Publications

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January 2025
Case

Untapped Global: Financing Africa's Missing Middle

By: Raymond Kluender and Emanuele Colonnelli

In November 2024, Jim Chu, founder and CEO of Untapped Global, faced mounting internal tensions over the company’s strategic direction. Untapped had developed a data-driven revenue-based financing (RBF) model to address the “missing middle” problem—the $5.2 trillion... View Details

September 2015
Article

(UN)Tangled: Exploring the Coevolution of VC Firm Reputation and Status

By: Timothy G. Pollock, Peggy M. Lee, Kyuho Jin and Kisha Lashley

We explore the relationship between status and reputation, examining how its dynamics change over time as these two intangible assets coevolve and how reputation and status are influenced by participation in highly visible events. Using a sample of more than 400... View Details

Keywords: Underpricing; Intangible Assets; New Firms; Status and Position; Reputation; Venture Capital; Initial Public Offering

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2023 Reunion Presentations - Alumni

by launching the Akamai Technical Academy, which asked the question: “Why don’t we go out and find smart people to train, and create our own talent pool?” Slides Impact Investing at a Crossroads Amelia Angella (MBA 2001), Director, HBS View Details

27 Mar 2007
First Look

First Look: March 27, 2007

Note 607-074 No abstract available. Purchase this case: http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=607074 Tickle Harvard Business School Case 807-100 Describes a set of decisions confronting the management team of a rapidly growing online... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

25 Jan 2016
Research & Ideas

When Negotiating a Price, Never Bid with a Round Number

Initial Offer Precision and M&A Outcomes. Their research builds on several previous social psychology studies showing that people place more value on precise numbers than on relatively round numbers. People tend to assume, true or... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

05 May 2009
First Look

First Look: May 5, 2009

of industries can't be managed as "silos," tucked away in corporate, university, or government research labs, in incubators, or within venture capital funded entrepreneurial start-ups. Access to the marketplace is needed to help... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

2008
Working Paper

Can the Virtuous Mouse and the Wealthy Elephant Live Happily Ever After?

By: James E. Austin and Herman B. Leonard

What happens when small iconic socially-oriented businesses are acquired by large corporations? Such mergers create significant opportunities for creating both business value and substantially expanded social value, but also pose unusually difficult challenges because... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Management Style; Agreements and Arrangements; Social Enterprise; Social Issues

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October 2002
Case

New Leaders for New Schools

Describes the founding, early growth, and expansion plans of New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit public education venture that recruits, trains, places, and supports principals in U.S. urban school districts. This case presents the strategic, financial, and... View Details

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Education; Education Industry

Web

HBS - The year in Review

in-kind funding for their startups. The finalists were selected from 318 teams by judges, including many HBS graduates, from fields such as venture capital, private equity, law, accounting, philanthropy, impact investing, and View Details

July 2024
Case

Replika AI: Alleviating Loneliness (A)

By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai

Eugenia Kuyda launched Replika AI in 2017 as an empathetic digital companion to combat loneliness and provide emotional support. The platform surged in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, offering non-judgmental support to isolated users. By 2023, Replika boasted... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Ethics; Health Pandemics; AI and Machine Learning; Well-being; Technology Industry

Nitin Nohria served as the tenth dean of Harvard Business School from 2010-2020. He previously served as co-chair of the Leadership Initiative, Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Development, and Head of the Organizational Behavior unit.

As Dean, building on... View Details

Web

Student Journey - Entrepreneurship

as EC) New Venture Competition — Student Business Track and Student Social Enterprise Track President’s Innovation Challenge Harvard College i3 Innovation Challenge — organized by the Harvard John A. Paulson... View Details

June 2016
Case

Publicis Groupe 2016: Maurice and the Millennials

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Jonathan Cohen

Having built Publicis Groupe through acquisitions maintained as separate brands, CEO Maurice Lévy wanted to transform the advertising and marketing firm to an integrated digital-ready enterprise to address industry changes. In early 2016, following a reorganization, he... View Details

February 2023 (Revised March 2023)
Case

Twitter Turnaround and Elon Musk

By: Andy Wu and Goran Calic

Late afternoon on Friday, October 27th, 2022, Elon Musk was the center of attention at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. The night before, Musk officially took the company private and became Twitter’s majority shareholder, finally ending a months-long acquisition... View Details

Keywords: Elon Musk; Twitter; Acquisition; Revenue; Advertising; Social Media; Business or Company Management; Public Opinion; Job Cuts and Outsourcing