... View Details

11 Jun 2024
In Practice

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2024

As the vacation season looms, Harvard Business School faculty members share recommendations for a little light reading. Spoiler alert: Lessons in Chemistry tops two of their beach-read lists. For those whose brains can’t—or won’t—turn off, HBS faculty also suggest some... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

May 11, 2020
Article

Steer Your Family Businesses Through an Unplanned Transition

By: Josh Baron and Nick Di Loreto

In a perfect world, family businesses will transition leadership from one generation to the next along a predictable and well-planned process — whether that’s determined within the business, the ownership group, or the family itself — passing the baton after years of... View Details

Keywords: Transition; Planning; Family Business; Management Succession

23 Jun 2023
HBS Case

This Company Lets Employees Take Charge—Even with Life and Death Decisions

BuurtzorgWeb allows everyone to help each other in real-time and capture knowledge as it emerges. Two considerations about decentralization But getting the free-spirited model right is not without challenges. Adapting to external crises, such as the COVID-19 View Details

Keywords: by Annelena Lobb; Health

17 Aug 2023
Research & Ideas

‘Not a Bunch of Weirdos’: Why Mainstream Investors Buy Crypto

during the pandemic gave researchers an opportunity to look at the impact of an influx of liquidity into the market and its relationship to cryptocurrency investing. Di Maggio and his team examined levels of cryptocurrency investing at... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

February 2021 (Revised May 2021)
Case

SafeGraph: Selling Data as a Service

By: Ramana Nanda, Abhishek Nagaraj and Allison Ciechanover

Set in January 2021, the CEO of SafeGraph, a four-year-old startup that sold Data as a Service, looked to the future. His aim was to become the most trusted source for data about a physical place. The company provided points of interest (POI) and foot traffic data on... View Details

Keywords: Data As A Service; Monetization; Pricing; Business Startups; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior; Analysis; Business Model; Health Pandemics; Information Industry; United States

09 May 2024
Research & Ideas

Called Back to the Office? How You Benefit from Ideas You Didn't Know You Were Missing

Pandemic Changed the Way We Collaborate Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu. Image: Illustration created by HBSWK using images generated by Midjourney, an artificial intelligence tool and with an... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

March 2022
Article

Where to Locate COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Facilities?

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Alexander Jacquillat, Michael Lingzhi Li and Alessandro Previero

The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a record-breaking race to develop a vaccine. However, the limited vaccine capacity creates another massive challenge: how to distribute vaccines to mitigate the near-end impact of the pandemic? In the United States in particular, the new... View Details

Keywords: Vaccines; COVID-19; Health Care and Treatment; Health Pandemics; Performance Effectiveness; Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods

Read Now

Winter 2022
Article

Determinants of Small Business Reopening Decisions After COVID Restrictions Were Lifted

By: Dylan Balla-Elliott, Zoë B. Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca and Christopher Stanton

The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic economic disruptions, including government-imposed restrictions that temporarily shuttered millions of American businesses. We use a nation-wide survey of thousands of small business owners to establish three main facts about... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Demand Forecasting; Reopening; Health Pandemics; Government Administration; Small Business

Find at Harvard

Read Now

31 Jan 2022
Research & Ideas

Where Can Digital Transformation Take You? Insights from 1,700 Leaders

class=infogram-embed data-id=_/2HVue23rXJZLet5zlvSC][/div] Getting to know the customer has become a dynamic, ongoing process, and is fast becoming table stakes. For example, companies understand they need to get reacquainted with their customers after the COVID-19... View Details

Keywords: by Linda A. Hill, Ann Le Cam, Sunand Menon, and Emily Tedards

08 Oct 2020
News

How to Manage a Hybrid Team

02 Apr 2020
What Do You Think?

What Are Lessons for Leaders from This Black Swan Crisis?

Eddisonphotos SUMMING UP In What Ways Will the Pandemic Stimulate Research in Leadership? Preparation for Black Swan events, to the extent that it is even possible, has to be balanced against the demands for short-term results. It may be... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

March 2021 (Revised July 2021)
Case

Resident

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Thomas O. Jones

Launched in 2016, Resident was a leading player in the direct-to-consumer bed-in-a-box mattress market, where it was one of at least 175 venture-backed companies competing in the space. By late 2020, it had realized over $500 million in revenue, profitability in the... View Details

Keywords: Digital Marketing; Business Growth and Maturation; Operations; Entrepreneurship; Competitive Strategy; Initial Public Offering; Decisions; Marketing Strategy; Cash Flow; Demand and Consumers

November 2023 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Norse Atlantic Airways

By: Willy Shih

Bjørn Tore Larsen, Norse Atlantic Airways' founder and CEO, hadn't planned to get into the airline business. But when the COVID-19 pandemic depressed the global demand for air travel and the lease rates for jetliners, he realized if ever he was going to get into the... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Business Startups; Market Entry and Exit; Leasing; Business Strategy; Segmentation; Interest Rates; Air Transportation Industry; Europe; North America; Norway; United Kingdom; United States

February 2021 (Revised March 2022)
Case

TikTok in 2020: Super App or Supernova?

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Dan Maher and Dan O'Brien

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was launched in 2012 around a simple idea – helping users entertain themselves on their smartphones while on the Beijing Subway. In less than a decade, it had become one of the world’s most valuable private companies, with investors... View Details

31 Oct 2022
Research & Ideas

Why the Largest Minority Group Faces the Most Hate—and How to Push Back

American cities have experienced an alarming double-digit rise in hate crimes in recent years, due in part to factors like anti-Asian sentiment in the wake of the pandemic and racial strife following the murder of George Floyd. Now, new... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

17 Aug 2020
Research & Ideas

What the Stockdale Paradox Tells Us About Crisis Leadership

even excluding COVID-19 deaths) Mental health crises Secondary health problems from neglect/postponement of routine/preventative care Mass unemployment Dining, entertainment, arts, tourism industries—the whole experiential economy—devastated. Further, the View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams

2022
Working Paper

Where the Cloud Rests: The Location Strategies of Data Centers

By: Shane Greenstein and Tommy Pan Fang

This study provides an analysis of the entry strategies of third-party data centers in the United States. We examine the market before the pandemic in 2018 and 2019, when supply and demand for data services were geographically stable. We compare with the entry... View Details

Keywords: Cloud Computing; Location Strategies; Data Centers; Information Infrastructure