Publications

Read Now

January 2012 (Revised March 2012)
Case

Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA)'s Entry into the Retirement Market

By: Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy

This case examines Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA)'s decision to enter the retirement market with their new "Dimensional Managed DC" product, a complete retirement solution that aimed to provide investors with what they really wanted: the same standard of living in... View Details

Keywords: Retirement; Asset Management

June 2006
Case

Home Equity Protection

Nearly 70% of households in the United States own their own home and, yet, virtually no household is insured against a crash in housing values. Is there a market for an insurance product, home equity protection, that would provide this protection? Focuses on the... View Details

Keywords: Housing; Insurance; Product Design; Equity; Insurance Industry

February 2016
Article

Bridging Science and Technology Through Academic-Industry Partnerships

By: Sen Chai and Willy C. Shih

Partnerships that foster the translation of scientific advances emerging from academic research organizations into commercialized products at private firms are a policy tool that has attracted increased interest. This paper examines empirical data from the Danish... View Details

Keywords: Economic Development; Technological Change; Government Policy; Technological Innovation; Research and Development; Information Technology; Policy; Technology Industry; Denmark

March 1997 (Revised March 1997)
Case

Business Teams at Rubbermaid, Inc.

By: Teresa M. Amabile and Dean Whitney

Rubbermaid, a consumer-products company widely praised for its innovation, has instituted a company-wide experiment to stimulate innovation even further. The experiment consists of creating small cross-functional business teams within each division, with each team... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Innovation Strategy; Groups and Teams; Innovation and Management; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Consumer Products Industry; United States

One of the most popular mantras for innovation is “avoid criticism.” The underlying assumption is that criticism kills the flow of creativity and the enthusiasm of a team. Aversion to criticism has significantly spread in the last 20 years, especially through the... View Details

September 2018
Article

Knowledge Integrators and the Survival of Manufacturing Clusters

By: Giulio Buciuni and Gary P. Pisano

Over the past two decades, the greater prevalence of global supply chains has had contrasting effects on Western manufacturing clusters. While some of them dwindled, others proved resilient. Contributing to the recent literature on co-located clusters and clusters'... View Details

Keywords: Production; Industry Clusters; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Strategy; Competition

Register to Read

14 May 2008
Research & Ideas

Getting Down to the Business of Creativity

entrepreneurship is as old as entrepreneurship itself. At HBS we define entrepreneurship as the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control—so, obviously, creativity is a big factor." The Creative Entrepreneur In her new elective course,... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Retail; Apparel & Accessories; Fashion; Entertainment & Recreation

January 2006 (Revised October 2006)
Case

Hewlett-Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk (A)

By: Clayton M. Christensen

Hewlett-Packard decided that, to grow more rapidly, it needed to design a revolutionary disk drive product that would create an entirely new market or application for magnetic recording technology. The company followed most of the "rules" good managers follow in such... View Details

Keywords: Management; Information Infrastructure; Innovation and Management; Product Development; Computer Industry; United States

25 Feb 2013
Research & Ideas

Lean Strategy Not Just for Start-Ups

steady business with TurboTax, the tax preparation software that has been a part of the company's product line since its 1993 acquisition of ChipSoft. Thus it makes sense for the company to innovate within... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Financial Services

Article

Do Private Equity Firms Have Better Management Practices?

By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

Using an innovative survey measure of management practices on over 15,000 firms, we find private equity firms are better managed than government, family, and privately owned firms, and have similar management to publicly listed firms. This is true both in developed and... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Management Practices and Processes

Read Now

23 Aug 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Capturing Benefits from Tomorrow’s Technology in Today’s Products: The Effect of Absorptive Capacity

Keywords: by Daniel Snow; Technology

24 Apr 2019
HBS Seminar

Dimitris Papanikolaou, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

December 2006 (Revised February 2009)
Case

China Merchants Bank: Here Just For You

By: F. Warren McFarlan, GuoQing Chen, HengYuan Zhu, Bin Yang, Michael Shih-ta Chen, G.A. Donovan, Waishun Lo and Yan Yang

Founded in 1987, China Merchants Bank (CMB) is a pioneer in the use of technical innovation and IT as a competitive tool in the rapidly evolving Chinese banking sector. With a relatively small branch network when compared to its larger competitors, CMB uses an... View Details

Keywords: Credit Cards; Information Technology; Technological Innovation; Innovation Leadership; Competitive Strategy; Initial Public Offering; Emerging Markets; Opportunities; Banking Industry; China; Hong Kong

December 2007 (Revised July 2008)
Case

Montague Corporation: Unfolding the Future in Cycling

Montague has developed a major innovation that creates a new sub-category in the bicycle industry: a full-sized, high-quality bicycle that folds. In contrast to existing small-wheeled folding bicycles that are portable, but with inferior performance characteristics,... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention; Product Positioning; Demand and Consumers; Adoption; Bicycle Industry

22 May 2007
First Look

First Look: May 22, 2007

existing products as well as exploring into architectural and/or discontinuous innovation. Based on in-depth, longitudinal data on 13 business units and 22 innovations, we investigate the consequences of organization design choices on... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

09 Mar 2017
Cold Call Podcast

IDEO is Changing the Way Managers Think About Thinking

Keywords: Re: Ryan W. Buell; Motion Pictures & Video; Consulting

January 2013
Article

Barriers to Household Risk Management: Evidence from India

By: Shawn A. Cole, Xavier Gine, Jeremy Tobacman, Petia Topalova, Robert M. Townsend and James Vickery

Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Household; India