Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(10,841)
- Faculty Publications (1,183)
- October 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Accounting Red Flags or Red Herrings at Catalent? (A)
By: Joseph Pacelli, ZeSean Ali and Tom Quinn
Fund manager Janet Curie asked for a recommendation about the pharmaceutical company Catalent. The company seemed like a solid investment. However, a pair of research reports issued over the previous two months complicated this narrative. GlassHouse Research, a short... View Details
Keywords: Accounting Audits; Budgets and Budgeting; Earnings Management; Cost Accounting; Fair Value Accounting; Revenue Recognition; Integrated Corporate Reporting; Fairness; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Government Legislation; Conflict of Interests; Announcements; Blogs; Debates; Investment; Trust; Business and Shareholder Relations; Pharmaceutical Industry; Accounting Industry; United States
- October 2023 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Thermo Fisher Scientific: Foray into Contract Research
By: Satish Tadikonda, William Marks and Kevin Emancipator
After publicly declaring that they would not enter the contract research organization (CRO) business in 2017, Thermo Fisher purchased Pharmaceutical Product Development (PPD), one of the biggest players in the CRO space, in 2021. Much had changed in the intervening... View Details
- October 10, 2023
- Article
10 Reasons Why Inclusion Is a Competitive Advantage
By: Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss
In their new book, Move Fast and Fix Things, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss outline five strategies to help leaders tackle their hardest problems and quickly make change. Their third strategy is creating an inclusive environment that allows all employees to... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Bringing Science to Market: Knowledge Foundations, Inventor-Founders, and Performance
By: Justine Boudou and Maria Roche
In this paper, we examine how a startup’s knowledge foundations—embedded in its
core technology—influence its performance in the exit market. Using a dataset of 1,006
biomedicine startups founded between 2005 and 2015, we focus on two key factors: (1)
the degree of... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Centralization and Organization Reproduction: Ethnic Innovation in R&D Centers and Satellite Locations
By: William R. Kerr
We study the relationship between firm centralization and organizational reproduction in satellite locations. For decentralized firms, the ethnic compositions of inventors in satellite locations mostly resemble their host cities, with little link to the inventor... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised August 2024)
- Case
Avive: Resuscitating a Defibrillator from the Regulatory Brink
By: Satish Tadikonda and William Marks
Avive Solutions set out to create a better Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) that would solve many of the problems with existing solutions, including lack of connectivity, difficulty-of-use and requiring prior training for successful use of the device, data... View Details
- September 22, 2023
- Article
How Software Companies Can Avoid the Trap of Product-Led Growth
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Oliver Jay
Companies like Slack and Dropbox have pioneered the use of Product-Led Growth (PLG). They start by building a product that’s indispensable for small teams, then count on low friction and customer advocates to expand throughout the organization. PLG works, at least at... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Icahn Enterprises: Ponzi Scheme or Sound Investment
By: Aiyesha Dey, Jonas Heese and James Weber
Icahn Enterprises, a publicly traded limited partnership founded and operated by famed activist investor Carl Icahn, had earned above market returns for over a decade. Between 2018 and early 2023, it had a compound annual return of 31%. Icahn invested in undervalued... View Details
- September 2023
- Module Note
Live Case Exercise for Financial Reporting
By: Tatiana Sandino and Marshal Herrmann
Harvard Business School employs the case method as a cornerstone of its pedagogy, providing students with opportunities to engage in discussions related to difficult or contentious decisions confronted by real-world organizations. In this “live case,” we depart from... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
TetraScience: Noise and Signal
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
In 2019, TetraScience CEO “Spin” Wang needed advice. Five years earlier, he had cofounded a startup that saw early success with a hardware product designed to help laboratory scientists in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical spaces more easily collect data from... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Organization; Restructuring; Forecasting and Prediction; Digital Platforms; Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning; Organizational Structure; Network Effects; Competitive Strategy; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States; Boston
- September 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Atomwise: Strategic Opportunities in AI for Pharma
By: Satish Tadikonda
Abraham Heifets and his co-founder, Izhar Wallach, had founded Atomwise to develop i) an AI engine to transform drug discovery by creating better medicines faster, and ii) a machine learning-based discovery engine that combined the power of convolutional neural... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
RightHand Robotics: Choosing the First Market
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Stacy Straaberg
In early 2015, RightHand Robotics’s (RHR) leadership faced a set of decisions in commercializing the startup’s robotic picking solution. RHR’s central product was the RightPick integrated robotic picking system which featured a robotic arm, a three-fingered robotic... View Details
- 2023
- Book
Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well
By: Amy Edmondson
A revolutionary guide that will transform your relationship with failure, from the pioneering researcher of psychological safety and award-winning Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson.
We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now,... View Details
We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now,... View Details
- September–October 2023
- Article
The New Era of Industrial Policy Is Here
By: Willy C. Shih
Governments around the world are increasingly intervening in the private sector through industrial policies designed to help domestic sectors reach goals that markets alone are unlikely to achieve. Companies in targeted sectors—such as automakers, energy companies, and... View Details
- August 2023
- Case
Constellation Pharmaceuticals: Corporate Development at a Novel Therapeutic Company
By: Satish Tadikonda and Brad Prosek
Constellation Pharmaceuticals was a company focused on epigenetic therapies for cancer patients. Despite a promising start and an early deal with a leading biopharma company, the company weathered twin setbacks in the end of a major research collaboration and the... View Details
- August 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Jake Becraft and Strand Therapeutics: The Making of an Entrepreneur
By: Satish Tadikonda, William Marks and Ananya Zutshi
Jake Becraft, a PhD student at MIT disillusioned in pursuit of his dreams of becoming an academic, serendipitously finds himself discussing the potential commercial applications of his work with Tasuku Kitada, his former postdoctoral research mentor. The two decide to... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Residential Battery Storage - Reshaping the Way We Do Electricity
By: Christian Kaps and Serguei Netessine
In this paper, we aim to understand when private households invest in behind-the-meter battery storage next to rooftop solar and how those batteries impact households, the electricity market, and emissions. We answer three main research questions: 1) When do customers... View Details
- July 2023 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Vytal: Packaging-as-a-Service
By: George Serafeim, Michael W. Toffel, Lena Duchene and Daniela Beyersdorfer
The Germany-based startup Vytal operated the largest digital-native reusable packaging-as-a-service network globally, having raised nearly €15 million, established a large network of restaurant partners, and prevented the use of millions of single-use take-out food... View Details
Keywords: Climate Risk; Digital; Platform Strategies; Data; Packaging; Sustainability; Start-up; Startup; Entrepreneur; Impact; Circular; Growth Strategy; Innovation; Environmental Sustainability; Innovation and Invention; Business Growth and Maturation; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Startups; Resource Allocation; Risk Management; Adoption; Strategy; Performance Productivity; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Supply Chain; Distribution; Entrepreneurship; Climate Change; Green Technology Industry; Service Industry; Retail Industry; Germany; Europe
- July 2023
- Case
DayTwo: Going to Market with Gut Microbiome (Abridged)
By: Ayelet Israeli
DayTwo is a young Israeli startup that applies research on the gut microbiome and machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized nutritional recommendations to its users in order to minimize blood sugar spikes after meals. After a first year of trial rollout in... View Details
- 18 Jul 2023
- Interview
Jeffrey Rayport on Product Market Fit, Profit Market Fit and Whiplash, and More
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Doug Levin
This episode of "Lessons from Startup Life" podcast features Jeffrey Rayport, Senior Lecturer of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Jeffrey specializes in teaching and researching growth-stage technology ventures and their scalability. Prior to... View Details