Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(505)
- Faculty Publications (205)
- October 2017 (Revised September 2022)
- Teaching Note
Fuyao Glass America: Sourcing Decision
By: Willy Shih
This case is about globalization: a Chinese company has decided to locate a production facility close to its customers in the U.S., but a recent contract bid means it will lose money, at least initially, by supplying product from that factory. The purpose of this case... View Details
- May 2017 (Revised June 2017)
- Case
ATH Technologies (A): Making the Numbers
By: Robert Simons and Jennifer Packard
An exercise that takes students through five stages of growth in an entrepreneurial start-up in the medical devices industry: 1) founding, 2) growth, 3) push to profitability, 4) refocusing process, and 5) takeover by new management. At each stage, students must... View Details
Keywords: Strategy And Execution; Management Control Systems; Balancing Innovation And Control; Performance Management; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Profit; Geographic Location; Governance Controls; Innovation and Invention; Management Succession; Performance Evaluation; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry
- May 2017
- Case
ATH Technologies: Making the Numbers
By: Robert Simons and Jennifer Packard
An exercise that takes students through five stages of growth in an entrepreneurial start-up in the medical devices industry: 1) founding, 2) growth, 3) push to profitability, 4) relocation process, and 5) takeover by new management. At each stage, students must... View Details
Keywords: Balancing Innovation And Control; Performance Evaluation; Strategy And Execution; Management Control Systems; Risk Management; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Profit; Geographic Location; Governance Controls; Innovation and Invention; Management Succession; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry
- February 2017
- Article
Resident Networks and Corporate Connections: Evidence from World War II Internment Camps
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Christopher J. Malloy
We demonstrate that simply by using the ethnic makeup surrounding a firm’s location, we can predict, on average, which trade links are valuable for firms. Using customs and port authority data on the international shipments of all U.S. publicly traded firms, we show... View Details
- 2017
- Book
Geography, Location, and Strategy
By: Juan Alcácer, Bruce Kogut, Catherine Thomas and Bernard Yin Yeung
Changes in both technology and global political economy have vastly accelerated the pace of globalization in the last 40 years, eroding barriers that limited firms' geographic scope and unleashing a seemingly unlimited set of new threats, challenges, and opportunities... View Details
- Fall 2016
- Article
Global Talent Flows
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr, Çağlar Özden and Christopher Parsons
The global distribution of talent is highly skewed and the resources available to countries to develop and utilize their best and brightest vary substantially. The migration of skilled workers across countries tilts the deck even further. Using newly available data, we... View Details
- November 2016
- Article
Spatial Organization of Firms and Location Choices Through the Value Chain
By: Juan Alcacer and Mercedes Delgado
We explore the impact of geographically bounded, intra-firm linkages (internal agglomerations) and geographically bounded, inter-firm linkages (external agglomerations) on firms' location strategies. Using data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database,... View Details
- June 2016
- Article
Vaccination Rates Are Associated with Functional Proximity but Not Base Proximity of Vaccination Clinics
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and Gwendolyn I. Reynolds
Background: Routine annual influenza vaccinations are recommended for persons 6 months of age and older, but less than half of U.S. adults get vaccinated. Many employers offer employees free influenza vaccinations at workplace clinics, but even then take-up is... View Details
- Article
What to Know About Locating in a Cluster
By: Willy C. Shih and Sen Chai
As a study of two industry clusters in Denmark shows, factors that can make clusters attractive—easy people movement and knowledge spillovers—can also make it harder for individual companies to retain proprietary knowledge. View Details
Keywords: Clusters; Clustering; Competitiveness; Life Sciences; Telecommunications; Science-based; Research And Development; Industry Clusters; Research; Innovation Strategy; Innovation and Management; Geographic Location; Pharmaceutical Industry; Biotechnology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Denmark
- 2015
- Chapter
Information Technology and the Distribution of Inventive Activity
By: Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb and Shane Greenstein
We examine the relationship between the diffusion of advanced Internet technology and the geographic concentration of invention, as measured by patents. First, we show that patenting became more concentrated from the early 1990s to the early 2000s and, similarly, that... View Details
- Article
How Local Context Shapes Digital Business Abroad
By: William R. Kerr
This article identifies how digital businesses need to be adapted to the local environment in which they are being applied. Core ideas include the development of strong barriers to entry, the types of network effects encountered, and the localization of business... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Can Marshall's Clusters Survive Globalization?
By: Giulio Buciuni and Gary P. Pisano
It is widely presumed that in today's globalized economy, the value of geographic clustering of manufacturing industries is no longer valuable. Manufacturing is represented as a highly mobile "commodity" that can be sourced from anywhere in the world where factor costs... View Details
- February 2015
- Article
Location Choices under Strategic Interactions
By: Juan Alcacer, Cristian Dezso and Minyuan Zhao
The literature on location choices has mostly emphasized the impact of location and firm characteristics. However, most industries with a significant presence of multi-location firms are oligopolistic in nature, which suggests that strategic interaction among firms... View Details
- December 2014
- Article
Location Strategies for Agglomeration Economies
By: Juan Alcácer and Wilbur Chung
Geographically concentrated industry activity creates pools of skilled labor and specialized suppliers, and increases opportunities for knowledge spillovers. The strategic value of these agglomeration economies may vary by firm, depending upon the relative value of... View Details
- July–August 2014
- Article
Where to Launch in Africa?
By: Eugene F. Soltes
A case study in the management of new business enterprises in developing countries is examined. A dilemma facing a Malawian entrepreneur in whether to locate a packaging industry new business in his native Malawi or in the larger market of Nigeria is examined.... View Details
- June 2014 (Revised July 2014)
- Background Note
An Overview of Project Finance and Infrastructure Finance—2014 Update
By: Benjamin C. Esty, Carla Chavich and Aldo Sesia
Provides an introduction to the fields of project finance and infrastructure finance, and gives a statistical overview of project-financed investments over the years from 2009 to 2013. Examples of project-financed investments include the Kashagan oil field development... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
The Organizational and Geographic Drivers of Absorptive Capacity: An Empirical Analysis of Pharmaceutical R&D Laboratories
By: Francesca Lazzeri and Gary P. Pisano
Scholars and practitioners alike now recognize that a firm's capacity to assimilate and use know-how from external sources—what Cohen and Levinthal (1990) called "absorptive capacity"—plays a central role in innovation performance. In recent years, a common strategy... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Should Firms Move Talent from the Geographic Periphery to Hubs? A Strategic Human Capital Perspective
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Victoria Sevcenko and Tarun Khanna
A longstanding literature holds that firms should hire and move talent from the geographic periphery to hubs as a means to create value from human capital. They do so, however, at the risk of losing the worker to rivals located in the same geographic hub,... View Details
- January 2014
- Case
Emirates Airline: Connecting the Unconnected
By: Juan Alcacer and John Clayton
Narrates the story of Emirates, an airline founded in 1985 in Dubai that by 2013 was among the three largest commercial airlines in the world. The case emphasizes how Emirates capitalized on its location—a small city–state strategically located to reach ¾ of the world... View Details
- October 2013
- Article
The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care
By: Michael E. Porter and Thomas H. Lee
In health care, the days of business as usual are over. Around the world, every health care system is struggling with rising costs and uneven quality, despite the hard work of well-intentioned, well-trained clinicians. Health care leaders and policy makers have tried... View Details