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Publications
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Failure
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- Article
Putin's Invasion of Ukraine: A Desperate Gamble to Reverse a String of Failures
By: Jeremy Friedman and Ingrid Burke Friedman
- January 2022
- Case
Dating Ring
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Lindsay N. Hyde
In 2015, the co-founders of Dating Ring, an online dating startup that relied on human matchmakers to arrange dates between its members, were deciding whether to either shut down the service or instead manage Dating Ring as a "lifestyle company," ramping down growth... View Details
- January 2022
- Case
Walmart Goes Global (A)
By: Juan Alcácer
- 2022
- Chapter
CIP Deviations, the Dollar, and Frictions in International Capital Markets
By: Wenxin Du and Jesse Schreger
The covered interest rate parity (CIP) condition is a fundamental arbitrage relationship in international finance. In this chapter, we review its breakdown during the Global Financial Crisis and its continued failure in the subsequent decade. We review how to measure... View Details
- December 2021 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Katerra (A)
By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
In April 2020, Katerra executives struggled with a series of decisions that would determine the fate of one of the best-funded construction startups in history. Katerra was founded in 2015 by technology-industry executive Michael Marks and commercial real estate... View Details
- December 2021 (Revised January 2023)
- Supplement
Katerra (B)
By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
In May 2020, SoftBank executives, having invested nearly $2 billion in Katerra, decided the vision of an end-to-end, vertically-integrated construction process was worth saving—with some major changes to company structure. The SoftBank Vision Fund invested $200 million... View Details
- 2021
- Chapter
Business Continuity Insurance in the Next Disaster
By: Samuel Gregory Hanson, Adi Sunderam and Eric Zwick
This article draws lessons from the business support policies pursued in the COVID-19
pandemic to guide policy design for the next disaster. We contrast the performance
of the Paycheck Protection Program to the Main Street Lending Program to illustrate
how design... View Details
- December 2021 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
Troverie (A)
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Lindsay N. Hyde and Olivia Graham
Six months after the August 2018 launch of Troverie, a U.S.-based online retailer of luxury watches, the average cost of acquiring a customer is much higher than originally projected, and the startup is incurring a substantial loss on each sales transaction. Could... View Details
- December 2021
- Supplement
Troverie (B)
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Lindsay N. Hyde and Olivia Graham
Resolves the questions raised in Troverie (A); recounts pivots and efforts to raise capital from strategic investors and sell Troverie; and shares the founder's post-mortem reflections on what went wrong and what he might have done differently. View Details
- 2021
- White Paper
Go Out and Innovate! Perspectives on Educating Health Care Leadership in the Time of Innovation
By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Anthony Stanowski, Edward Schumacher, Eugene Schneller, Kaveh Safavi, Quint Studer, Andrew Jay, Tom Robinson and Kevin Mahoney
The CAHME Innovation Council unanimously believes that education is essential. In evaluating the competency domain of management and leadership, and learning from programs that prioritize innovation, we ask how do we develop competencies in future leaders to succeed in... View Details
- October 2021
- Article
Board Design and Governance Failures at Peer Firms
By: Shelby Gai, J. Yo-Jud Cheng and Andy Wu
Our study introduces board committees as a crucial determinant of board actions. We examine how directors who structurally link different board committees—referred to as multi-committee directors (MCDs)—explain why some board actions are merely symbolic while others... View Details
- September 2021
- Article
Trials and Terminations: Learning from Competitors' R&D Failures
I analyze project continuation decisions where firms may resolve uncertainty through news about competitors' research and development (R&D) failures, as well as through their own results. I examine the trade-offs and interactions between product-market competition and... View Details
- August 2021
- Teaching Note
IBM Watson at MD Anderson Cancer Center
By: Shane Greenstein and Mel Martin
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 621-022. View Details
Keywords: Decision Making; Technological Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Knowledge Management; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Operations; Failure; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Health Care and Treatment; Product Development; Health Industry; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; United States; Houston; Texas
- July 2021
- Case
Amazon HQ2
By: James K. Sebenius and Ben Cook
Amazon’s failed bid for a second headquarters location (“HQ2”) in Long Island City, New York offers many lessons for negotiators looking to avoid similar high-profile defeats in strategically important deals. The company’s project – which promised to bring billions of... View Details
- July 2021
- Article
Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? Experimental Evidence from Italy
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, from canvassers supporting... View Details
- July 19, 2021
- Article
Do Most Family Businesses Really Fail by the Third Generation?
By: Josh Baron and Rob Lachenauer
Perhaps the most commonly-cited statistic about family businesses is their failure rates. Most articles or speeches about family businesses start with some version of the “three-generation rule,” which suggests that most don’t survive beyond three generations. But that... View Details
- 2021
- Book
Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
Why Startups Fail explores entrepreneurial failure, examining its predictable patterns, how to avoid them, and how to cope when failure does occur. Part I looks at three common failure patterns for early-stage startups, illustrating each with an anchor case... View Details
- May–June 2021
- Article
Why Start-ups Fail
If you’re launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds... View Details