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October 2017 (Revised April 2019)
Case

Eastern Bank: Innovating Through Eastern Labs

By: Karen Mills, Dennis Campbell and Aaron Mukerjee

Eastern Bank is a 200-year-old New England mutual bank with a community focus. Eastern specializes in small business lending, having made strategic investments to become the top SBA lender in New England in the midst of the Great Recession, when other banks were... View Details

Keywords: Banks and Banking; Technological Innovation; Entrepreneurship; Management

Article

Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology under Network Effects

By: Deishin Lee and Haim Mendelson

We study how a commercial firm competes with a free open source product. The market consists of two customer segments with different preferences and is characterized by positive network effects. The commercial firm makes product and pricing decisions to maximize its... View Details

Keywords: Profit; Product Launch; Network Effects; Open Source Distribution; Adoption; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage

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03 Jan 2019
Blog Post

Leveraging Transferable Skills

the projects that they were able to accomplish with their varied skillsets and how each of their employers was able to capitalize on their new perspectives. View Video View Details

February 2018
Case

Rosslyn Resource: Monetization and Sales Strategy

By: Robert J. Dolan and Sunru Yong

Rosslyn Resource identifies exploration targets (potential mineral deposits) in the mining industry and advances them until the project can be monetized, usually through sale to a larger mining company, in return for an upfront fee and a royalty on future revenues.... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Decision Choices and Conditions; Business Model; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Mining Industry

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Harvard Business School (HBS) leadership urged faculty seeking to contribute to not overthink their engagement—to do what they could for whom they could. That hit home with HBS faculty member Euvin Naidoo.... View Details

August 2012 (Revised November 2017)
Case

Turkey—A Work in Progress?

By: Richard H.K. Vietor

For the past 10 years, Turkey has grown its real GDP at about 6% annually. This came after a huge debt crisis in 2001-02, wherein Turkey had to borrow $16 billion more from the IMF and comport with its difficult conditionality. Today, Turkey is a middle-income country,... View Details

Keywords: Turkey; Economy; Macroeconomics; International Relations; Growth and Development Strategy; Turkey

19 Jul 2004
Research & Ideas

Why Innovations Sit on the Shelf

delegating authority to heavyweight product development teams. But senior functional leaders, used to making key decisions, are likely to resist. The most effective way for a leader to realign his company is to facilitate open and honest... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Beer, Russell Eisenstat & Derek Schrader

September 2024
Case

InfraCredit and the Project Inception Facility

By: John Macomber, Namrata Arora and Maagatha Kalavadakken

Around the world, large infrastructure projects are frequently stymied by the high cost and high uncertainty of the project inception phase: the research and engineering and planning prior to financial close and start of construction. Could there be a new kind of... View Details

25 Feb 2020
News

Profits and Purpose

Professor George Serafeim (left) and Professor Rebecca Henderson (right); image by John Ritter CEOs are increasingly being asked to take the lead on some of the most vexing problems of our time, from climate change and data privacy to issues of income or gender... View Details

Keywords: Jen McFarland Flint

January 2025
Case

Untapped Global: Financing Africa’s Missing Middle

By: Raymond Kluender and Emanuele Colonnelli

In November 2024, Jim Chu, founder and CEO of Untapped Global, faced mounting internal tensions over the company’s strategic direction. Untapped had developed a data-driven revenue-based financing (RBF) model to address the “missing middle” problem—the $5.2 trillion... View Details

26 Jun 2017
Research & Ideas

How Cellophane Changed the Way We Shop for Food

development of self-service merchandising systems in American grocery stores, but also revealing how cellophane manufacturers tried to control the narrative of how women buy food. “Cellophane changed how people shopped,” says Ai Hisano,... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Food & Beverage; Retail; Advertising

March 2020
Case

Cafe Kenya

By: Lynda M. Applegate and James T. Kindley

This case describes Café Kenya (CK), a Kenyan-based chain of casual quick-food restaurants. The chain was started in 2011 in Nairobi by Nekesa Kuria. Kuria started Café Kenya and grew it by reinvesting profits into company stores and through franchising. She also... View Details

Keywords: Restaurants; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Kenya

Program

Advanced Management Program

your company to capitalize on digital transformation and strategically implement artificial intelligence Keep growing as a leader by building on powerful insights gained through introspection, assessments, professional coaching, and... View Details

December 2010
Article

Management and the Financial Crisis (We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us...)

By: William A. Sahlman

The financial crisis of 2008-2009 has revealed that our broad model of corporate governance is broken, independent of the shortcomings in the regulatory system. Managers and boards of directors in scores of systemically important firms failed to protect employees,... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Human Capital; Ethics; Policy; Corporate Governance; Financial Crisis; Finance; Business and Shareholder Relations

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Research Summary

Cross-Boundary Coordination and Airline Performance

In the context of global airline alliances, this study explores how organizations engaged in partnerships for service delivery achieve coordination with each other. We will assess the impact of both cross-functional and cross-organizational coordination on the quality... View Details

TraceTogether

By April 7, 2020, over 1.4 million people worldwide had contracted the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Governments raced to curb the spread of COVID-19 by scaling up testing, quarantining those infected, and tracing their possible contacts. It had taken Singapore's... View Details

01 Dec 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Financing Innovation

Keywords: by William R. Kerr & Ramana Nanda

February 1984 (Revised February 1986)
Case

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.: Titanium Dioxide

By: W. Carl Kester, Robert R. Glauber, David W. Mullins Jr. and Stacy S. Dick

Disequilibrium in the $350 million TiO2 market has prompted Du Pont's Pigments Department to develop two strategies for competing in this market in the future. The growth strategy has a smaller internal rate of return than the alternative strategy due to large capital... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Cash Flow; Investment Return; Growth and Development Strategy; Strategic Planning; Projects; Chemical Industry

April 2004 (Revised August 2004)
Teaching Note

BuildingBlocks International

BuildingBlocks International (BBI) plans to accomplish its mission to help children in developing countries succeed in school by bringing management expertise to local organizations. Two years after founding BBI, however, the team hasn't figured out exactly how to make... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Social Marketing; Developing Countries and Economies; Sales