Publications

05 Nov 2013
First Look

First Look: November 5

auditors to determine what constellation of international, domestic, civil society, and market institutions promotes compliance with the global labor standards embodied in codes. We find that supplier... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2009
Working Paper

Clusters of Entrepreneurship

By: Edward L. Glaeser, William R. Kerr and Giacomo A.M. Ponzetto

Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry... View Details

Keywords: Economic Growth; Entrepreneurship; Cost; Employment; Market Entry and Exit

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March 1998 (Revised October 1998)
Case

Siebel Systems (B)

By: Michael J. Roberts, Joseph B. Lassiter III and Nicole Tempest

Supplements the (A) case. View Details

Keywords: Marketing; Software; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Sales; Information Technology Industry

May 2004
Supplement

Slingshot Technology, Inc. Supplement: Partnership Agreements

By: Lynda M. Applegate and Elizabeth Collins

Slingshot Technology Inc. (STI) is a privately held software start-up founded in 1995 focused on identifying emerging spaces in the IT services industry and partnering with vendors selling promising but unproven technologies in those spaces. The vendors used STI to... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Emerging Markets; Partners and Partnerships; Intellectual Property; Information Technology Industry; Consulting Industry

October 2016 (Revised November 2016)
Case

Innovating Beyond Ochsner

By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Olivia Hull

The Ochsner Health System has developed a proprietary software tool designed to treat hypertension. Built into the system’s electronic medical records, the Hypertension Digital Medicine program allows patients to record their blood pressure at home and share readings... View Details

24 Mar 2002
Lessons from the Classroom

Case Study: A Lesson in Private Venture Financing

With few opportunities for IPOs, a developing infrastructure, low transparency, and a limited labor market, the environment for private venture financing in Africa could be described as "challenging" at best. Yet if the demands... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

15 Aug 2016
Research & Ideas

Black Swans and Big Trends Can Ruin Anyone's Internet Prediction

how we thought about online opportunities one year after the dot-com bubble burst. In retrospect, many of my thoughts about the internet’s future evolution missed the mark. If you think history repeats itself, then these forecasting errors might be germane, since View Details

Keywords: by Thomas R. Eisenmann; Technology

16 Jun 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Paying Up for Fair Pay: Consumers Prefer Firms with Lower CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios

Keywords: by Bhavya Mohan, Michael I. Norton & Rohit Deshpandé

April 2018
Article

Consumers Avoid Buying from Firms with Higher CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios

By: Bhavya Mohan, Tobias Schlager, Rohit Deshpandé and Michael I. Norton

We document a novel driver of consumer behavior: pay ratio disclosure. Swiss corporation performance data gathered during a legally mandated pay ratio referendum reveals that salient high pay ratios are associated with decreased firm sales (Pilot Study). An... View Details

Keywords: Pay Ratio; Wage Fairness; Purchase Intention; Customers; Wages; Fairness; Consumer Behavior

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24 Sep 2014
Op-Ed

Tackling Climate Change Will Cost Less Than We Think

world spends $523 billion a year subsidizing fossil fuels as against $88 billion a year to renewables. But of course we shouldn't be subsidizing —or mandating —any fuel directly! If we were to mobilize the private sector by creating a truly competitive View Details

Keywords: by Rebecca Henderson; Energy; Utilities

September 2000 (Revised February 2007)
Case

Freeport Studio

By: Rajiv Lal and James Weber

Describes the start-up and first-year difficulties of Freeport Studio, a unit of L.L. Bean, founded in 1998 to sell women's clothing by catalog. First-year sales were far below plan, and projected profits did not materialize. Fran Philip must identify the problems and... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Profit; Growth and Development Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Strategic Planning; Problems and Challenges; Creativity

November 1997 (Revised October 2000)
Case

Interactive Minds (A)

By: William A. Sahlman, Michael J. Roberts and Christina L. Darwall

The efforts of two recent Harvard Business School graduates to start a venture capital/consulting firm focused on opportunities related to the Internet are recounted. Raises the question of what the nature of this opportunity is, how well-positioned the protagonists... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Internet and the Web; Market Entry and Exit; Financing and Loans; Business Startups; Consulting Industry

16 Sep 2002
Research & Ideas

The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs

performance—and the issues about how top executives seem to be getting a different kind of deal than employees get, there is a fundamental cynicism about the free enterprise system. The closed CEO labor View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

November 2011 (Revised February 2012)
Case

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul: Building on a Diversified Base

By: William W. George

Since the 1970s, the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan region (MSP) had outpaced the nation in job creation and income per capita. MSP's diversified base of industry clusters had enabled the region to adapt to economic downturns and an exodus of major corporate... View Details

Keywords: Industry Clusters; Employment; Organizations; Transformation; Economic Slowdown and Stagnation; Minneapolis; Saint Paul

15 Feb 2000
Research & Ideas

Growing Pains: Prescriptions for U.S. Health Care

needs are increasingly ignored by these firms, which now require large margins to support their burgeoning overhead. The low-end gap thus created offers fertile ground for startups to enter the market with... View Details

Keywords: by Staff; Health

25 May 2018
Working Paper Summaries

Trust and Disintermediation: Evidence from an Online Freelance Marketplace

Keywords: by Grace Gu and Feng Zhu; Service

October 2022
Supplement

Single Earth: Science White Paper Supplement

By: Rembrand Koning and Emer Moloney

Science White Paper prepared by Single.Earth to give an overview of the models and solutions it has developed. View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Natural Resources; Pollution; Analytics and Data Science; Marketing; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Markets; Market Timing; Strategy; Green Technology Industry; Estonia