Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,029)
- Faculty Publications (211)
- May 2020
- Teaching Note
Big Boom Beverages: Fight or Flight? (Brief Case)
By: Stephen A. Greyser and William Ellet
Teaching Note for HBS Brief Case No. 920-557. The case addresses analysis and decisions related to the entrepreneurial life of a distinctive energy beverage, including its niche market launch, early problems, reformulation, social media impact, market success, and... View Details
- March 2020 (Revised June 2022)
- Case
GreenLight Fund
By: Brian Trelstad, Julia Kelley and Mel Martin
As Tara Noland, the Executive Director (ED) of GreenLight Cincinnati, reflected on her first few years on the job. Noland had delivered on what she had been hired to do in the city: work with leading philanthropists and nonprofit executives to use data and evidence to... View Details
- March 2020
- Supplement
People Analytics at Teach For America (B)
By: Jeffrey T. Polzer and Julia Kelley
This is a supplement to the People Analytics at Teach For America (A) case. In this supplement, situated one year after the A case, Managing Director Michael Metzger must decide how to apply his team's predictive models generated from the previous year’s data. View Details
- January 2020
- Article
How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?
By: Paul A. Gompers, William Gornall, Steven N. Kaplan and Ilya A. Strebulaev
We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions across eight areas: deal sourcing, investment selection, valuation, deal structure, post-investment value-added, exits, internal firm organization, and relationships... View Details
- November 2019 (Revised April 2020)
- Case
Away: Scaling a DTC Travel Brand
By: Jill Avery and Joseph B. Fuller
Away, a direct-to-consumer, digital native e-commerce seller of travel luggage, is debating how to invest its latest round of venture funding. How quickly could and should Away scale and what were the most promising growth trajectories to maximize its potential? Three... View Details
Keywords: Brand Management; DTC; Brand Extension; Lifestyle Brand; Customer Segmentation; Retailing; Scaling And Growth; Startup; Brands and Branding; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Marketing Channels; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Consumer Behavior; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Startups; E-commerce; Consumer Products Industry; Travel Industry; United States; North America
- November 2019
- Supplement
Kids & Company: Entering the U.S.
By: Boris Groysberg, Sarah Mehta and Matthew Preble
This video supplement pairs with “Kids & Company: Entering the U.S.” (case no. 418011). It contains eight individual clips that range in length from 5 to 12 minutes. Instructors can use the videos, either in whole or in part, as an additional teaching... View Details
Keywords: Early Childhood Education; Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Expansion; Leadership; Marketing; Product Marketing; Brands and Branding; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Product Design; Product Development; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Selection and Staffing; Customer Focus and Relationships; Entrepreneurship; Service Industry; Canada; United States
- November 2019
- Article
When and Why Defaults Influence Decisions: A Meta-analysis of Default Effects
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Shannon Duncan, Elke U. Weber and Eric J. Johnson
When people make decisions with a pre-selected choice option—a “default”—they are more likely to select that option. Because defaults are easy to implement, they constitute one of the most widely employed tools in the choice architecture toolbox. However, to decide... View Details
- October 2019
- Case
GRIT Fitness
By: Lynda M. Applegate and Olivia Hull
In December 2018, GRIT Fitness was a growing chain of boutique fitness studios offering a variety of workout classes, including weightlifting, high intensity interval training, and cardio dance. With 400 members and three Dallas studios, CEO Brittani Rettig believed... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Mission and Purpose; Corporate Strategy; Customer Focus and Relationships; Forecasting and Prediction; Business Plan; Trends; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Training; Health; Selection and Staffing; Leadership Style; Leadership Development; Management Style; Management Teams; Brands and Branding; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure; Motivation and Incentives; Sports; Competition; Diversification; Expansion; Value Creation; Health Industry; Sports Industry; Texas
- 2019
- White Paper
Impact-Weighted Financial Accounts: The Missing Piece for an Impact Economy
By: George Serafeim, T. Robert Zochowski and Jennifer Downing
Reimagining capitalism is an imperative. We need to create a more inclusive and sustainable form of capitalism that works for every person and the planet. Massive environmental damage, growing income and wealth disparity, stress, and depression within developed... View Details
- August 2019 (Revised March 2020)
- Background Note
Note on Structured Interviewing
By: Ethan Bernstein and Amy Ross
Making good hiring decisions is a critical management activity, yet many leaders just “wing it” when interviewing candidates to fill openings by having an organic conversation to assess the candidate’s fit, unknowingly subjecting the process to unconscious bias.... View Details
- February 2019
- Technical Note
Can Multiunit Organizations Remain Agile as They Grow?
By: Tatiana Sandino
This note discusses how multiunit organizations incorporate flexibility into their management control systems, some by authorizing all or a select number of their dispersed units to make input and process decisions, some by investing in data-analytic technologies to... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
CrossBoundary Energy
By: John Macomber
Almost 500 million people are without electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. Governments and public utilities are challenged to bring generation and distribution to most of them. Considerable promise exists in “off-grid” or “mini-grid” technologies, notably using renewable... View Details
Keywords: Energy Investing; Economic Development; Renewable Energy; Business Growth and Maturation; Developing Countries and Economies; Project Finance; Emerging Markets; Industry Structures; Infrastructure; Segmentation; Private Equity; Decision Choices and Conditions; Energy Industry; Utilities Industry; Africa; Tanzania; Ghana
- January 2019 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
Analytical Space: The Next Frontier?
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Jeffrey J. Bussgang and David Lane
With one satellite aloft and in the midst of beta testing in late 2018, Analytical Space founders Justin Oliveira and Dan Nevius turned to critical questions about the pioneering startup’s go-to-market, pricing, and business development strategy. Analytical Space aimed... View Details
- December 2018
- Case
The Swedish Academy #MeToo Scandal and the Reputation of the Nobel Prize
By: Stephen A. Greyser and Mats Urde
This case focuses on the potential for “reputational contagion” to the Nobel Prize from a scandal affecting one of its independent network member entities, the Swedish Academy. The latter is responsible for selecting the Nobel Prize in Literature, by appointment of... View Details
- September 2018 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
THE VELUX FOUNDATIONS: Selecting Impact Funds
By: Vikram Gandhi, Caitlin Reimers Brumme and Nathaniel Schwalb
After much internal debate, THE VELUX FOUNDATIONS of Denmark have decided to allocate a small percentage of their investment portfolio to impact investments. Cambridge Associates, one of the leading investment advisory firms in the world, has been engaged to assist... View Details
- September 2018
- Article
Expressive Voting and Its Cost: Evidence from Runoffs with Two or Three Candidates
By: Vincent Pons and Clémence Tricaud
In French parliamentary and local elections, candidates ranked first and second in the first round automatically qualify for the second round, while a third candidate qualifies only when selected by more than 12.5 percent of registered citizens. Using a fuzzy RDD... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised September 2018)
- Supplement
Predicting Purchasing Behavior at PriceMart (B)
By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler
Supplements the (A) case. In this case, Wehunt and Morse are concerned about the logistic regression model overfitting to the training data, so they explore two methods for reducing the sensitivity of the model to the data by regularizing the coefficients of the... View Details
- Article
Does 'Could' Lead to Good? On the Road to Moral Insight
Dilemmas featuring competing moral imperatives are prevalent in organizations and are difficult to resolve. Whereas prior research has focused on how individuals adjudicate among these moral imperatives, we study the factors that influence when individuals find... View Details
- March 2018
- Teaching Note
Mavi: Fashioning a Path to Brand Growth
By: Jill Avery and Gamze Yucaoglu
Mavi, a leading Turkish apparel retailer, had sales of $419 million in 2015, up 20%. Growth rates like these were becoming routine at Mavi. But, its path to growth was getting more challenging, and Turkven, Mavi’s private equity partner, was planning its exit options... View Details
- March 2018 (Revised March 2019)
- Case
Gender and Free Speech at Google (A)
By: Nien-hê Hsieh, Martha J. Crawford and Sarah Mehta
In August 2017, Google fired James Damore, a 28-year-old software engineer who had been employed by the company since 2013. The move came after Damore penned an internal company memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” which posited that innate biological... View Details