Publications

June 2020
Teaching Note

Armarium: Luxury Fashion Brands for Rent

By: Jill Avery and David Fubini

Armarium, a two-sided digital platform that offered consumers the opportunity to rent the most coveted, current season high fashion clothing and accessories from the top global luxury brands, had emerged from its first sales season with two distinct customer segments:... View Details

Keywords: Luxury Brand; Fashion; Sharing Economy; Two-sided Marketplace; Target Market; Customer Selection; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Luxury; Two-Sided Platforms; Business Model; Growth and Development Strategy; Customer Value and Value Chain; Fashion Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; North America

December 2018 (Revised June 2021)
Supplement

Bulb 2017: Launch

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

On August 21, 2015, Amit Gudka and Hayden Wood, co-founders of Bulb Ltd. (Bulb) launched a new business to supply energy to the United Kingdom’s 27 million residential homes with a promise of 100% renewable electricity at affordable prices. By the end of March 2017,... View Details

November 2017
Case

The 'Wonder Drug' That Killed Babies

By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Tom Nicholas and Matthew Preble

In the early 1960s, a popular drug taken by patients worldwide for a range of maladies was found to cause severe birth defects and other health problems in babies born to mothers who had taken it during a certain stage of fetal development. As many as 10,000 children... View Details

Keywords: Regulation; Business and Government Relations; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Product Marketing; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business History; Health; Government Legislation; Corporate Accountability; Ethics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Pharmaceutical Industry; Public Administration Industry; United States; United Kingdom; Australia; Germany; Europe

Educators

2017
Working Paper

Salience through Information Technology: The Effect of Balance Availability on the Smoothing of SNAP Benefits

By: Andrew Hillis

Recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) run out of most benefits before halfway through a benefit deposit cycle. I study the introduction of a mobile software application, Fresh EBT, that enables beneficiaries to check their available balance... View Details

Keywords: Mobile Technology; Welfare or Wellbeing; Technology Adoption; Behavior

2012
Working Paper

School Accountability and Principal Mobility: How No Child Left Behind Affects the Allocation of School Leaders

By: Danielle Li

The move toward increased school accountability may substantially affect the career risks that school leaders face without providing commensurate changes in pay. Since effective school leaders likely have significant scope in choosing where to work, these uncompensated... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Corporate Accountability; Education; North Carolina

2014
Working Paper

Hidden Structure: Using Network Methods to Map System Architecture

By: Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack and John Rusnak

In this paper, we describe an operational methodology for characterising the architecture of complex technical systems and demonstrate its application to a large sample of software releases. Our methodology is based upon directed network graphs, which allows us to... View Details

Keywords: Complexity; Applications and Software; Product Design

SSRN

November 2003 (Revised February 2011)
Case

Sanford C. Bernstein: The Fork in the Road (A)

By: Boris Groysberg and Anahita Hashemi

Soon after the death of the firm's legendary founder, the individuals then serving as chairman and as president--Lewis A. Sanders and Roger Hertog, respectively--talked about the future of their firm. Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., a private investment firm, had grown... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Performance Expectations; Competitive Advantage; Valuation

Find at Harvard

16 Apr 2018
News

Tax Reform, Round One

15 Sep 2015
First Look

September 15, 2015

an associated 90% confidence interval of (2.3%, 17.8%). Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=49523 2015 The Changing Frontier: Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy Information Technology and the View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

08 Sep 2014
Research & Ideas

The Strategic Way To Hire a Sales Team

Too often, there's a huge gap between a company's overall business strategy and the way its salesforce operates in the field. In fact, says Frank V. Cespedes, articles and books about strategy rarely take sales into consideration at all. "Everybody talks about the... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

08 Mar 2021
In Practice

COVID Killed the Traditional Workplace. What Should Companies Do Now?

A year ago, COVID-19 forced many companies to send employees home—often with a laptop and a prayer. Now, with COVID cases subsiding and vaccinations rising, the prospect of returning to old office routines appears more possible. But will employees want to flock back to... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

Web

Topics - HBS Working Knowledge

Development Economics (33) Diasporas (3) Disruption (22) Disruptive Innovation (27) Distribution Channels (20) Distribution (45) Diversification (1) Diversity (248) Duopoly and Oligopoly (2) Early Childhood... View Details

14 May 2018
Research & Ideas

Amazon vs. Whole Foods: When Cultures Collide

Walmart, which had entered the organic space. By 2017, Whole Foods had started closing stores. Turning data into customer value Amazon, by contrast, had always been about low costs and efficiency, pursuing a frugal focus and rigorous performance measurement in its... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Food & Beverage

29 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

How Much More Would Holiday Shoppers Pay to Wear Something Rare?

Do you have that one friend who seems to snag the coolest, most fashionable shoes, jewelry, or clothes? Now new research shows that when luxury goods companies cater to these trendy consumers by controlling how rare certain items are—seeking to make them exclusive and... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail

25 Jan 2021
Book

In a Nutshell, Why American Capitalism Succeeded

How did the United States become the world’s center of business growth following its founding in 1776? Surely a number of nations had powerful natural resources, stable financial and legal institutions, and dynamic entrepreneurs over that same span. Why was American... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Manufacturing

10 Mar 2009
First Look

First Look: March 10, 2009

create value. We extend this theory to address value appropriation. A product or process design that is modular with respect to intellectual property (IP) allows firms to better capture value in situations where knowledge and value creation are View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

22 May 2012
First Look

First Look: May 22

http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/11-100.pdf Open Innovation and Organizational Boundaries: The Impact of Task Decomposition and Knowledge Distribution on the Locus of Innovation Authors:Karim R. Lakhani, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, and Michael L.... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2019
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 13 Platform Systems vs. Step Processes—The Value of Options and the Power of Modularity

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

This is the first chapter in Part 3. Its purpose is to contrast the value structure of platform systems with step processes from a technological perspective. I first review the basic technical architecture of computers and argue that every computer is inherently a... View Details

Keywords: Platform Systems; Step Processes; Computer Architecture; Modularity; Information Technology; Digital Platforms

SSRN

January 2016 (Revised January 2017)
Case

Rumie: Bringing Digital Education to the Underserved

By: John J-H Kim and Amram Migdal

In fall of 2015, the Toronto, Canada–based education technology nonprofit Rumie had distributed thousands of computer tablets preloaded with collections of thousands of pieces of curated educational content to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in some of the most... View Details

Keywords: Edtech; Education Technology; Social Enterprise; Nonprofit; Education Startup; Technological Innovation; Nonprofit Organizations; Social Entrepreneurship; Education; Business Startups; Education Industry; Canada; Africa

Educators