Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(825)
- Faculty Publications (203)
- 2019
- Article
Overcoming Cultural Resistance to Open Source Innovation
By: John Winsor, Jin Hyun Paik, Michael Tushman and Karim R. Lakhani
Purpose: This article offers insight on how to effectively help incumbent organizations prepare for global business shifts to open source and digital business models.
Design/methodology/approach: Discussion related to observation, experience and case studies... View Details
Design/methodology/approach: Discussion related to observation, experience and case studies... View Details
- October 2019 (Revised March 2021)
- Background Note
Modern Automation (B): Robotics
By: William R. Kerr and James Palano
Driven largely by advances in perception and situational awareness, robots in the 2010s were gaining functionality that allowed them to be applied to fundamentally new types of work. The expanding range of new tasks that could be completed by machines had significant... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 8 Rationalizing Flow Processes
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the value structure of flow production processes and to explain why it is necessary to rationalize flow processes using the tools of systematic management. I first explain the problems facing managers of multi-step flow... View Details
- September 2019
- Case
Shell: A Company of Opportunity?
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Emer Moloney
The Opportunity Hub was a cloud-based platform that enabled managers to market projects they were working on and associated resourcing needs as “Opportunity Owners” and employees, or “Opportunity Seekers,” to browse these statements of need and engage when they had... View Details
Keywords: Business Divisions; Change Management; Competency and Skills; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Energy; Energy Sources; Non-Renewable Energy; Renewable Energy; Human Resources; Employees; Retention; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Jobs and Positions; Job Design and Levels; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Labor; Human Capital; Labor Unions; Leading Change; Resource Allocation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Evaluation; Performance Productivity; Strategic Planning; Projects; Motivation and Incentives; Business Strategy; Social and Collaborative Networks; Technology Platform; Chemical Industry; Energy Industry; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; United Kingdom; Netherlands
- July 2019 (Revised November 2019)
- Case
Osaro: Picking the Best Path
By: William R. Kerr, James Palano and Bastiane Huang
The founder of Osaro saw the potential of deep reinforcement learning to allow robots to be applied to new applications. Osaro targeted warehousing, already a dynamic industry for robotics and automation, for its initial product—a system which would allow robotic arms... View Details
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Machine Learning; Robotics; Robots; Ecommerce; Fulfillment; Warehousing; AI; Startup; Technology Commercialization; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Logistics; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Information Technology; Commercialization; Learning; Complexity; Competition; E-commerce
- May 2019 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
Walmart's Workforce of the Future
By: William R. Kerr and Jordan Bach-Lombardo
Faced with intense competition from Amazon, Walmart began a transformation of its operations and workforce in 2015. The goal was to create an omnichannel retail experience for customers that seamlessly joined online and offline shopping. This case explores Walmart's... View Details
- May 2019
- Background Note
Geographic Inequality Primer
By: William Kerr, Joseph Fuller, Manjari Raman and Donald Maruyama
There are large and persistent divides between urban centers and rural areas in America due in part to structural causes. This primer focuses on the demographic differences between urban and rural areas within the United States and the unique challenges facing rural... View Details
- Article
Use of Crowd Innovation to Develop an Artificial Intelligence-Based Solution for Radiation Therapy Targeting
By: Raymond H. Mak, Michael G. Endres, Jin Hyun Paik, Rinat A. Sergeev, Hugo Aerts, Christopher L. Williams, Karim R. Lakhani and Eva C. Guinan
Importance: Radiation therapy (RT) is a critical cancer treatment, but the existing radiation oncologist work force does not meet growing global demand. One key physician task in RT planning involves tumor segmentation for targeting, which requires substantial... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Overcoming the Cold Start Problem of CRM Using a Probabilistic Machine Learning Approach
By: Eva Ascarza
The success of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs ultimately depends on the firm's ability to understand consumers' preferences and precisely capture how these preferences may differ across customers. Only by understanding customer heterogeneity, firms can... View Details
- December 2018 (Revised March 2021)
- Background Note
Modern Automation (A): Artificial Intelligence
By: William R. Kerr and James Palano
This primer is meant to be a field guide to the late 2010s' surge in business use of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI), or enterprise software based in machine learning. First, it provides an overview of the key trends—digitization, connectivity, the continuation of... View Details
- October 2018 (Revised September 2020)
- Case
Testing Autonomy in Pittsburgh
By: Mitchell Weiss and Brittany Urick
Pittsburgh’s mayor had been among the first to welcome self-driving vehicles but was now one of many needing to react after a pedestrian fatality involving an autonomous Uber in Arizona. He had originally preferred to roll out “the red carpet” instead of the “red... View Details
Keywords: Public Entrepreneurship; Government Innovation; Government Experimentation; Autonomous Vehicles; Mayor; Mayor Peduto; Cities; Mobility; Automation; Uber; Argo Ai; Aurora Innovation; Aptiv; Entrepreneurship; Public Sector; Innovation and Invention; Transportation; City; Safety; Business and Government Relations; Transportation Industry; Auto Industry; United States; Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh
- October 2018
- Case
American Family Insurance and the Artificial Intelligence Opportunity
By: Rajiv Lal and Scott Johnson
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Machine Learning; Automation; Analytics; American Family; American Family Insurance; Insurance; Business Organization; Transformation; Talent and Talent Management; Employee Relationship Management; Innovation Strategy; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Risk and Uncertainty; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Technology Adoption; Internet and the Web; Applications and Software; Corporate Strategy; AI and Machine Learning; Digital Transformation; Insurance Industry; Technology Industry; Wisconsin
- September 2018 (Revised May 2021)
- Teaching Plan
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; Fintech; Innovation; Innovation ＆ Entrepreneurship; Innovation And Strategy; Technological Change; Technology And Innovation Management; Entrepreneurial Management; Intrapreneurship; Banks and Banking; Innovation and Invention; Entrepreneurship; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Information Technology; Management
- September 2018
- Case
Kevin Ryan Inc.
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Greg Marsh
The case focuses on the hiring process for a CEO. Kevin Ryan had a solid trajectory as a serial entrepreneur of well-known ventures like Gilt Group, DoubleClick, Business Insider, among others. Ryan tended to involve himself in all aspects of his ventures: ideation,... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised October 2020)
- Case
Tailor Brands: Artificial Intelligence-Driven Branding
By: Jill Avery
Using proprietary artificial intelligence technology, startup Tailor Brands set out to democratize branding by allowing small businesses to create their brand identities by automatically generating logos in just minutes at minimal cost with no branding or design skills... View Details
Keywords: Startup; Services; Artificial Intelligence; Machine Learning; Digital Marketing; Brand Management; Big Data; Internet Marketing; Analytics; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Information Technology; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Business Model; Consumer Behavior; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Advertising Industry; Service Industry; Technology Industry; United States; North America; Israel
- March 2018 (Revised March 2018)
- Teaching Note
OpenInvest
By: Boris Vallee and Caitlin Reimers Brumme
Founded by a team of hedge fund and NGO alumni, OpenInvest launched its platform in 2015 to enable retail investors to tailor their portfolio to their personal values in an automated way, for instance by screening out weapon manufacturers stocks or overweighting LGBTQ... View Details
- March 2018
- Article
Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labor
Although recent studies on African colonial tax systems have deepened our understanding of early fiscal capacity building efforts in the region, they have largely ignored the contributions from a widely used but invisible source of state revenue: that of labor... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised August 2018)
- Case
OpenInvest
By: Shawn Cole, Boris Vallée and Nicole Tempest Keller
Founded by a team of hedge fund and NGO alumni, OpenInvest launched its platform in 2015 to enable retail investors to tailor their portfolios to their personal values in an automated way, for instance by screening out weapons manufacturers stocks or overweighting... View Details
- February 2018
- Case
The Golden Triangle: Back in Business (A)
By: Joseph Fuller, William Kerr, Manjari Raman and Donald Maruyama
The Golden Triangle Region (GTR) is a three-county area in rural Mississippi that suffered a steep decline as manufacturing companies faced pressures from automation and overseas competition. Between the mid 1980s and late 1990s, several textile, toy, and tubing... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
New Constructs: Disrupting Fundamental Analysis with Robo-Analysts
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Kyle Thomas
This case highlights the business challenges associated with a financial technology firm, New Constructs, that created a technology that can quickly parse complicated public firm financials to paint a clearer economic picture of firms, remove accounting distortions,... View Details