Publications

06 May 2025
Blog Post

The Incredible Land of Ice and Fire: Exploring Iceland's Renewable Energy Model for a Changing Planet

signal into grid-ready electricity. The goal is to launch this solution at commercial scale by 2030, with each satellite expected to deliver up to 600 MW of clean power. Considering that many View Details

28 Feb 2019
News

New Program Will Develop Leaders of Innovative Ventures

and his wife, Kristen, were intrigued by the idea of helping Harvard undergraduates with a passion for technology and entrepreneurship become future leaders of innovative... View Details

2019
Working Paper

The Customer May Not Always Be Right: Customer Compatibility and Service Performance

By: Ryan W. Buell, Dennis Campbell and Frances X. Frei

This paper investigates the impact of customer compatibility – the degree of fit between the needs of customers and the capabilities of the operations serving them – on customer experiences and firm performance. We use a variance decomposition analysis to quantify the... View Details

Keywords: Customer Compatibility; Satisfaction; Profitability; Customer Relationship Management; Service Operations; Customer Satisfaction; Banking Industry; Retail Industry

SSRN

May 2022
Case

Thinking Outside the Wine Box (A): Mekanism and the Franz for Life Campaign

By: Tomomichi Amano, Elie Ofek, Mengjie Cheng and Amy Klopfenstein

This case provides an overview of “Franz for Life,” an advertising campaign that independent advertising agency Mekanism created and executed to revitalize the brand image of Franzia, a low-cost boxed wine. For several years, Franzia’s popularity declined among... View Details

Keywords: Marketing; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Digital Marketing; Social Marketing; Marketing Communications; Product Positioning; Food and Beverage Industry; Advertising Industry; United States

September 13, 2023
Article

How the Best Chief Data Officers Create Value

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Robin Seibert

Despite the rapidly increasing prominence of data and analytics functions, the majority of chief data officers (CDOs) fail to value and price the business outcomes created by their data and analytics capabilities. It comes as no surprise then that many CDOs fall behind... View Details

Keywords: Value Creation; Analytics and Data Science; Measurement and Metrics; Leadership

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15 Jul 2011
Working Paper Summaries

Poultry in Motion: A Study of International Trade Finance Practices

Keywords: by Pol Antras & C. Fritz Foley; Agriculture & Agribusiness

Research Summary

Thin Slices of Teams with Professor Jeff Polzer, Patricia Satterstrom, and Lisa Kwan

How do people evaluate team effectiveness from short observations of interactions among team members? What are the cues people take in in such narrow windows of experience? What contributes to the accuracy of evaluations based on thin slices of... View Details

January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Pioneer Natural Resources: Enhancing the Capital Return Strategy with Variable Dividends

By: Benjamin C. Esty, Elisabeth Kempf and E. Scott Mayfield

In February 2021, Scott Sheffield, the CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources (an independent oil and gas company based in Texas), was considering the possibility of enhancing the firm’s capital return strategy by introducing a variable dividend tied to cash flows in... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Finance; Cash Flow; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Value Creation; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment Return; Profit; Policy; Business and Shareholder Relations; Energy Industry; United States; North America; Texas

Article

Dissecting Costs of CT Study: Application of TDABC (Time-driven Activity-based Costing) in a Tertiary Academic Center

By: Robert S. Kaplan, Yoshimi Anzai, Marta E. Heilbrun, Derek Haas, Luca Boi, Kirk Moshre, Satoshi Minoshima and Vivian S. Lee

The lack of understanding the true costs (not charges) of delivering health care services poses tremendous challenges in the containment of health care costs. In this study, we applied an established cost accounting method, time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC),... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare Costs; Medical Imaging; Computed Tomography; Activity-Based Costing; Cost Accounting; Activity Based Costing and Management; Health Care and Treatment; Performance Efficiency; Health Industry

August 2003
Case

Mercury Computer Systems: The Evolution from Integrated Technology to Open Standard

By: Rebecca Henderson and Nancy Confrey

For 20 years, Mercury Computer Systems has thrived, providing products and services that support ultrafast processing of real time data. Now Jay Bertelli, the CEO, faces a critical question: How can the firm compete once the standards on which its products are based... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Open Source Distribution; Strategic Planning; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Information Technology; Information Technology Industry

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2018
Working Paper

Quantile Forecasts of Product Life Cycles Using Exponential Smoothing.

By: Xiaojia Guo, Kenneth C. Lichtendahl Jr. and Yael Grushka-Cockayne

We introduce an exponential smoothing model that a manager can use to forecast the demand of a new product or service. The model has five features that make it suitable for accurately forecasting product life cycles at scale. First, the trend in our model follows the... View Details

Keywords: New Product Development; Demand Forecasting; Product Adoption; Innovation Diffusion; Product Development; Demand and Consumers; Forecasting and Prediction; Adoption

SSRN

Web

Geography of Care - Institute For Strategy And Competitiveness

existing providers. Several premier organizations have already begun this geographic expansion. The Cleveland Clinic expanded but the main center in Cleveland served as the hub... View Details

October 1992 (Revised February 1995)
Background Note

Note on the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations

By: Lynn S. Paine

Describes the federal guidelines used by judges for sentencing organizations convicted of criminal wrong-doing under U.S. law as of November 1, 1991. Describes the guidelines' approach to calculating criminal fines for organizations, determining an organization's... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Governance Compliance; Law Enforcement; Laws and Statutes; Organizations; Legal Services Industry; United States

August 2021 (Revised March 2022)
Case

Camera IQ and the Metaverse: Building Augmented Reality Brand Experiences

By: Jill Avery and Rayan Nahas

Camera IQ, a camera marketing software company that empowered brands to create and launch augmented reality experiences (AREs) across social platforms, had just raised an additional $5 million to fund further product development and expand its marketing and sales... View Details

Article

Regulatory, Legal, and Market Aspects of Smart Wearables for Cardiac Monitoring

By: Jan Benedikt Brönneke, Jennifer Müller, Konstantinos Mouratis, Julia Hagen and Ariel Dora Stern

In the area of cardiac monitoring, the use of digitally driven technologies is on the rise. While the development of medical products is advancing rapidly, allowing for new use-cases in cardiac monitoring and other areas, regulatory and legal requirements that govern... View Details

Keywords: Wearables; Regulatory Changes; Medical Technology; Medical Devices; Market Access; Market Entry and Exit; Information Technology; Health Care and Treatment; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; United States; Germany; Belgium

Program

Rising Generation in the Family Enterprise

Summary As a member of a family with a significant business legacy, you may feel both incredibly lucky and weighed down with responsibility. How can you best deploy your talents, capabilities, and resources? How should you think about... View Details

July 2023 (Revised October 2024)
Case

Revenue Recognition at Stride Funding: Making Sense of Revenues for a Fintech Startup

By: Paul M. Healy and Jung Koo Kang

The case explores the challenges of revenue recognition and financial reporting for Stride Funding (Stride), a fintech startup that has disrupted the student loan market. Stride leveraged proprietary machine learning and financial models to underwrite alternative... View Details

Keywords: Revenue Recognition; Financial Reporting; Entrepreneurial Finance; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Governance Compliance; Accrual Accounting; Financial Services Industry; United States

04 Dec 2019
Book

Creating the Experimentation Organization

customer purchasing decisions based on layouts that change from store to store. “It’s around us now, and it’s growing.” "If something is very novel, there is little data around it to use." Thomke first explored View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

2024
Working Paper

Does the Case for Private Equity Still Hold?

By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Philipp Chvanov

Private Equity (“PE”) received a 10-fold increase in capital flows since the Great Financial Crisis (“GFC”) Investors sought higher nominal returns relative to those they could obtain in the public capital markets. This paper questions the fundamental assumptions... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Investment Return; Investment Portfolio; Financial Markets

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