Black Box Models - Publications - Faculty & Research

12 Oct 1999
Research & Ideas

Rapid Response: Inside the Retailing Revolution

Once upon a time, suppliers held all the cards. Henry Ford's dictum that consumers could have any color car they wanted as long as it was black proved wrong in the extreme, but for years manufacturers in this country kept their hands... View Details

Keywords: by James E. Aisner; Apparel & Accessories; Fashion; Consumer Products; Manufacturing; Retail

07 Mar 2011
Research & Ideas

Why Companies Fail—and How Their Founders Can Bounce Back

Market went through several business models before finding one that worked. But the opposite was true after the boom; a company could have a great idea and a great team, but still fail to achieve traction due to lack of funding and,... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

18 Apr 2023
Research & Ideas

The Best Person to Lead Your Company Doesn't Work There—Yet

Companies looking for the best possible leaders—and leaders looking to become CEOs—would do well to heed the model of private-equity (PE) backed companies, which often look outside their ranks when hiring for the top job and see excellent... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Financial Services

06 Jun 2016
Research & Ideas

Skills and Behaviors that Make Entrepreneurs Successful

makes entrepreneurial leaders tick, the answers are far from clear. In fact, most studies present conflicting findings. Entrepreneurs, it seems, are still very much a black box waiting to be opened. A... View Details

Keywords: by HBS Working Knowledge

09 Dec 2019
Research & Ideas

Identify Great Customers from Their First Purchase

the customer would do in the future. As with other artificial intelligence tools, the drawback to this technology is that the model acts as a sort of black box, so researchers can’t determine the exact... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Retail; Service

19 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

15 Podcast Episodes That Grabbed Listeners in 2023

microcosm for the future of media and information. Muhammad Ali: A Case Study in Purpose-Driven Decision Making Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., rose from a poor family in segregated Louisville, Kentucky, to international fame, winning three heavyweight... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

03 Jan 2023
Book

Confront Workplace Inequity in 2023: Dig Deep, Build Bridges, Take Collective Action

Despite calls for making the workplace more equitable, women, particularly Black women, continue to get the short end of the stick at work. Only 6 percent of the top 3,000 companies in the US are led by a woman. In 2022, only two View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

30 May 2024
Research & Ideas

Racial Bias Might Be Infecting Patient Portals. Can AI Help?

to an inquiry? Researchers analyzed more than 57,000 message threads between patients and physician teams at Boston Medical Center and found that white patients were more likely to receive answers from their attending physicians, while View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand; Health

19 Apr 2010
Research & Ideas

The History of Beauty

autonomy beauty companies have to shape ideals. Unilever's current Dove marketing campaign, which uses senior women as models to make the point that one can be beautiful beyond one's 30s, shows that a large company has the power to... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Beauty & Cosmetics

16 Nov 2015
Research & Ideas

Does Competition Make Us More Creative?

2016.) “We tend to study innovation in terms of inputs like R&D spending or outcomes like patents,” says Gross, “but creativity is really about what happens in between. It’s really about this process of exploring new and untested ideas.” Peering inside that View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Advertising

16 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

Restaurant Revolution: How the Industry Is Fighting to Stay Alive

business model for small independents is often elusive. So when a crisis of the magnitude of the COVID-19 global pandemic forces restaurants to close, and their revenue drops to zero overnight, things get particularly dire. Unlike the... View Details

Keywords: by Michael S. Kaufman, Lena G. Goldberg, and Jill Avery; Food & Beverage

15 Jul 2008
First Look

First Look: July 15, 2008

simple model of collective action which is intended to capture the various mechanisms that are discussed in the theoretical literature on collective action. We argue that several of these intuitive theoretical arguments rely on special... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

06 May 2021
HBS Case

How Four Women Made Miami More Equitable for Startups

Noting that many urban youth lacked tech skills, she and her husband Derek Pearson launched Code Fever, a company offering training camps and hackathons for young people, and transformed a vacant building in a historically Black... View Details

Keywords: by Carolyn DiPaolo

28 Jan 2020
Book

Advanced Leadership Requires More Than Outside-The-Box Thinking

Sometimes, thinking outside the box isn’t ambitious enough to get real innovation flowing. In her new book, Rosabeth Moss Kanter encourages organization leaders to think much more broadly at what restricts creativity and how to overcome... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

25 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

HBS Cases: Beauty Entrepreneur Madam Walker

Koehn discovered, Walker had lived an entrepreneurial life that was dramatic and deeply complex on many levels. "I think much of Walker's business model and her animating vision is a product of the constraints that she faced,"... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Beauty & Cosmetics

06 Oct 2003
Research & Ideas

The Problem with Hedge Funds

fund managers will know exactly what caused an investment to be a success or a failure. From the point of view of most investors, including the banks that claim expertise when they intermediate investors' money, invested funds go into a View Details

Keywords: by D. Quinn Mills

08 Dec 2020
Research & Ideas

Why Companies Hunt for Talent on Digital Platforms, Not in Resume Piles

Koning was talking about such studies with colleagues Ines Black and Sharique Hasan from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, however, something about that model didn’t seem right. “It really didn’t... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Employment

09 Nov 2022
In Practice

COP27: What Can Business Leaders Do to Fight Climate Change Now?

The US government’s newly passed Inflation Reduction Act will direct $370 billion toward advancing renewal energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions—the country's largest investment in fighting climate change so far. As business and government leaders around the... View Details

Keywords: by Lynn Schenk and Danielle Kost

18 Nov 2022
HBS Case

What Does It Take to Safeguard a Legacy in Asset Management?

in a business environment awakening to equity and inclusion. One of the first Black portfolio managers, Eddie Brown, founded the eponymous firm in 1983. It was only the second Black-founded investment firm in the US. Its performance in... View Details