Publications

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June 2000
Case

Rebirth of the Swiss Watch Industry, 1980-1992 (A)

By: Michael L. Tushman and Daniel Radov

The Swiss watch industry has been devastated by new entrants from Asia in the low- and mid-priced watch segments. Japanese and Hong Kong firms have used quartz technology to lower costs dramatically. Nicolas Hayek, president of a Swiss consulting firm, is asked to help... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Product Development; Organizational Structure; Change Management; Alignment; Product Positioning; Brands and Branding; Management Teams; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Switzerland

21 Aug 2019
Research & Ideas

What Machine Learning Teaches Us about CEO Leadership Style

CEOs are communicators. Studies show that CEOs spend 85 percent of their time in communication-related activities, including speeches, meetings, and phone calls with people both inside and outside the firm. Now, new research using machine... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

09 Mar 2009
Research & Ideas

How to Revive Health-Care Innovation

fundamental question: How do we make health care affordable? Most disruptions have three enablers: a simplifying technology, a business model innovation, and a disruptive value network. The technological enabler transforms a View Details

Keywords: by Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman, M.D. M.D. & Jason Hwang; Health

May 2018 (Revised October 2019)
Case

Managing the Future of Work

By: William R. Kerr, Allison Ciechanover and Jeff Huizinga

By 2019, leaders from the public and private sector had become increasingly anxious about how advanced technologies and aging global populations could affect labor markets, workplaces, and workers’ lives. Some analysts forecasted that hundreds of millions of workers... View Details

Keywords: Labor Markets; Workplace; Employment; Technological Innovation; Demographics; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Problems and Challenges; Opportunities

2021
Working Paper

Friends and Family Money: P2P Transfers and Financially Fragile Consumers

By: Tetyana Balyuk and Emily Williams

We assess the impact that real time money transfer technology has on consumer outcomes, particularly during periods of financial fragility. We do this by developing a new data set that documents use of Zelle—the most widely used P2P money transfer technology in the... View Details

Keywords: P2P Money Transfers; Real Time Payments; Fintech; Finance; Information Technology; Personal Finance; Financial Condition

SSRN

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February 2024 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Lina Khan at the FTC: Redefining Antitrust in the Age of Big Tech

By: Joseph L. Badaracco Jr. and Susan Pinckney

In 2023 and 2024, the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice sued Google, Amazon, and Apple claiming antitrust violations. These lawsuits marked a shift in U.S. antitrust enforcement away from the Chicago School and towards the New Brandeis school of... View Details

Keywords: Transition; Government Administration; Lawsuits and Litigation; Monopoly; Technology Industry; United States; European Union; China; India

05 Sep 2019
Sharpening Your Skills

Making the Right Technical Hire

first prototype and then let that language dictate future work as their product gets market fit and scales. This rarely works out, unless that first engineer is a ringer, and most of the time the reality of having to refactor your entire codebase or port to a View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin; Technology

21 Jun 2019
News

When Tech Companies Compete on Their Own Platforms

19 Nov 2013
News

Q&A With Harvard’s Top Entrepreneurship Professor

26 Jan 2018
HBS Seminar

John Helveston, Boston University

14 Aug 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Are ‘Better’ Ideas More Likely to Succeed? An Empirical Analysis of Startup Evaluation

Keywords: by Pian Shu; Financial Services

November 2023 (Revised October 2024)
Supplement

Accounting Outages at Plug Power? (C)

By: Jonas Heese, Joseph Pacelli and James Barnett

Set in June 2023, the C case explores Plug Power’s recovery from its financial restatements, how it benefited from government subsidies, and new strategic alliances. View Details

Keywords: Environmental Accounting; Financial Reporting; Ethics; Finance; Management; Social Enterprise; Energy Industry; Green Technology Industry; United States; Europe

January 2019 (Revised October 2019)
Case

Commercial Sales Transformation at Microsoft

By: Doug J. Chung

Industry leaders should adapt to changes in the business context and consider different ways to grow. Advances in technology had shifted software demand to the cloud. As a result, Microsoft announced a strategic shift in direction from its existing ‘Windows first’... View Details

Keywords: Sales; Strategy; Transformation

March 2010 (Revised October 2010)
Case

The Huffington Post

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Toby E. Stuart and David Kiron

In Feb. 2010, management of the Huffington Post, a fast-growing but not-yet-profitable Internet newspaper that aggregates blog posts from unpaid contributors and excerpts of stories originally published by other news sites, faces a number of decisions about its growth... View Details

Keywords: Networks; Business Model; Cost vs Benefits; Internet and the Web; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Publishing Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry

July 2013
Case

Sample6: Innovating to Make Food Safer

By: Robert F. Higgins and Kirsten Kester

Tim Curran, CEO of Sample6, a start-up biotechnology company developing a novel food safety diagnostics platform, must decide how to partner with food industry players. How can he best convince leaders in this mature industry to adopt a new technology and improve food... View Details

The experience of Encyclopædia Britannica provides the canonical example of the decline of an established firm at the outset of the digital age. Competition from Microsoft's Encarta in 1993 led to sharp declines in the sales of books, which led to the distressed... View Details

Forthcoming
Article

You've Got Mail! The Late 19th-Century U.S. Postal Service Expansion, Firm Creation, and Firm Performance

By: Astrid Marinoni and Maria P. Roche

This paper examines the impact of the expansion of the US Postal Service in the late 19th century on firm creation and performance. Utilizing newly digitized archival data on historic business establishments, post office locations, and road networks in California,... View Details

Keywords: Institutional Innovation; Knowledge Exchange; US Postal Service; Firm Performance; Infrastructure; Expansion; Government Administration; Communication; Business History; Entrepreneurship; Public Administration Industry; California

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