Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(4,630)
- Faculty Publications (1,307)
- February 2008
- Article
Where Do Transactions Come From? Modularity, Transactions, and the Boundaries of Firms
This article constructs a theory of the location of transactions and the boundaries of firms in a productive system. It proposes that systems of production can be viewed as networks, in which tasks-cum-agents are the nodes and transfers—of material, energy and... View Details
- January 2008 (Revised September 2008)
- Supplement
Marketing the "$100 Laptop" (C)
By: John A. Quelch and David Chen
In October 2007, the OLPC reported production delays and missed its shipment date. In early November, the $100 PC finally went into production, with initial shipments planned for Uruguay and Mongolia, and mid-month launched the "Give One, Get One" program. It enabled... View Details
- January 2008
- Case
Lenovo: Building A Global Brand (Multimedia case)
By: John A. Quelch and Carin-Isabel Knoop
Announced in December 2004, the $1.75 billion acquisition of IBM's PC division by Lenovo, China's largest PC maker, made headlines around the world. A relative upstart in the business, Lenovo acquired the division of IBM that invented the PC in 1981. While Lenovo was... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Product Development and Learning in Project Teams: The Challenges are the Benefits
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Ingrid M. Nembhard
The value of teams in new product development (NPD) is undeniable. Both the interdisciplinary nature of the work and industry trends necessitate that professionals from different functions work together on development projects to create the highest quality product in... View Details
- December 2007 (Revised April 2008)
- Case
Alltech...naturally
By: David E. Bell and Mary L. Shelman
Entrepreneur Pearse Lyons had built Alltech into the fastest growing company in the global animal health industry through innovative technology, creative marketing, and strong branding. Sel-Plex, a proprietary Alltech product, had shown important health benefits for... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Competition in Modular Clusters
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and C. Jason Woodard
The last twenty years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated "clusters," "networks," or "ecosystems" of firms. In these clusters the activities of R&D, product design, production, distribution, and system integration may be split up among hundreds or even thousands... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
The Impact of Component Modularity on Design Evolution: Evidence from the Software Industry
By: Alan MacCormack, John Rusnak and Carliss Y. Baldwin
Much academic work asserts a relationship between the design of a complex system and the manner in which this system evolves over time. In particular, designs which are modular in nature are argued to be more "evolvable," in that these designs facilitate making... View Details
- November 2007 (Revised April 2008)
- Case
Hariyali Kisaan Bazaar: A Rural Business Initiative
By: David E. Bell, Nitin Sanghavi, Virginia Fuller and Mary L. Shelman
In rural India, farmers historically had limited access to quality input items for both their fields and homes. Indian conglomerate DSCL has undertaken a Rural Business Initiative to address this issue, establishing a chain of retail outlets throughout rural India... View Details
- October 2007 (Revised December 2007)
- Case
TiVo 2007: DVRs and Beyond
By: David B. Yoffie and Michael Slind
Tom Rogers, CEO of TiVo, had placed multiple strategic bets on his company. In September 2007, that strategy was due for a major test. TiVo was a maker of digital video recorder (DVR) products and a distributor of DVR technology. Rogers believed that macro-trends in... View Details
- October 2007
- Case
iPhone vs. Cell Phone
By: David B. Yoffie and Michael Slind
The launch of Apple's iPhone marked a pivotal new chapter in the story of mobile music (the uniting of digital music players with mobile phones). The iPhone combined an iPod music player, a cell phone, and a mobile Internet device, along with a camera and other... View Details
- October 2007 (Revised April 2009)
- Case
TH!NK: The Norwegian Electric Car Company
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and David Kiron
On August 1, 2007, 61-year-old Jan-Olaf Willums' plane was flying along the Greenland coastline on his way back to Norway after intense discussions with several prominent U.S. venture capital investors, among them Kleiner Perkins and Rockport Capital Partners, about... View Details
- Article
How to Capture Value from Innovation: Shaping Intellectual Property and Industry Architecture
By: Gary P. Pisano and David J. Teece
Capturing value from innovation requires innovators to figure out how to blunt inroads into the profit stream by imitators, customers, suppliers, and other providers of complementary products and services. In making strategic decisions around technology... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Team Familiarity, Role Experience, and Performance: Evidence from Indian Software Services
By: Robert S. Huckman, Bradley R. Staats and David M. Upton
Much of the literature on team learning views experience as a unidimensional concept captured by the cumulative production volume of, or the number of projects completed by, a team. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that teams are stable in their membership... View Details
- August 2007 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
Trouble with a Bubble
By: Tom Nicholas
Examines technology, firm performance, and the stock market during the 1929 Great Crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The 1920s was an extraordinary period of technological progress marked by a strong run-up in stock market prices. Firms invested heavily in... View Details
- August 2007 (Revised February 2008)
- Case
Gome Electronics: Evolving the Business Model
By: Regina M. Abrami, William C. Kirby, F. Warren McFarlan, Gao Wang, Fei Li, Tracy Manty and Waishun Lo
After 20 years of expansion, Gome Electronics has become China's largest consumer electronics retailer. It has opened stores in almost every province in China, acquired some of its competitors, and went public in Hong Kong. However, it has begun to experience a... View Details
- August 2007 (Revised September 2008)
- Case
Marketing the "$100 Laptop" (A)
By: John A. Quelch and Carin-Isabel Knoop
In 2002, Professor Nicholas Negroponte, a successful venture capitalist, author, and co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, announced his intention to build a PC so cheap as to make it possible to provide... View Details
Keywords: Venture Capital; Internet and the Web; Information Technology; Product Development; Technological Innovation; Nonprofit Organizations; Marketing Strategy; Information Infrastructure; Developing Countries and Economies; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Cambridge
- July 2007 (Revised April 2008)
- Case
Secom: Managing Information Security in a Risky World
By: F. Warren McFarlan, Robert D. Austin, Junko Usuba and Masako Egawa
Examines the type of security that is appropriate for an Internet company to have on its site. Focuses on a 20-person electronic e-commerce company trying to decide what parts of the information security product line they should acquire from the largest security... View Details
- June 2007 (Revised June 2008)
- Case
GE's Imagination Breakthroughs: The Evo Project
By: Christopher A. Bartlett, Brian J. Hall and Nicole Bennett
In September 2003, Jeff Immelt challenged the business leaders at GE to come up with "Imagination Breakthroughs," innovative new projects that would serve as the centerpiece of GE's organic growth initiative. Follows the company as these changes are driven through the... View Details
- June 2007 (Revised April 2010)
- Case
Comcast Corporation
By: Anita Elberse and Jason Schreiber
In October 2006, Comcast executives had entered negotiations with broadcast networks to broaden the selection of free network content distributed via its video-on-demand (VOD) service. The major broadcast networks, however, were unsure of the effect it would have on... View Details
- June 2007 (Revised October 2007)
- Case
Information Technology and Clinical Operations at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
By: Richard M.J. Bohmer, F. Warren McFarlan and Julia Rose Adler-Milstein
Describes the history of clinical computing at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital and the development, since the 1996 merger to form the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, of an information system designed to support the delivery of patient care. The hospitals' CIO, John... View Details