Publications

SSRN

February 2013 (Revised September 2013)
Case

Elasto Therm: The Next Step

By: Jim Sharpe and James Weber

Julia and Nate Burstein were living their dream running their own business and balancing the demands between their work and family obligations while creating a company that was responsive to their employees' and their customers' needs. The Bursteins had joined a large... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurial Management; Entrepreneurs; Pricing; Pricing Policies; Pricing Strategy; Pricing Structure; Sales Force Management; Acquisitions; Work/family Balance; Family-owned Business; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Expansion; Work-Life Balance; Manufacturing Industry; Rubber Industry; United States

26 Oct 2017
HBS Seminar

Nicholas Bloom, Stanford University

19 Oct 2022
Op-Ed

Cofounder Courtship: How to Find the Right Mate—for Your Startup

entrepreneurs I know who are looking for cofounders, yet many don’t appreciate that this is a similar courtship to mating and partnership. Many entrepreneurs believe they must have a cofounder, and some are pressured by investors to have... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

07 Apr 2021
Research & Ideas

How Teams Work: Lessons from the Pandemic

similar messaging apps—helped compensate for the lack of spontaneity. Moreover, the researchers suggest that this change could permanently improve team collaboration, even when teams reunite in person, by giving individual members more... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

31 Mar 2008
HBS Case

JetBlue’s Valentine’s Day Crisis

students in the class were affected by the JetBlue crisis, adds Huckman. "Russ seemed to view his visit as an opportunity to educate students who may be in similar roles in the not-too-distant future; he also saw it as a way to get... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Air Transportation

October 2019
Case

Agility Africa

By: Juan Alcacer, Caroline M. Elkins and Esel Çekin

This case illustrates the challenge and opportunities that firms face when developing and executing new business models in high-risk, low-infrastructure, low-trust countries. It features a global logistics group, Agility, that aimed to become the leader in supplying... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Business Model; Innovation and Invention; Expansion; Emerging Markets; Decision Choices and Conditions; Real Estate Industry; Distribution Industry; Africa

2019
Article

Reflections on 25 Years of Building Social Enterprise Education

By: James E. Austin and V. Kasturi Rangan

Purpose—This paper aims to reflect on 25 years of the Social Enterprise Initiative at the Harvard Business School, examining the processes and thinking involved at key stages of this pioneering Initiative’s implementation and... View Details

Keywords: Social Enterprise Initiative; Harvard Business School; Social Enterprise; Education; Programs

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October 2016
Article

Technical Debt and System Architecture: The Impact of Coupling on Defect-related Activity

By: Alan MacCormack and Daniel J. Sturtevant

Technical debt is created when design decisions that are expedient in the short-term increase the costs of maintaining and adapting this system in future. An important component of technical debt relates to decisions about system architecture. As systems grow and... View Details

Keywords: Information Infrastructure; Performance Efficiency; Applications and Software; Infrastructure

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2020
Working Paper

Should Firms Move Talent from the Geographic Periphery to Hubs? A Strategic Human Capital Perspective

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Victoria Sevcenko and Tarun Khanna

A longstanding literature holds that firms should hire and move talent from the geographic periphery to hubs as a means to create value from human capital. They do so, however, at the risk of losing the worker to rivals located in the same geographic hub,... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Selection and Staffing; Employment; Residency; Technology Industry; India

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Blog

What Can You Do to Foster Gender Equity?

taking time to reflect on the reasoning behind your decisions can help you neutralize the influence of such biases. Give sufficient time and feedback. While it's natural to gravitate primarily or exclusively toward people similar to you,... View Details

02 Nov 2023
News

Seeding Startups

window into the young online-software market. He saw a need for a product similar to Hotmail that was tailored for businesses, a web-based email solution with calendaring and scheduling capabilities. “I thought it was a great idea,”... View Details

Keywords: April White

Web

Financial Accounting Online Course | HBS Online

week’s course module deadlines and fully answering questions posed therein, including satisfactory performance on the quizzes at the end of each module (earning an average score of 50% or greater). This helps ensure your cohort proceeds through the course at a View Details

05 Dec 2018
Research & Ideas

Why Managers Should Reveal Their Failures

than others who read a few extra lines describing the person’s professional failures. The results of two similar online studies also yielded an important insight for successful people who share their failures: Colleagues have no less... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

28 Feb 2022
Research & Ideas

How Racial Bias Taints Customer Service: Evidence from 6,000 Hotels

titles? Do they end all messages with “best” or other polite language? How are perks, like hotel upgrades and free drinks, distributed? Run experiments. Conduct email tests similar to the ones Feldberg and Kim used in their studies. Gauge... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

11 Apr 2023
Research & Ideas

Is Amazon a Retailer, a Tech Firm, or a Media Company? How AI Can Help Investors Decide

health care, utilities, energy, real estate, and technology by as much as 2.5 percentage points on an annualized basis. The TOPICS method uses sophisticated financial models to spot hidden similarities in risk and return profiles among... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost; Consumer Products; Real Estate; Financial Services; Retail

October 2023
Case

CornerUp: Digitizing the Corner Store

By: Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui, Stacy Straaberg and Diego Zainos De La Sota Riva

In July 2023, Jason Diaz, co-founder and CEO of CornerUp, assessed the progress of his business-to-business e-procurement software application (app) startup, founded in January 2022. CornerUp began as a fast-moving consumer packaged goods (FMCG) distributor in New York... View Details

Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Small Business; Transition; Decisions; Social Entrepreneurship; Geographic Location; Disruptive Innovation; Market Participation; Digital Platforms; Trust; Business Strategy; Expansion; Information Infrastructure; Internet and the Web; Technology Adoption; Value Creation; Technology Industry; United States

October 2022
Case

Afrigen Biologics: Vaccines for the Global South

By: Debora L. Spar and Julia Comeau

The majority of vaccines used on the continent of Africa (99%) are produced offshore. This makes African nations reliant on the West for major health care needs, a problem which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Afrigen Biologics (in partnership with the WHO)... View Details

Keywords: Vaccination; Vaccine; mRNA; COVID; COVID-19; Inequity; Hub-and-spoke; Health Care and Treatment; Health Pandemics; Production; Social Issues; Business and Government Relations; South Africa; Africa