Publications
Publications
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(2,590)
- Faculty Publications (374)
- February 2023 (Revised May 2023)
- Case
CalPERS Private Equity 2.0
By: Josh Lerner, John D. Dionne and Alys Ferragamo
Yup Kim, the Head of Investments, Private Equity at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), reflected on the pension fund’s private equity strategy. In July of 2022, the fund was in the midst of a multi-year turnaround strategy with the goal to... View Details
- February 2023
- Case
Seemore Meats & Veggies
By: Lou Shipley, Patricia Favreau and Mel Martin
Cara Nicoletti was an emerging food entrepreneur that had recently launched her first product, a sustainably sourced, vegetable-infused meat sausage. Brooklyn, New York City-based Seemore Meats & Veggies had seen promising signs of success in local markets and pockets... View Details
- January 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
OhmConnect: Energizing the Future
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller
Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households... View Details
Keywords: App Development; Renewable Energy; Electricity Usage; Regulations; VC; Technology; Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC); Scalability; Applications and Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business Model; Venture Capital; Energy Industry; United States; California; Texas; Europe
- January 2023
- Case
Cleave Therapeutics: Taking a Risk on Oncology Drug Discovery
By: Regina Herzlinger and Brian Walker
What should a successful executive (HBS Baker Scholar) assess as her next move as the CEO of a firm with a promising and yet uncertain new drug? Amy Burroughs’ mandate to successfully commercialize Cleave Therapeutics’ drug for a cancer with no current successful... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Cann: High Hopes for Cannabis Infused Beverages
By: Ayelet Israeli and Anne V. Wilson
Founded in 2018 by Jake Bullock and Luke Anderson, Cann sold “social tonics,” or cannabis-infused beverages. By 2022, the company had several notable celebrity investors and talent partners, had sold over 10 million beverages to consumers, was distributing in six... View Details
Keywords: Stigma; Product Innovation; Product Introduction; Product Differentiation; New Products; New Product Marketing; New Product Management; Brand Management; Branding; Packaging; Positioning; Growth Strategy And Execution; Growth; Cannabis Industry; Purpose; Purpose Brands; LGBTQ; Direct-to-consumer; DTC; Regulations; Channels Of Distribution; Product Development; Product Marketing; Product Positioning; Product; Innovation and Invention; Brands and Branding; Marketing; Marketing Communications; Marketing Channels; Advertising; Advertising Campaigns; Digital Marketing; Market Entry and Exit; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Consumer Products Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; Canada; North America
- 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
- November 2022
- Case
Goonj: Growing in the Face of a Pandemic
By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Priyank Narayan
Founded by the husband and wife team of Anshu and Meenakshi Gupta in 1999, Goonj had quickly emerged as one of the leading disaster relief and rural development organizations in India. Their main mode of development was through providing a clothing kit to the village... View Details
- November 2022
- Case
Ajax Health: A New Model for Medical Technology Innovation
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Ben Creo
This case teaches key success factors for both startup and established MedTech firms. It examines how to structure a firm to maximize innovation and financial returns with organizational structures that better align the incentives for the different skill sets... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Lyra Health: Transforming Mental Health
By: Rembrand Koning and Nicole Keller
In January 2022, Lyra Health was deciding between several different alternatives to grow the business. Founded in 2015, Lyra Health, was a digital mental health platform that combined technology with human therapists and coaches to deliver high quality mental health... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Spaceport America, Public Sector Risk-taking, and Political Accountability (A)
By: Matthew Weinzierl, Dava Newman, Rebecca Browder and Angela Acocella
Sitting quietly in the heart of the New Mexico desert in the summer of 2014, Spaceport America (SA) housed little of the activity its supporters anticipated when opening its hangar doors in 2011. Despite $1 million in annual rent from Virgin Galactic, British... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Beam Dental (A)
By: Rembrand Koning and Alicia Dadlani
In May 2014, Alex Frommeyer, cofounder and CEO of Kentucky-based Beam Dental, a seed-stage startup that developed connected toothbrushes that tracked brushing habits, needed to decide which strategy to pitch to a venture capital firm. The first pitch deck played to the... View Details
- Article
Recovering Investor Expectations from Demand for Index Funds
By: Mark Egan, Alexander J. MacKay and Hanbin Yang
We use a revealed-preference approach to estimate investor expectations of stock market returns. Using data on demand for index funds that follow the S&P 500, we develop and estimate a model of investor choice to flexibly recover the time-varying distribution of... View Details
- September 2022
- Case
HPP: Tapping the Netherlands’ Potential
By: Brian Trelstad and Idelès Kaandorp
Stichting Het Potentieel Pakken (HPP) was launched to solve a systemic problem in the Dutch Labor Market: gender inequity that was leading to a large number of women to work part-time in fields that were in desperately short supply of labor, like health care, child... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Grants; Scaling And Growth; Nonprofit Organizations; Opportunities; Gender; Income; Employment; Health Care and Treatment; Human Capital; Mission and Purpose; Motivation and Incentives; Growth and Development Strategy; Employment Industry; Health Industry; Education Industry; Consulting Industry; Europe; Netherlands
- 2023
- Working Paper
Scoring and Funding Breakthrough Ideas: Evidence from a Global Pharmaceutical Company
By: Joshua Krieger, Ramana Nanda, Ian Hunt, Aimee Reynolds and Peter Tarsa
We study resource allocation to early-stage ideas at an internal startup program of
one the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world. Our research design enables us to
elicit every evaluator’s scores across five different attributes, before seeing how they
would... View Details
- August 2022
- Case
Southwick Social Ventures
By: Henry McGee, Mel Martin and Amy Klopfenstein
In 2021, the HBS Impact Investment Fund student team had found a promising potential investment in Southwick Social Ventures (SSV), a worker and management-owned trouser manufacturer. With a 100% immigrant workforce, the co-operative was focused on reviving... View Details
- August 2022
- Case
In-Q-Tel: Innovation On A Mission
By: Joshua Lev Krieger and Josh Lerner
In 2022, the leaders of In-Q-Tel (IQT) considered what was next for the unique mission-driven organization. Since 1999, IQT had one mission: to be the most sophisticated source of strategic technical knowledge and capabilities to the U.S. government and its allies. IQT... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Automating Short-Term Payroll Savings: Evidence from Two Large U.K. Experiments
By: Sarah Holmes Berk, James J. Choi, Jay Garg, John Beshears and David Laibson
Automatic enrollment is often used to increase retirement savings. What are the effects of using it (or, alternatively, requiring an active enrollment choice) to increase short-term savings? We evaluate two experiments in the U.K. at employers that enable workers to... View Details
- July 2022 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Vicky Tsai and Tatcha: Confronting Stereotypes
By: Geoffrey Jones and Veronica Tong
Teaching Plan for HBS Case No. 323-007. This case examines the career of Vicky Tsai, the creator of San Francisco-based TATCHA, a Japanese-themed luxury beauty brand launched in 2009. It explores how Tsai developed the concept, assembled management, and successfully... View Details
- July 2022
- Article
Estimating Spillovers from Publicly Funded R&D: Evidence from the US Department of Energy
By: Kyle Myers and Lauren Lanahan
We quantify the magnitude of R&D spillovers created by grants to small firms from the US Department of Energy. Our empirical strategy leverages variation due to state-specific matching policies, and we develop a new approach to measuring both geographic and... View Details
Keywords: Innovation; Energy; R＆D; Grants; Innovation and Invention; Research and Development; Patents; Performance; United States
- June 2022
- Teaching Plan
Lifebank Nigeria
By: Brian Trelstad, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Wale Lawal
The aspiration of addressing maternal deaths in Nigeria, which were mostly caused by blood shortages, led Temie Giwa-Tubosun to found LifeBank in 2015. LifeBank developed an online platform that enabled hospitals to connect and purchase blood from local blood banks and... View Details