Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(3,025)
- Faculty Publications (585)
- March 2021 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
The Trouble with TCE
By: Vincent Pons, Rafael Di Tella and Galit Goldstein
Trichloroethylene, or TCE, was a chemical used by tens of thousands of businesses in the United States. It was an affordable tool for many. Yet, TCE had been associated with important health risks, including cancer and autoimmune disease. TCE potentially posed other... View Details
- March 2021 (Revised December 2021)
- Case
Cedar Environmental: Innovation vs. Corruption in Lebanon?
By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Youssef Abdel Aal
The case follows Ziad Abi Chaker, founder and CEO of Cedar Environmental, as he weighs options for how to grow the company in the face of growing economic and political instability in Lebanon in 2019.
Founded after the Lebanese civil war, Cedar... View Details
Founded after the Lebanese civil war, Cedar... View Details
Keywords: Waste Management; Recycling; Corruption; Leadership & Corporate Accountability; Business And Government; Social Entrepreneurship; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Pollution; Entrepreneurship; Business and Government Relations; Crime and Corruption; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Strategy; Expansion; Corporate Accountability; Green Technology Industry; Middle East; Lebanon
- 2021
- Working Paper
First Law of Motion: Influencer Video Advertising on TikTok
By: Jeremy Yang, Juanjuan Zhang and Yuhan Zhang
This paper engineers an intuitive feature that is predictive of the causal effect of influencer video advertising on product sales. We propose the concept of m-score, a summary statistic that captures the extent to which a product is advertised in the most engaging... View Details
- March 2021
- Article
Increasing the Level of Abstraction as a Strategy for Accelerating the Adoption of Complex Technologies
By: Willy C. Shih
Many new technologies are complex and embody high levels of technical sophistication, and applying them should require significant knowledge and experience. Yet, the rapid adoption and incorporation of these technologies into other innovations seems inconsistent with... View Details
- February 2021 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Henry Ford: Changing the World
By: Robert Simons and Max Saffer
This case traces the rise of Henry Ford from a small farm in Michigan to the controlling shareholder of the Ford Motor Company. The case describes how Ford, as young man, acquired engineering skills and the risks he took as he built and marketed one of the first... View Details
- February 2021
- Article
Platform Diffusion at Temporary Gatherings: Social Coordination and Ecosystem Emergence
By: Tommy Pan Fang, Andy Wu and David R. Clough
Software platforms create value by cultivating an ecosystem of complementary products and services. Existing explanations for how a prospective complementor chooses platforms to join assume the complementor has rich information about the range of available platforms.... View Details
Keywords: Innovation Ecosystems; Technology Diffusion; Hackathon; Contagion; Software Applications; Software Development; Software Engineering; Technology Strategy; Technology Adoption; Technological Innovation; Information Infrastructure; Innovation Strategy; Digital Platforms; Network Effects; Applications and Software; Information Technology; Technology Industry; Computer Industry; Information Technology Industry; Video Game Industry
- January 2021
- Case
Andela: Africa's AWS for Talent
By: Caroline M. Elkins, Tarun Khanna and Joyce J. Kim
Five years after the company’s founding, Andela, a company that built and trained remote engineering teams, became arguably Africa’s greatest technology unicorn. By January 2019, Andela raised $100 million in Series D funding. As Andela looked to scale in an... View Details
- December 2020 (Revised December 2021)
- Case
Komatsu and Smart Construction
By: Rajiv Lal, David J. Collis and Akiko Saito
Komatsu, Japan's leading construction equipment manufacturer, is considering investing in a digital platform "Smart Construction" that will digitise the entire work process on a construction site, allowing for substantial reductions in cost and time while improving... View Details
- December 2020
- Supplement
Komatsu Smart Construction: Launch Video
By: Rajiv Lal, David J. Collis and Akiko Saito
Short video of the concept of "Smart Construction" that was shown at the launch of the business by Komatsu. Illustrates what the automated construction site might look like in the future. View Details
- December 2020
- Supplement
Komatsu: Video of Future Building Site
By: Rajiv Lal, David J. Collis and Akiko Saito
Short video that illustrates how an automated construction site would operate View Details
- Article
Incorporating the Arts to Create Technical Leaders of the Future
By: Linda A. Hill
Engineering education should be reimagined to create a new generation of technical leaders prepared to dream, invent, and steward the future. These leaders of tomorrow will need to bridge business, engineering, and the arts. View Details
- October 2020
- Case
Israelis, Palestinians and the Technology Bridge Between Them: A Work in Progress
By: Elie Ofek and Lia Weiner
In Israel of 2020 the demand for software engineers was endless. Meanwhile just miles away, Palestinian universities were graduating 3,000 engineers a year, and many of them could not find jobs in the still nascent Palestinian tech sector. Could these dots be... View Details
- September 2020
- Teaching Note
TransDigm in 2017: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 720-422. TransDigm was a highly acquisitive company that manufactured a wide range of highly engineered aerospace parts for both military and commercial customers. Over the ten years ending in 2016, its stock price had increase ten times,... View Details
Keywords: Value Capturing; Pricing Strategy; Supplier Power; Buyer Power; Porter's Five Forces; Bargaining Power; Monopoly; Aerospace; Acquisition Strategy; Value Drivers; Ethical Behavior; Regulation; Growth Strategy; Business Ethics; Defense; Procurement; Sustainability; Value-Based Business Strategy; Acquisition; Ethics; Private Equity; Financial Strategy; Growth Management; Performance Evaluation; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Horizontal Integration; Value Creation; Competitive Advantage; Aerospace Industry; Air Transportation Industry; United States
- Article
Doubting Driverless Dilemmas
By: Julian De Freitas, Sam E. Anthony, Andrea Censi and George A. Alvarez
The alarm has been raised on so-called driverless dilemmas, in which autonomous vehicles will need to make high-stakes ethical decisions on the road. We argue that these arguments are too contrived to be of practical use, are an inappropriate method for making... View Details
Keywords: Moral Judgment; Autonomous Vehicles; Driverless Policy; Transportation; Ethics; Judgments; Policy
- July 2020 (Revised November 2020)
- Case
Gera Developments: Leadership at a Crossroads
By: Christina R. Wing and John Masko
For decades, Gera Developments (Gera) was a boutique family-owned real estate development firm in Pune, India. But since 2000, managing director Rohit Gera had turned the company into a dynamic innovator in housing solutions for urban Indian families. Over the 2010s,... View Details
Keywords: Buildings and Facilities; Business Growth and Maturation; Construction; Geographic Location; Global Strategy; Globalized Firms and Management; Housing; Leadership Style; Management Succession; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Family Ownership; Family and Family Relationships; Urban Development; Customization and Personalization; Real Estate Industry; Maharashtra; India; United States
- 2020
- Working Paper
Performance Hacking: The Contagious Business Practice that Corrodes Corporate Culture, Undermines Core Values, and Damages Great Companies
By: Robert D. Austin and Richard L. Nolan
August 7, 1955 is an important date in commercial aviation history. You could say it began the jet airliner age, though other dates might also qualify. Jet engines had proven successful in military aircraft. But no one knew then whether members of the general public... View Details
- July 2020 (Revised September 2020)
- Case
MobSquad
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, William R. Kerr and Susie L. Ma
Irfhan Rawji (MBA 2004) launched MobSquad in October 2018 to help American tech start-ups retain hard-to-find talent, many of whom struggled with U.S. work visa issues, such as software engineers with experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data... View Details
- July 2020 (Revised January 2021)
- Case
Rosalind Fox at John Deere
By: Anthony Mayo and Olivia Hull
Rosalind Fox, the factory manager at John Deere’s Des Moines, Iowa plant, has improved the financial standing of the factory in the three years she’s been at its helm. But employee engagement scores—which measured employees’ satisfaction with working conditions and... View Details
Keywords: Agribusiness; Change Management; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Diversity; Gender; Race; Engineering; Geographic Location; Globalized Markets and Industries; Leadership Development; Leadership Style; Leading Change; Management Style; Management Teams; Organizational Culture; Personal Development and Career; Prejudice and Bias; Power and Influence; Status and Position; Trust; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; United States
- July 2020
- Case
Super 30: Educating the Elite Poor
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Shreya Ramachandran
In the summer of 2019 in New Delhi, S K Shahi and his daughter, Meenakshi, faced a difficult problem. India had 19 centers of their non-profit, the Center for Social Responsibility and Leadership. Also called the 'Super 30' program, this offered free training for... View Details
- 2020
- Other Teaching and Training Material
Leading the Charge: A Podcase about Product Management at Opower
By: Jeffrey Rayport and John J. Lafkas
The Opower podcase materials contain audio from professor Jeffrey Rayport's interview with Ben Foster, the former vice president of product management at Opower, and more recently the co-founder of Prodify. In the podcase, Ben discusses how product management works in... View Details