Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(736)
- Faculty Publications (90)
- 2013
- Working Paper
Skilled Immigration and the Employment Structures of U.S. Firms
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr and William F. Lincoln
We study the impact of skilled immigrants on the employment structures of U.S. firms using matched employer-employee data. Unlike most previous work, we use the firm as the lens of analysis to account for a greater level of heterogeneity and the fact that many skilled... View Details
Keywords: H-1B; Firms; Scientists; Engineers; Inventors; Age; Employment; Competency and Skills; Immigration; United States
- October 2012 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Kleiner-Perkins and Genentech: When Venture Capital Met Science
By: Felda Hardymon and Tom Nicholas
Genentech is a rare success story in the biotechnology industry. Hundreds of billions of dollars of venture capital have been invested without the expected transformational effects. Established in 1976, Genentech was to develop the new science of recombinant DNA into... View Details
- July 2012
- Case
Performance Management at Vitality Health Enterprises, Inc.
By: John Bingham and Michael Beer
Vitality Health Enterprises, a medium-sized firm that manufactures health and personal care products, has experienced six straight quarters of strong revenue growth. James Hoffman, the new Senior Vice President of Human Resources, fears that the chain of success is... View Details
- July 2011 (Revised January 2013)
- Case
Digital Microscopy Is Making Me Crazy!
By: Willy Shih
For Carl Zeiss Microimaging, modular hardware and software enabled customers to tailor Zeiss's broad range of microscopy systems hardware and software to meet a wide range of needs from basic scientific research in the biological and medical sciences to clinical... View Details
- June 2011 (Revised June 2011)
- Case
Calit2: A UC San Diego, UC Irvine Partnership
By: Linda A. Hill and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld
Larry Smarr, the founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), reflects on the Institute's past 10 years of successes and challenges. In 2010, more than 700 university scientists, artists, engineers, and... View Details
- March 2011 (Revised February 2012)
- Case
Innovation and Growth at Actelion Ltd.
By: Gary P. Pisano, Daniela Beyersdorfer and Ruth Dittrich
In late 2010, Jean-Paul Clozel, CEO of the Swiss biotech pharmaceuticals firm Actelion, looks back on a successful decade. The small venture that he had started with a few of his scientist colleagues in the late 1990s to discover novel medicine in a research-driven... View Details
- 2010
- Chapter
The Agglomeration of U.S. Ethnic Inventors
By: William R. Kerr
The ethnic composition of US inventors is undergoing a significant transformation - with deep impacts for the overall agglomeration of US innovation. This study applies an ethnic-name database to individual US patent records to explore these trends with greater detail.... View Details
- January 2010
- Article
Breakthrough Inventions and Migrating Clusters of Innovation
By: William R. Kerr
We investigate the speed at which clusters of invention for a technology migrate spatially following breakthrough inventions. We identify breakthrough inventions as the top one percent of U.S. inventions for a technology during 1975-1984 in terms of subsequent... View Details
- 2010
- Chapter
Lessons from Catastrophe Reinsurance
By: Kenneth A. Froot
Of the 20 most costly catastrophes since 1970, more than half have occurred since 2001. Is this an omen of what the 21st century will be? How might we behave in this new, uncertain, and more dangerous environment? Will our actions be rational or irrational? A select... View Details
- September 2009
- Case
Peter Schultz at The Scripps Research Institute
By: H. Kent Bowen, Alison Berkley Wagonfeld and Courtney Purrington
Peter Schultz, Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute, managed an extremely productive lab. This case examines how Schultz recruited, motivated and inspired the students and scientists that worked with him. View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Breakthrough Inventions and Migrating Clusters of Innovation
By: William R. Kerr
We investigate the speed at which clusters of invention for a technology migrate spatially following breakthrough inventions. We identify breakthrough inventions as the top one percent of US inventions for a technology during 1975-1984 in terms of subsequent citations.... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
The Agglomeration of U.S. Ethnic Inventors
By: William R. Kerr
The ethnic composition of US inventors is undergoing a significant transformation—with deep impacts for the overall agglomeration of US innovation. This study applies an ethnic-name database to individual US patent records to explore these trends with greater detail.... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
The Ethnic Composition of U.S. Inventors
By: William R. Kerr
The ethnic composition of US scientists and engineers is undergoing a significant transformation. This study applies an ethnic-name database to individual patent records granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to document these trends with greater... View Details
- May 2006 (Revised February 2012)
- Case
General Electric's 20th Century CEOs (Abridged)
By: Nitin Nohria, Anthony J. Mayo and Mark Benson
General Electric thrived in every decade of the 20th century. Since its founding in 1892, GE has placed a high value on picking and training the best people. Staff members worked with other scientists in the company's research lab to design and manufacture new and... View Details
- December 2005 (Revised April 2011)
- Case
General Electric's 20th Century CEOs
By: Nitin Nohria, Anthony Mayo and Mark Benson
General Electric thrived in every decade of the 20th century. Since its founding in 1892, GE has placed a high value on picking and training the best people. Staff members worked with other scientists in the company's research lab to design and manufacture new and... View Details
- May 2005 (Revised April 2010)
- Case
GlaxoSmithKline: Reorganizing Drug Discovery (A)
By: Robert S. Huckman and Eli Strick
Describes the reorganization of drug discovery at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) following the formation of GSK from the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham. This reorganization placed nearly 2,000 research scientists into six centers of excellence in drug discovery... View Details
- September 2002 (Revised October 2002)
- Case
Managing Knowledge and Learning at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
By: Dorothy A. Leonard and David Kiron
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) faces a serious loss of knowledge--both because of the "faster, better, cheaper" mandate for Mars missions and from the retirement of key personnel. An extensive knowledge management system for NASA/JPL includes formal knowledge-capture... View Details
- April 2002
- Case
In vivo to in vitro to in silico: Coping with Tidal Waves of Data at Biogen
By: Juan Enriquez-Cabot, Gary P. Pisano and Gaye Bok
Biogen is a successful biotech company facing a critical juncture. CEO John Mullen ponders how technological changes introduced into the research function will shape larger corporate decisions. This world in which biotechnology companies operated had changed... View Details