Point Four Program - Publications - Faculty & Research

19 Nov 2012
Research & Ideas

LEED-ing by Example

buildings, a joint program of the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency; the National Association of Home Builders' NAHBGreen program; and the aforementioned LEED, a rating system that doles out View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Construction; Real Estate; Energy; Utilities

19 Aug 2013
Research & Ideas

Studying How Income Inequality Shapes Behavior

explains. "And the same may be true about inequality and our inability at this point to say much about its effects. The problem may be that we don't yet know enough about mechanism." Moss followed the same logic working with... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

23 Oct 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, October 23, 2018

formulate strategy in large, evolving technical systems. I argue that the points of value creation and value capture in a technical system are the system’s bottlenecks. Bottlenecks arise first as important technical problems to be solved.... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

07 Sep 2020
Research & Ideas

How to Help Small Businesses Survive COVID's Next Phase

through a few months, when normalcy would resume. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)—government-funded forgivable loans designed to help businesses pay their employees—would help them weather the storm. Six months later, there’s still... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost; Food & Beverage; Service

22 Sep 2003
Research & Ideas

How Businesses Can Respond to AIDS

2002, according to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS Recognizing The Threat What should responsible organizations do to counter the epidemic for their employees and their business? For a start, they must pool knowledge... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

23 Mar 2016
Research & Ideas

Researchers Prove C-Suite Gender Gap—but Can’t Explain It

Here’s some bad news and some worse news for women who aspire to the executive suite. The bad news is that there’s a huge gender gap in top corporate positions, both in terms of the number of female executives and how much money they make compared to men. “Our results... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

05 Jun 2006
Research & Ideas

Using Competition to Reform Healthcare

Business Around Medical Conditions The starting point for developing strategy in any field is to define the relevant business or businesses in which an organization competes. Health care delivery is no different. Health care providers do... View Details

Keywords: by Michael E. Porter; Health

27 Nov 2006
Research & Ideas

Manly Men, Oil Platforms, and Breaking Stereotypes

evacuation took place, four people at a time clinging to a "basket," a large donut shaped contraption with nets through which we laced our arms, as a crane lowered us 400 feet to the boat's deck. The lengthy (eight-hour) trip... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Energy; Utilities

13 Sep 2011
First Look

First Look: September 13

competence, transparency, and identification) will be relevant to which stakeholder type. We test the predictions of our framework using original survey data from 1,298 respondents across four stakeholder groups from View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

14 Jan 2013
Research & Ideas

Few Women on Boards: Is There a Fix?

be male-oriented." "The men's point of view was basically, look, this wouldn't be such a problem if we had qualified women to pick from," Groysberg says. "Female board members talked about male-dominated board chairs, nominating... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

23 Oct 2006
Research & Ideas

Will the “Long Tail” Work for Hollywood?

2000-2005 period covered in the paper, the number of titles that sold only a few copies each week increased twofold—yet the number of titles that didn't sell at all was four times as high as in 2000. The increasing clutter may be a... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Entertainment & Recreation

28 Aug 2006
Research & Ideas

Online Match-Making with Virtual Dates

are searching for product attributes: If you're buying a toaster you may not know exactly what kind of toaster you want, but you know if you want two or four slots. With people, even when we have well-articulated stories about the kind of... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Publishing

07 Dec 2009
Research & Ideas

Government’s Positive Role in Kick-Starting Entrepreneurship

a business in which there are increasing returns. To put the point another way, it is far easier to found a start-up if there are 10 other entrepreneurs nearby. In many respects, founders and venture capitalists benefit from their peers.... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Technology

09 Jun 2003
Research & Ideas

The Challenge of the Multi-site Nonprofit

highest affiliation organizations; Planned Parenthood and Outward Bound were high autonomy organizations; SOS Kinderdorf ranked lowest on the autonomy scale, and about in the middle for affiliation.) The point isn't whether an... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

01 Jul 2008
First Look

First Look: July 1, 2008

Cases & Course MaterialsAdvanced Energy: Programs for Energy Conservation Harvard Business School Case 508-003 Describes the dilemma facing Advanced Energy (AE), a $6 million nonprofit engaged in energy conservation in North... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

09 Sep 2014
First Look

First Look: September 9

advice by drawing on both academic research and the lessons of skilled practitioners. It begins with a discussion of the potential benefits and costs of advice seeking and advice giving. The note then defines and distinguishes four... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

12 Oct 1999
Research & Ideas

Confronting the Challenges that Face Bricks-and-Mortar Stores

vegetables at the point of sale, improving the speed and accuracy of the checkout. If the benefit is not immediately apparent, make it obvious through advertising and promotional materials. Lesson 2: Make The Technology Easy To Use. Most... View Details

Keywords: by Raymond Burke; Retail

09 Aug 2010
Research & Ideas

How to Speed Up Energy Innovation

Is there a special sauce for stimulating innovation in the energy sector, a concoction to spur cost-effective developments toward solving the climate change problem? HBS professor Rebecca Henderson doesn't claim to know all the ingredients for that special sauce. But... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Energy; Utilities

22 Jan 2019
First Look

New Research and Ideas, January 22, 2019

up to the point where the benefit of the marginal project is just equal to the cost. Because labor is a key input to innovation when the opportunity cost of time is lower, such as during school breaks or time off from work, we find that... View Details