Design thinking - Publications - Faculty & Research

02 Feb 2004
Research & Ideas

Where Does Apple Go From Here?

market for any electronic product. Historically, Apple was trying to sell to its installed base of Mac users, and that base has never been large enough to amount to a hill of beans. Q: What do you think of what Jobs calls the BMW strategy... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

27 Sep 2010
Research & Ideas

Customer Experts Lose Influence When Teams are Pressured

pressure—people switch what knowledge they listen to and what they are willing to think about. The subtle process of general expertise crowding out customer-specific expertise was part of what had escaped me when I'd been in the... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert

12 Feb 2014
Research & Ideas

Private Sector, Public Good

Public Sector seminar series, which runs through May, is designed to induce lively conversation, build a community of scholars, and create a research agenda exploring the possible role of the private sector in shaping the institutions of... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

29 Apr 2013
Research & Ideas

Are First-Time Buyers Left Out of Real Estate’s Rebound?

would lessen the incentive for buying a home. Bottom line, the deduction remained, but with one change. Instead of being unlimited, it was capped at a million dollars. As we look back at what happened with the housing market implosion, I View Details

Keywords: Construction; Real Estate

18 Jan 2012
Research & Ideas

Beyond Heroic Entrepreneurs

traditional nonprofits, what's most important is the social purpose, but hybrids also have economic objectives to generate enough revenue to sustain their operations." Echoing Green Battilana and Lee, who were designing the database... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

10 Dec 2012
Research & Ideas

Why We Blab Our Intimate Secrets on Facebook

to fill out a "Web survey about student behaviors," which comprised 15 yes/no questions. Unbeknownst to them, the participants were randomly assigned to one of three user-interface conditions. In some cases, they took an online survey titled "How BAD Are U???"... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

23 Jul 2001
Research & Ideas

How One Center of Innovation Lost its Spark

Akron, Ohio tire cluster—to try to discover how Akron companies turned into what he calls a "community of inertia." Drawing as well on research by other scholars, including Harvard University Professor Michael E. Porter, Sull's work provides a new way of... View Details

Keywords: by Donald Sull; Manufacturing; Transportation; Auto

21 Jul 2003
Research & Ideas

Don’t Get Buried in Customer Data—Use It

Experience Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), because "most practitioners have taken the concept of one-to-one marketing and bastardized it into CRM. They're using CRM tools to design better processes for a nonexistent... View Details

Keywords: by Jean Ayers

12 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

Operations and the Competitive Edge

operations took somewhat of a back seat. There were just too many new things to think about and explore, and everybody's attention was focused on "breakthrough improvements," so the mandate for operations became "just keep... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

15 Oct 2014
Research & Ideas

Apple Pay’s Technology Adoption Problem

When Apple introduced the iPod, it had a simple but compelling tag line for music fans: "1,000 thousand songs in your pocket." The company sold 300 million of them. On the eve of debuting its digital payment system, Apple Pay, two Harvard Business School... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Technology; Retail

09 Oct 2019
Research & Ideas

For Better Ideas, Bring the Right People to the Brainstorm

and wrote down as many innovative ideas as they could think of, with the average person coming up with 4.5 new ideas. These ideas were then anonymously scored by other participants and Indian consumers on a variety of measures, including... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

09 Mar 2016
Lessons from the Classroom

In This Classroom, Beer Can Improve Your Grade

In a large circular classroom called The Hives, Ramon Casadesus-Masanell is roaming the floors this week as he oversees the second running of Strategic Brew, a computerized business simulation designed for first-year MBA students at... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Education; Food & Beverage

03 Apr 2013
What Do You Think?

Will Women Leaders Influence the Way We Work?

felt that the lines are not finely drawn. As she put it: "Men and women are variations on a theme, not opposites . It is possible, and I think likely, that the male-dominated business world selects as leaders women who demonstrate... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

16 Jun 2014
Research & Ideas

The Unfulfilled Promise of Educational Technology

technological innovation. “The question is with 50 million public school students in America, how can you provide a more individualized learning experience?” "If you go to the smallest mom-and-pop restaurant, you'll find a point-of-sale terminal behind the counter... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Education

17 Jan 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research: January 17

and will take years. The authors describe the path that blockchain is likely to follow and explain how firms should think about investments in it. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=52100 forthcoming Annual... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

10 Mar 2002
Research & Ideas

Breakthrough Negotiation: Don’t Leave It On the Table

sessions to integration and distillation of insights. Principle 3: Breakthrough Negotiators Are Masters Of Process Design Control of the process yields control over outcomes. Skilled negotiators think hard... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Watkins

23 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

How Countries Use Financial Policy to Fight COVID-19

Kazakhstan at 3.62 percent. Beyond monetary or fiscal policy changes themselves, students were struck by where the actual dollars were spent and how that differed from nation to nation, says Tannya Cai, who coauthored a working paper on the tracker with Cavallo. Cai,... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

08 Jul 2014
First Look

First Look: July 8

Publications 2014 AMACOM Own Your Future: How to Think Like an Entrepreneur and Thrive in an Unpredictable Economy By: Brown, Paul B., Charles F. Kiefer, and Leonard A. Schlesinger Abstract—It used to be that if you studied and worked... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

01 Apr 2019
What Do You Think?

Does Our Bias Against Federal Deficits Need Rethinking?

accompanied by lower inflation and interest rates—that justify deficit spending to produce both economic growth and social programs designed to improve our quality of life and reduce social inequality” (JohnfrmClevelnd). Or, it prompts... View Details