Publications

Forthcoming
Article

Beefing IT Up for Your Investor? Engagement with Open Source Communities, Innovation, and Startup Funding: Evidence from GitHub

By: Annamaria Conti, Christian Peukert and Maria P. Roche

We study the engagement of nascent firms with open source communities and its implications for innovation and attracting funding. To do so, we link data on 160,065 U.S. startups from Crunchbase to their activities on the open source software development platform... View Details

Keywords: Startups; Knowledge; Open Source Communities; GitHub; Machine Learning; Innovation; Business Startups; Venture Capital; Information Technology; Strategy

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October 2023 (Revised April 2024)
Case

ghSMART & Co: Building and Scaling a Time Smart Firm

By: Ashley Whillans and Sara Coronel Rodriguez

"For ghSMART, freedom is the first principle from which all good things flow”—Geoff Smart, Chairman and Founder, ghSMART. ghSMART was a leadership advisory firm that was grounded in the principle of freedom. Talented Consultants and Partners could work remotely from... View Details

Keywords: Time; Consulting Firms; Time Management; Talent and Talent Management; Employee Relationship Management; Innovation Strategy; Knowledge Sharing; Organizational Culture; Going Public; Partners and Partnerships; Expansion; Reputation

Article

Democratizing Work: Redistributing Power in Organizations for a Democratic and Sustainable Future

By: Julie Battilana, Julie Yen, Isabelle Ferreras and Lakshmi Ramarajan

Environmental destruction and social inequalities are increasingly urgent challenges. How can corporations, which have played a key role in creating and reproducing these problems, be part of the solution? In this paper, we advance that a shift to more democratic forms... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Citizenship; Corporate Social Responsibility; CSP; CSR; Domination; Industrial Relations; Power; Resistance; Work; Corporate Governance; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Governance; Power and Influence; Environmental Management; Social Issues

June 2021
Case

Linda Oubré at Whittier College

By: Debora L. Spar and Haley P. Brown

The case follows President Linda Oubré (HBS MBA Class of 1984) as she seeks to move Whittier College towards a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive campus.
In 2020, the student body of Whittier, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles County,... View Details

Keywords: Race And Ethnicity; Women And Leadership; Education; Higher Education; Diversity; Race; Leadership; Change Management; United States; California; Los Angeles

2020
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 7 The Value Structure of Technologies, Part 2: Strategy without Numbers

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

Functional analysis as set forth in the last chapter decomposes a technical system into functional components that do things to advance the system’s purpose and the goals of its designers. Functional analysis in turn can be used to construct value structure maps... View Details

Keywords: Modularity; Value Structure Mapping; Value Capture; Information Technology; Organizations; Strategy; Value Creation

SSRN

2016
Working Paper

Financial Regulation in a Quantitative Model of the Modern Banking System

By: Juliane Begenau and Tim Landvoigt

How does the shadow banking system respond to changes in the capital regulation of commercial banks? This paper builds a quantitative general equilibrium model with commercial banks and shadow banks to study the unintended consequences of capital requirements. A key... View Details

Keywords: Capital; Commercial Banking

SSRN

2014
Supplement

Bluestar's Acquisition of Adisseo (B)

By: F. Warren McFarlan, Donghong Li and Lei Li

This case describes the post-M&A integration of Adisseo of France in 2006 by Bluestar Group, the largest subsidiary of ChemChina (a Fortune 500 company) until 2013. Adisseo was mainly engaged in production of methionine, a feed additive, while China had no methionine... View Details

Keywords: Internationalization; Mergers ＆ Acquisitions; Postmerger Integration; Strategy; China; France

Article

Build It, Buy It, or Both? Rethinking the Sourcing of Advertising Services

By: Alvin J. Silk and Marta M. Stiglin

This paper provides an update on the current state of in-house agencies. Whereas traditional consideration of internalizing advertising services was framed as a binary choice of build or buy, today's advertisers frequently pursue hybrid policies of build and buy to... View Details

Keywords: Operations; Advertising; Advertising Industry

2016
Chapter

Wrong Paths to Right: Defining Morality With or Without a Clear Red Line

By: Ryann Elizabeth Manning and Michel Anteby

The extensive literature on organizational wrongdoing tends to assume that a clear red line divides the moral terrain. However, many organizations function not as moral orders, but as moral pursuits in which there is intentionally no explicit definition of right and... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Organizational Theory; Sociology Of Ethics And Morality; Morality; Organizational Culture; Culture; Ethics; Africa; North and Central America

2013
Case

Career Pathways, Performance Pay, and Peer-review Promotion in Baltimore City Public Schools

By: Susan Moore Johnson, John J-H Kim, Geoff Marietta, S. Elisabeth Faller and James Noonan

In the fall of 2012, Dr. Andres Alonso had much to celebrate about in his five-year tenure as CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, including the approval and implementation of an innovative teachers' contract with a jointly-governed four-tier career pathway that tied... View Details

Keywords: Labor Management; Public Education; PELP; Union; Compensation; Collaboration; Public Education Leadership Project; Education; Labor; Compensation and Benefits; Education Industry; United States

January 2014
Article

China's 'New Regionalism': Subnational Analysis in Chinese Political Economy

By: Meg Rithmire

The study of Chinese political economy has undergone a sea change since the late 1990s; instead of debating the origins and direction of national reform, scholars have turned to examining the origins of local economic variation. This essay reviews recent work in... View Details

Keywords: China; Political Economy; Economy; Government and Politics; China

March–April 2013
Article

Language Matters: Status Loss & Achieved Status Distinctions in Global Organizations

By: Tsedal Neeley

How workers experience and express status loss in organizations has received little scholarly attention. I conducted a qualitative study of a French high-tech company that had instituted English as a lingua franca, or common language, as a context for examining this... View Details

Keywords: Organizations; Status and Position; Loss; Spoken Communication; Emotions; Attitudes; Behavior; Globalization

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January 2011
Article

Let the Right One In: A Microeconomic Approach to Partner Choice in Mutualisms

By: Marco Archetti, Francisco Ubeda, Drew Fudenberg, Jerry R. Green, Naomi E. Pierce and Douglas W. Yu

One of the main problems impeding the evolution of cooperation is partner choice. When information is asymmetric (the quality of a potential partner is known only to himself), it may seem that partner choice is not possible without signaling. Many mutualisms, however,... View Details

Keywords: Microeconomics; Strategy; Partners and Partnerships; System; Problems and Challenges; Information; Economics; Theory; Cost; Decision Choices and Conditions; Cooperation

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December 2008 (Revised January 2011)
Case

Arcadia Biosciences: Seeds of Change

By: Arthur A. Daemmrich, Forest L. Reinhardt and Mary Louise Shelman

Arcadia Biosciences is an entrepreneurial California agricultural biotech company seeking to earn carbon credits by modifying commodity crops for use in China and India. Eric Rey, Arcadia's CEO, faced a strategic inflection point in early September 2008. The company... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Environmental Sustainability; Science-Based Business; Climate Change; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Biotechnology Industry; China; India; California

July 2008 (Revised June 2012)
Case

Corruption in Germany

By: Rawi E. Abdelal, Rafael Di Tella and Jonathan Schlefer

Why do managers become corrupt? Does corruption ever pay? When do friendly relations cross into bribery? How can CEOs manage and prevent outbreaks of corruption? These and other questions are raised by three short case studies of corruption in Germany: at the global... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Law; Managerial Roles; Practice; Conflict of Interests; Germany

2010
Working Paper

Competing Complements

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Barry Nalebuff and David B. Yoffie

In Cournot's model of complements, the producers of A and B are both monopolists. This paper extends Cournot's model to allow for competition between complements on one side of the market. Consider two complements, A and B, where the A + B bundle is valuable only when... View Details

Keywords: Profit; Revenue; Monopoly; Game Theory; Competition