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- January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Course Overview Note
Managing Customers for Growth: Course Overview for Students
By: Eva Ascarza
Managing Customers for Growth (MCG) is a 14-session elective course for second-year MBA students at Harvard Business School. It is designed for business professionals engaged in roles centered on customer-driven growth activities. The course explores the dynamics of... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
PortageBay and ESG Analytics
By: Vikram S. Gandhi and Radhika Kak
In 2023, sustainable investors faced several challenges. The first was the lack of access to standardized and vetted environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data, and equally, the interpretation of this data into investment-useful insights. Reducing reliance on... View Details
- 2024
- Conference Paper
Quantifying Uncertainty in Natural Language Explanations of Large Language Models
By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Sree Harsha Tanneru and Chirag Agarwal
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as powerful tools for several
high-stakes natural language processing (NLP) applications. Recent prompting
works claim to elicit intermediate reasoning steps and key tokens that serve as
proxy explanations for LLM... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Money, Time, and Grant Design
By: Kyle Myers and Wei Yang Tham
The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for
influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought
experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First,
we offer participants a... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Enhancing Treatment Effect Prediction on Privacy-Protected Data: An Honest Post-Processing Approach
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
As firms increasingly rely on customer data for personalization, concerns over privacy and regulatory compliance have grown. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong individual-level protection by injecting noise into data before collection. While... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Post Hoc Explanations of Language Models Can Improve Language Models
By: Satyapriya Krishna, Jiaqi Ma, Dylan Slack, Asma Ghandeharioun, Sameer Singh and Himabindu Lakkaraju
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in performing complex tasks. Moreover, recent research has shown that incorporating human-annotated rationales (e.g., Chain-of-Thought prompting) during in-context learning can significantly enhance... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised August 2024)
- Background Note
Life Cycle Assessment: An Overview
By: Willy C. Shih, Michael W. Toffel and Kelsey Carter
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a holistic approach to quantifying the environmental impacts—including resources consumed and wastes produced—associated with the entire life cycle of a product, from the production or extraction of the raw materials used in its creation,... View Details
- November 2023
- Case
Copilot(s): Generative AI at Microsoft and GitHub
This case tells the story of Microsoft’s 2018 acquisition of GitHub and the subsequent launch of GitHub Copilot, a tool that uses generative artificial intelligence to suggest snippets of code to software developers in real time. Set in late 2021, when Copilot was... View Details
- November 2023
- Case
Will Fintechs and Central Banks Play in Emtech's Sandbox?
By: Daniel Isenberg and William R. Kerr
In February 2023, Emtech’s founder Carmelle Cadet is facing a dilemma. Rapidly running out of cash, Cadet has a term sheet from a leading VC but has a choice of how to structure the investment. The decision will have significant implications for Cadet’s own stake, as... View Details
- 2023
- Book
How the Harvard Business School Changed the Way We View Organizations
By: Jay W. Lorsch
The story of the field of organizational behavior (which overlaps considerably with the origin story of Harvard Business School) and how it created the “medical model” of systems thinking—anchored in the practices of listening, observing, testing, and only then... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Systems Thinking; Medical Model; Organizations; Behavior; System; History
- November 2023
- Article
Psychological Factors Underlying Attitudes toward AI Tools
By: Julian De Freitas, Stuti Agarwal, B. Schmitt and N. Haslam
What are the psychological factors driving attitudes toward AI tools, and how can resistance to AI systems be overcome when they are beneficial? In this perspective, we first organize the main sources of resistance into five main categories: opacity, emotionlessness,... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Prime Coalition: Estimating Climate Impact
A case on CRANE, a tool to help investors and green technology companies estimate the future climate impact of new technologies and products, called emissions reduction potential (ERP). The case includes material on CRANE’s methodology for estimating future carbon... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: A Curriculum Provider Puts Itself on the Hook for Student Outcomes
By: John J-H Kim, Derek C. M. van Bever, Michael Norris and Max Hancock
Jack Lynch, CEO of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) since 2017, was leading the company’s transformation from a legacy textbook publisher to a digital-first student outcomes provider, which earned subscription revenue from digital products and curriculum. In 2023, HMH... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Technical Note
Design and Evaluation of Targeted Interventions
By: Eva Ascarza and Ta-Wei (David) Huang
Targeted interventions serve as a pivotal tool in business strategy, streamlining decisions for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. This note delves into two central facets of such interventions: first, the design of potent decision guidelines, or targeting... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Fixie and Conversational AI Sidekicks
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Carin-Isabel Knoop
In March 2023, Fixie Co-Founder and Chief Architect Matt Welsh and co-founders had the kind of meeting no founders want to have. The president of leading artificial intelligence (AI) research and deployment firm OpenAI, which had catapulted into fame with its ChatGPT... View Details
- October 2023
- Technical Note
Governance for the Family Enterprise
By: Christina R. Wing and Vicki Morton
Governance stands as the backbone of any successful organization, providing the structure, transparency, and accountability necessary to guide decisions, ensure efficiency and foster sustainable growth. Its significance takes on a heightened dimension within family... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Loris
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Das Narayandas, Stacy Straaberg and David Lane
In December 2022, Loris’s executive team considered their go-to-market strategy. Loris was an artificial intelligence (AI) software startup for the customer service industry with two products on the market: 1) Agent Assist which provided customer service agents (CSAs)... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
The Impact of Input Inaccuracy on Leveraging AI Tools: Evidence from Algorithmic Labor Scheduling
By: Caleb Kwon, Antonio Moreno and Ananth Raman
Problem Definition: Considerable academic and practitioner attention is placed on the value of ex-post interactions (i.e., overrides) in the human-AI interface. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to ex-ante human-AI interactions (e.g., the... View Details
- September 2023
- Supplement
Design and Evaluation of Targeted Interventions
By: Eva Ascarza
Targeted interventions serve as a pivotal tool in business strategy, streamlining decisions for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. This note delves into two central facets of such interventions: first, the design of potent decision guidelines, or targeting... View Details
- September 2023
- Case
DocSend: A Path off the Plateau?
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Jeffrey Huizinga
Recounts how the leaders of DocSend, an early-stage startup that offered tools for sharing files online, searched for a viable business model and weighed tradeoffs in transitioning from a sales-led to a product-led "go-to-market" approach. View Details