Publications

December 2014 (Revised August 2024)
Case

HomeAway: Organizing the Vacation Rental Industry

By: Rory McDonald, Feng Zhu and Cheng Gao

In less than 10 years, cofounders Brian Sharples and Carl Shepherd had transformed HomeAway from just another Internet startup into the world's leading vacation-rental marketplace—a global online platform that links customers seeking vacation-home rentals to the... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Innovation; Technology; Acquisitions; Operations Management; Digital Platforms; Acquisition; Entrepreneurship; Business Model; Disruptive Innovation; Disruption; Accommodations Industry

28 Apr 2011
News

Harvard Business School Holds 15th Annual Business Plan Contest

Web

Publications - Faculty & Research

gilt) market. When the new government announced the largest tax cuts the U.K. had seen in half a century,... View Details Keywords: Financial Crisis ; Macroeconomics ; Assets ; Asset Management ; Borrowing and Debt ; Corporate Finance ;... View Details

December 2021 (Revised September 2022)
Case

Moleskine: Daniela Riccardi Turns the Page

By: Ryan Raffaelli and Sarah Gulick

Newly appointed CEO Daniela Riccardi needed to develop and present an action plan to the board of the company that owned Moleskine. Riccardi was hired because Moleskine had recently overextended its reach and needed more focus and discipline. Having previously served... View Details

Keywords: Rebranding; Brands and Branding; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Operations; Planning; Retail Industry; Italy

16 Apr 2007
Research & Ideas

Delivering the Digital Goods: iTunes vs. Peer-to-Peer

the Market for Digital Information Goods," is among the first efforts to study the interactions of two entirely new and radical business models operating in the same market. Sean Silverthorne: What attracted you to research this area... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Music

Program

Senior Executive Leadership Program—India

leaders, or general managers leading successful, established companies in India and South Asia with 10+ years of experience who want to sharpen their management and leadership skills and are preparing to assume new responsibilities or... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Learning to Use: Stack Overflow and Technology Adoption

By: Daniel Jay Brown and Maria P. Roche

In this paper, we examine the potential impact of Q&A websites on the adoption of technologies. Using data from Stack Overflow – one of the most popular Q&A websites worldwide – and implementing an instrumental-variable approach, we find that users whose questions... View Details

Keywords: Technology Adoption; Knowledge Sharing

Read Now

14 Aug 2014
Working Paper Summaries

The State of Small Business Lending: Credit Access During the Recovery and How Technology May Change the Game

Keywords: by Karen Mills & Brayden McCarthy; Banking; Financial Services

June 2024 (Revised August 2024)
Case

Revlon India's Turnaround: Navigating Online-Offline Decisions Using a Balanced Scorecard

By: Tatiana Sandino and Samuel Grad

Revlon India was founded as a joint venture in 1995, pairing the industrial conglomerate UMG with the global beauty brand Revlon, Inc. to bring international color cosmetics to India. After growing rapidly and pioneering the Beauty Advisor (BA) model in India, the... View Details

24 Jul 2017
Research & Ideas

People Have an Irrational Need to Complete 'Sets' of Things

donations. This page also included an image of a globe. For each new item added to the donor’s online cart, a location marker would appear in a particular geographic region, signaling that the item would be... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

19 Oct 2016
HBS Seminar

Luís Cabral, NYU Stern School of Business

05 Nov 2007
What Do You Think?

Why Is Succession So Badly Managed?

today's breakneck world, who has the time for such things?" Several cited the difficulty of selecting a new CEO, particularly from within, given the changing nature of the needs of a modern corporation. As Veronica Serrano put it,... View Details

Keywords: Re: James L. Heskett

Strong Brands, Strong Relationships

From the editor team of the ground-breaking Consumer-Brand Relationships: Theory and Practice comes this new volume. Strong Brands, Strong Relationships is a collection of innovative research and management insights that... View Details

February 2025
Supplement

Moleskine: Daniela Riccardi Turns the Page

By: Ryan Raffaelli

Newly appointed CEO Daniela Riccardi needed to develop and present an action plan to the board of the company that owned Moleskine. Riccardi was hired because Moleskine had recently overextended its reach and needed more focus and discipline. Having previously served... View Details

Keywords: Brands and Branding; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Distribution Channels; Planning; Leading Change; Organizational Culture; Product Marketing; Retail Industry; Italy

20 Jan 2015
First Look

First Look: January 20

rededicating themselves to improving the value they deliver to their patients: better outcomes and lower costs. Time-driven activity-based costing offers the potential for clinicians to redesign their care processes toward that end. This costing approach, however, is... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

August 2021 (Revised February 2022)
Case

Lexoo: Building a Long-Lasting Platform (Abridged)

By: Chiara Farronato and Elena Corsi

Lexoo, a UK-based online marketplace for legal services, was facing the strategic choice of how to grow from early start-up to mature platform. Daniel van Binsbergen, Lexoo's CEO, and web developer Chris O'Sullivan, CTO, had set up Lexoo to help Small and Medium-Sized... View Details

Keywords: Legal Services; Marketplaces; Pivot; Growth and Development Strategy; Digital Platforms; Small Business; Service Operations; Decision Making; Legal Services Industry

September 2006 (Revised February 2007)
Case

Friendster (A)

By: Mikolaj Jan Piskorski and Carin-Isabel Knoop

In January 2006, the president of Friendster needs to choose between two strategic options to revive the company. Friendster started the social networking industry in 2003, but has been overtaken by MySpace and Facebook. The two options are: 1) offer new features to... View Details

Keywords: Value Creation; Competitive Advantage; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Social and Collaborative Networks; Brands and Branding; Service Industry