Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,536)
- Faculty Publications (196)
- May–June 2018
- Article
The Surprising Power of Questions
By: Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John
Much of an executive’s workday is spent asking others for information—requesting status updates from a team leader, for example, or questioning a counterpart in a tense negotiation. Yet unlike professionals such as litigators, journalists, and doctors, who are taught... View Details
- March 2018 (Revised June 2018)
- Case
Knowledge Sharing at REMA 1000 (A)
By: Tatiana Sandino and Olivia Hull
A year after Norwegian grocery chain REMA 1000 adopted Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise social network, Chief Human Resource Officer Tore Høylie is asked to evaluate its impact on company culture and communication. Almost 90% of the workforce is engaged with the... View Details
- March 2018
- Article
Enacting Knowledge Strategy Through Social Media: Passable Trust and the Paradox of Non-work Interactions
By: Tsedal Neeley and Paul Leonardi
Despite the recognition that knowledge sharing among employees is necessary to enact knowledge strategy, little is known about how to enable such sharing. Recent research suggests that social media may promote knowledge sharing because they allow social lubrication and... View Details
- January 2018 (Revised February 2023)
- Teaching Note
The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO
This teaching note pairs with the case entitled: “The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO” (case no. 617-027). View Details
- January–February 2018
- Article
More than a Paycheck: How to Create Good Blue-Collar Jobs in the Knowledge Economy
By: Dennis Campbell, John Case and Bill Fotsch
Fifty years ago a good blue-collar job was with a large manufacturer such as General Motors or Goodyear. Often unionized, it paid well, offered benefits, and was secure. But manufacturing employment has steadily declined, from about 25% of the U.S. labor force in 1970... View Details
- Article
What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools: Avoid the Common Pitfalls So That Your Organization Can Collaborate, Learn, and Innovate
By: Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley
Workplaces have adopted internal social tools—think stand-alone technologies such as Slack, Yammer, and Chatter, or embedded applications such as Microsoft Teams and JIRA—at a staggering rate. In an ambitious study of 4,200 companies, conducted by the McKinsey Global... View Details
- August 2017 (Revised August 2018)
- Case
Busbud: Building a Data Company
By: Srikant M. Datar, Alistair Croll and Caitlin N. Bowler
The case features the work of LP Maurice (HBS '08) as he decides to take on the fragmented bus travel industry and launch an online business that aggregates and shares bus schedules for routes around the world. His first challenge: finding that the data he needs is... View Details
- April 2017
- Case
The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Sarah Mehta
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal government agency responsible for evaluating and granting patents and trademarks. In 2015, the USPTO employed approximately 8,000 patent examiners who granted nearly 300,000 patents to inventors. As of April... View Details
Keywords: Machine Learning; Telework; Collaborating With Unions; Human Resources; Recruitment; Retention; Intellectual Property; Copyright; Patents; Trademarks; Knowledge Sharing; Technology Adoption; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Productivity; Performance Improvement; District of Columbia
- March–April 2017
- Article
Innovation Outcomes in a Distributed Organization: Intrafirm Mobility and Access to Resources
Prior research has established a relation between intra-firm mobility and innovation outcomes at distributed organizations. The literature has also uniformly agreed on the mechanism underlying this relationship: the sharing of tacit knowledge and recombination of ideas... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Intellectual Baggage of Ethnic Migrant Inventors: Transfer and Recombination of Knowledge Across Borders
Ethnic migrant inventors might differ from locals in terms of knowledge they bring to host firms. We study the role of first-generation ethnic migrant inventors in cross-border transfer of knowledge previously locked within the cultural context of their home regions.... View Details
- December 2016 (Revised April 2017)
- Case
BASF: Co-Creating Innovation (A)
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Emilie Billaud and Vincent Dessain
In 2016, BASF's chief executive officer and chief technology officer reflected on the co-creation innovation program started almost 18 months ago as part of BASF's 150th anniversary celebration. Five hundred project ideas had been created, of which 100 had already... View Details
- Article
Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows
By: Samer Faraj, Georg von Krogh, Eric Monteiro and Karim R. Lakhani
Online communities frequently create significant economic and relational value for community participants and beyond. It is widely accepted that the underlying source of such value is the collective flow of knowledge among community participants. We distinguish the... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
A Welfarist Role for Nonwelfarist Rules: An Example with Envy
I propose and formalize an argument for why economists working in the welfarist normative tradition should include nonwelfarist principles in how they judge economic policy. The key idea behind this argument is that the world is too complex, and our ability to model it... View Details
- September 2016 (Revised July 2017)
- Case
Transferring Knowledge Between Projects at NASA JPL (A)
By: Dorothy Leonard and Christopher Myers
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a federally funded research institution within NASA, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has played a large role in many space and planetary explorations, particularly to the planet Mars. As a project-based... View Details
- September 2016 (Revised July 2017)
- Supplement
Transferring Knowledge Between Projects at NASA JPL (B)
By: Dorothy Leonard and Christopher Myers
At the conclusion of the (A) case, Jennifer Trosper needed to decide whether or not to throw her support behind the training and outreach represented by the ROV-E program to build small rovers like the ones used on the surface of Mars by NASA JPL. The (B) case... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
More Effective Sports Sponsorship—Combining and Integrating Key Resources and Capabilities of International Sports Events and Their Major Sponsors
By: Ragnar Lund and Stephen A. Greyser
Organizations in the field of sports are becoming increasingly dependent on sponsors for their value creation and growth. Studies suggest that sports organizations (rights-holders) often fail to exploit the full potential of such sponsorship partnerships. The aim of... View Details
- February 2016
- Teaching Note
Advanced Leadership Pathways: David Weinstein and Write the World
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Tessa Natanay Hamilton and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone
Following a successful career as a lawyer, Chief Administrative Officer of Fidelity Investments, and law school instructor, David Weinstein became a 2011 Advanced Leadership Fellow at Harvard University. During his Advanced Leadership Fellowship he conceived an idea to... View Details
- June 2015
- Article
Looking Beyond Mau Mau: Archiving Violence in the Era of Decolonization
- 2015
- Chapter
Innovating without Information Constraints: Organization, Communities, and Innovation when Information Costs Approach Zero
By: Elizabeth J. Altman, Frank Nagle and Michael Tushman
Innovation has traditionally taken place within an organization's boundaries and/or with selected partners. This Chandlerian approach to innovation has been rooted in transaction costs, organizational boundaries, and information processing challenges associated with... View Details
- February 2015
- Article
'Open' Disclosure of Innovations, Incentives and Follow-on Reuse: Theory on Processes of Cumulative Innovation and a Field Experiment in Computational Biology
By: Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani
Most of society's innovation systems―academic science, the patent system, open source, etc.―are "open" in the sense that they are designed to facilitate knowledge disclosure among innovators. An essential difference across innovation systems is whether disclosure is of... View Details