Publications

February 2006 (Revised September 2006)
Case

Sippican Corporation (A)

By: Robert S. Kaplan

Presents a time-driven version of the Wilkerson Co. activity-based costing case (101092). Faced with declining profits, Sippican Corp. is struggling to understand why it is encountering severe price competition on one product line. The controller collects data that... View Details

Keywords: History; Business Model; Strategic Planning; Cost Accounting; Motivation and Incentives; Resource Allocation; Activity Based Costing and Management; Profit; Business Strategy; Budgets and Budgeting

September 2009 (Revised February 2011)
Case

Eden McCallum: A Network-Based Consulting Firm (A)

By: Heidi K. Gardner and Robert G. Eccles

Eden McCallum pioneered the network-based ("virtual") consulting firm model in the U.K. Contracting freelance consultants on a per-project basis keeps overheads lean so that Eden McCallum's fees are a fraction of the big firms' rates. Their flexible, low-cost model has... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Decision Choices and Conditions; Financial Crisis; Growth and Development Strategy; Expansion; Consulting Industry; United Kingdom

2011
Chapter

El Sector Privado y las Responsabilidades Públicas: El Rol de las Soluciones Comerciales en la Temática Social

By: Michael Chu

In today's world, certain goods and services are considered so basic that, regardless of culture, they are accepted as public responsibilities. However, for the low-income populations in developing countries, which constitute the majority of the world, access to these... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Developing Countries and Economies; Private Sector; Public Sector; Management Practices and Processes; Human Needs; Poverty; Commercialization

Keywords: Real Estate, Hotels, Diversified

February 2017
Case

Valerie Daniels-Carter: High Growth Entrepreneurship via Franchising

By: Steven Rogers and Alyssa Haywoode

This case looks at entrepreneurship via franchising through the leadership of an African-American entrepreneur who owns almost 150 stores including Burger King, Pizza Huts, and Auntie Anne’s Pretzels. Her company is the largest female-owned franchise business in the... View Details

Keywords: Giving And Philanthropy; Weather And Climate Change; Franchise Ownership; Family Business; Experience and Expertise; Decisions; Borrowing and Debt; Food; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Business History; Climate Change; Motivation and Incentives; Food and Beverage Industry

August 2008 (Revised December 2009)
Case

Nantero

By: William A. Sahlman, Dan Heath and Caroline Perkins

This case describes a decision confronting the founder of Nantero, a company developing a new semiconductor technology. The company needs to raise additional venture capital. Potential investors have competing visions for the company, and its business model. Some... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Decision Choices and Conditions; Venture Capital; Investment; Product Development; Production; Technology; Semiconductor Industry

2018
Chapter

New Prospects for Organizational Democracy?: How the Joint Pursuit of Social and Financial Goals Challenges Traditional Organizational Designs

By: Julie Battilana, Michael Fuerstein and Michael Lee

For an extended period during the first half of the 20th century, industrial democracy was a vibrant movement, with ideological and organizational ties to a thriving unionism. In 2015, however, things look different. While there are instances of democracy in the... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Design; Social Enterprise; Values and Beliefs; Integration; Theory

Find at Harvard

06 Jul 2011
Research & Ideas

Are You a Level-Six Leader?

several options)? “Opportunists are the people who always ask, 'What's in it for me?'” Asking the question whom do you serve? is a powerful vector on which to build a useful typology of leadership. Based on this idea, I have constructed a six-level Purpose-Driven View Details

Keywords: by Mitch Maidique

February 2024 (Revised September 2024)
Case

TimeCredit

By: Emanuele Colonnelli, Raymond Kluender and Shai Benjamin Bernstein

TimeCredit is an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that is developing large language models (LLMs) to generate accounting memos. The case follows Ndonga Sagnia, a Gambian Harvard Business School MBA student with an accounting background, as she decides how much... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Financing and Loans; AI and Machine Learning; Entrepreneurial Finance; Identity; Technology Industry

April 2023 (Revised September 2023)
Case

Levels: The Remote, Asynchronous, Deep Work Management System

By: Joseph B. Fuller and George Gonzalez

Levels is a highly innovative startup in the health care space. They intend to revolutionize health by linking behavior—eating, exercise, sleeping, etc.—to changes in metabolism. They believe metabolic health can be managed through careful monitoring of changes in... View Details

Keywords: Applications and Software; Business Startups; Organizational Culture; Management Style; Technology Industry; United States

01 Apr 2021
News

Kennedy: Time is ripe for remote work

June 2017
Case

Obesity Management at Kaiser Permanente: A New Mindset for Healthcare Delivery?

By: Kevin Schulman, Gregory Leya and Christina Beveridge

Kaiser Permanente (KP) is the largest managed care organization in the United States with over 10 million members. KP evolved from a prepayment or capitation model that focuses the organization around the efficiency of care and the health of the population it serves.... View Details

Keywords: Operations; Health Care and Treatment; Business Model; Strategy; Health Industry; United States

October 2019 (Revised January 2020)
Case

Fixing Facebook: Fake News, Privacy, and Platform Governance

By: David Yoffie and Daniel Fisher

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook based on the idea that connecting people was a fundamentally good thing—and a way to turn a handsome profit. But from the beginning, Facebook received criticism both for how it handled user privacy and how it curated user-generated... View Details

Keywords: Platform; Governance; Privacy; Internet and the Web; Corporate Governance; Ethics; Business and Government Relations; Strategy; Digital Platforms; Web Services Industry

25 Sep 2017
News

10 books that should be on every marketer’s shelf

2016
Working Paper

Markets for Ideas: Prize Structure, Entry Limits, and the Design of Ideation Contests

By: Pavel Kireyev

Contests are a popular mechanism for the procurement of innovation. In marketing, design, and other creative industries, firms use freelance marketplaces to organize contests and obtain high-quality ideas for ads, new products, and even business strategies from... View Details

Keywords: Idea Generation; Crowdsourcing; Contest Design; Structural Estimation; Motivation and Incentives; Competition; Innovation and Invention

SSRN

Read Now

27 Nov 2013
News

How to Lead While Your Company Is Going Under

October 2023
Case

Hey Jane: Delivering Abortion Pills to the Doorstep

By: Rembrand Koning, Geraldine Pena-Galea and Sarah Mehta

This case tells the story of Hey Jane, a telehealth clinic founded in 2020 that provides virtual medication abortion services to eligible patients in nine U.S. states. By January 2023, the company had served more than 20,000 patients and raised nearly $10 million in... View Details

Keywords: Operations; Business Startups; Health Care and Treatment; Growth and Development Strategy; Health Industry; Technology Industry; United States

September 2018 (Revised August 2021)
Teaching Note

Blackstone at Age 30 and Blackstone at 35

By: Josh Lerner

This teaching note is meant to guide in the instruction of HBS No. 316-013 "Blackstone at 30" case. It examines the process of institutionalization and scaling in private equity and alternative investments more generally, looking specifically at how Blackstone's size... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Blackstone; Alternative Assets; Venture Capital; Private Equity; Business Growth and Maturation; Public Ownership; Cost vs Benefits; Financial Services Industry