Publications

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December 2020 (Revised December 2021)
Case

Komatsu and Smart Construction

By: Rajiv Lal, David J. Collis and Akiko Saito

Komatsu, Japan's leading construction equipment manufacturer, is considering investing in a digital platform "Smart Construction" that will digitise the entire work process on a construction site, allowing for substantial reductions in cost and time while improving... View Details

Keywords: Platform; Digital Business; Construction; Business Model; Strategy; Technology Adoption; Internet and the Web; Digital Platforms; Construction Industry; Japan

January 1999 (Revised March 2003)
Case

Rich-Con Steel

One month after "going live" with a new information system, Rich-Con Steel is in crisis. The new system was intended to give the company basic visibility and control over its business processes, but instead, visibility and control appear to have evaporated. Marty... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Crisis Management; Business Processes; Steel Industry

27 Sep 2017
Research & Ideas

What Happens When Ordinary People Get Creative?

mainstream press, led to the 2011 book The Progress Principle—a guide for managers who want to provide catalysts for progress among their employees. But the research also revealed a more meta result: Amabile realized the extent to which people volunteer their inner... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

11 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

The Business of Saving the Planet

"The fact that the benefits of addressing the problem of climate change almost certainly outweigh the costs ... does not make concerted global action to address the problem easy." —Climate Change in 2018: Implications for Business If there is one positive... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Energy; Green Technology

07 Oct 2020
Blog Post

7 Coming Out Stories from the HBS PRIDE Club

their LGBTQ+ status private. We accept everyone in any stage of their coming out process and hope that you will be inspired by the stories of these students as they continue to grapple with a world that is not always accepting of who they... View Details

2024
Working Paper

The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem Solving

By: Léonard Boussioux, Jacqueline N. Lane, Miaomiao Zhang, Vladimir Jacimovic and Karim R. Lakhani

The rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) open up attractive opportunities for creative problem-solving through human-guided AI partnerships. To explore this potential, we initiated a crowdsourcing challenge focused on sustainable, circular economy... View Details

Keywords: Large Language Models; Crowdsourcing; Generative Ai; Creative Problem-solving; Organizational Search; AI-in-the-loop; Prompt Engineering; AI and Machine Learning; Innovation and Invention

SSRN

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Research Summary

Competing on a Common Platform

Why have over 100 firms joined the Eclipse Foundation to collectively produce an open source platform and tools for software application development? What are they trying to accomplish? This research analyzes IBMs divestment of the Eclipse Java Integrated Development... View Details

February 2024
Teaching Note

Data-Driven Denim: Financial Forecasting at Levi Strauss

By: Mark Egan

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 224-029. Levi Strauss & Co. (“Levi Strauss”) partnered with the IT services company Wipro to incorporate more sophisticated methods, such as machine learning, into their financial forecasting process starting in 2018. The decision to... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting; Regression; Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Apparel; Corporate Finance; Forecasting and Prediction; AI and Machine Learning; Apparel and Accessories Industry; United States

July 2021
Article

How Trust and Distrust Shape Perception and Memory

By: Ann-Christin Posten and Francesca Gino

Trust is a key ingredient in decision making, as it allows us to rely on the information we receive. Although trust is usually viewed as a positive element of decision making, we suggest that its effects on memory are costly rather than beneficial. Across nine studies... View Details

Keywords: Distrust; Memory; Similarity; Misinformation; Trust; Perception; Decision Making

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06 Nov 2013
What Do You Think?

Is Top-Down Resource Allocation on the Rise?

Summing Up Is Business Agility a Product of Top-Down or Bottom-Up Resource Allocation? Respondents to this month's column provided possible explanations for greater reliance on top-down resource allocation processes (RAPs) while reminding... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

December 1994 (Revised July 1996)
Case

USSR 1988, The: The Search for Growth

For decades after the revolution of 1917, Communist Party leaders claimed that the socialist economic system was superior to the capitalist system on both moral and economic grounds. By 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the... View Details

Keywords: Economic Systems; Economic Growth; Government and Politics; Soviet Union

23 Oct 2007
First Look

First Look: October 23, 2007

http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=706442 Central Bank: The ChexSystems(SM) QualiFile(R) Decision Harvard Business School Case 208-029 The "Central Bank" series analyzes the use of information and... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

11 May 2009
Research & Ideas

The IT Leader’s Hero Quest

Rising star Jim Barton has decidedly mixed feelings after being selected as the new chief information officer at the fictional IVK Corporation. On the one hand, he lacks an IT background; on the other, he's ambitious and up for a... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

December 1996 (Revised June 1998)
Case

Midnight Networks, Inc.

By: H. Kent Bowen and Marilyn Matis

Midnight Networks, Inc., is a small computer network validation company. This case describes how the five founders built their business from operations earnings and how they established "best practices" operational processes to run their firm successfully. Operational... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Entrepreneurship; Business or Company Management; Operations; Organizational Culture; Applications and Software; Business Startups; Business Growth and Maturation; Information Technology Industry; Massachusetts

26 Mar 2014
HBS Seminar

Brian Kahin, MIT

January 2002
Case

DeRemate.com: Building a Latin American Internet Auction Site

Analyzes the strategic decision-making process in terms of market forces and short-term growth for an online trading community site in Latin America. A major competitor to E-bay, DeRemate.com is contemplating expansion throughout Latin America. View Details

Keywords: Strategic Planning; Competition; Expansion; Internet and the Web; Auctions; Latin America

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May 2020
Teaching Note

Talismark

By: Richard S. Ruback, Royce Yudkoff and Ahron Rosenfeld

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 211-097. Talismark negotiated waste hauling contracts for small and medium size companies. Its owners, Charles Muszynski and Marshall Staiman, were able to grow the business by more than 30% per year since it was founded, but believed... View Details

Keywords: Small Business; Small Business Administration; Infrastructure; Restructuring; Business Processes; Information Management; Sales; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Wastes and Waste Processing