Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(5,301)
- Faculty Publications (1,574)
- October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Fortinet: Cybersecurity Pioneer Ken Xie Considers the Long Game
By: Tsedal Neeley, Jeff Huizinga and Emily Grandjean
Ken Xie, cofounder of cybersecurity giant Fortinet, faced a critical decision that would validate his leadership. Fortinet became the industry’s second-largest pureplay cybersecurity firm by developing differentiated hardware and investing in R&D. However, after a... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Sprout Solutions
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Bonnie Yining Cao and Dawn H. Lau
Husband-and-wife co-founders Patrick and Alexandria Gentry had built Sprout Solutions to be one of the biggest Software-as-a-Service human resources management platforms in the Philippines, guided by the mission to "impact the life of every Filipino by improving... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Loris
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Das Narayandas, Stacy Straaberg and David Lane
In December 2022, Loris’s executive team considered their go-to-market strategy. Loris was an artificial intelligence (AI) software startup for the customer service industry with two products on the market: 1) Agent Assist which provided customer service agents (CSAs)... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised November 2023)
- Case
Recycle & Re-Match: The Future of Soccer Turfs
By: George Serafeim, Lena Duchene and Carlota Moniz
By August 2023, Re-Match, an artificial turf waste-to-value company, had operations in Denmark and the Netherlands and had recycled over 160,000 tons of waste and plastic fiber. With recent capital injection from the VC firm Verdane and a dual revenue business model,... View Details
Keywords: Carbon Emissions; Carbon Abatement; Sustainability; Recycling; Waste Management; Technology; Entrepreneurial Management; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Model; Decisions; Energy Conservation; Investment Return; Profit; Technological Innovation; Patents; Growth and Development Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Digital Platforms; Wastes and Waste Processing; Business Strategy; Competition; Expansion; Technology Adoption; Sports; Environmental Sustainability; Entrepreneurship; Green Technology Industry; Service Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Rubber Industry; Sports Industry; Denmark; Netherlands; France; United States; Pennsylvania; Europe
- 2025
- Working Paper
Bringing Science to Market: Knowledge Foundations, Inventor-Founders, and Performance
By: Justine Boudou and Maria Roche
In this paper, we examine how a startup’s knowledge foundations—embedded in its
core technology—influence its performance in the exit market. Using a dataset of 1,006
biomedicine startups founded between 2005 and 2015, we focus on two key factors: (1)
the degree of... View Details
- September–October 2023
- Article
Building Brand Engagement: Lessons from NFTs and Collectibles
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Ben Plomion
The financial hype about Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has cooled considerably since trading in that market went from more than $780 million on May 1, 2022 to less than $295 million for the entire month of May, 2023. But brands launch marketing campaigns in this medium,... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement
By: David Delacrétaz, Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym
Current refugee resettlement processes account for neither the preferences of refugees nor the priorities of hosting communities. We introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional knapsack constraints that captures the (possibly multidimensional) sizes of... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
No Revenge for Nerds? Evaluating the Careers of Ivy League Athletes
By: Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul A. Gompers, George Hu, Will Levinson and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
This paper compares the careers of Ivy League athletes to those of their non-athlete classmates. Combining team-level information on all Ivy League athletes from 1970 to 2021 with resume data for all Ivy League graduates, we examine both post-graduate education and... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Speedy Activists: Firm Response Time to Sociopolitical Events Influences Consumer Behavior
By: Jimin Nam, Maya Balakrishnan, Julian De Freitas and Alison Wood Brooks
Organizations face growing pressure from their consumers and stakeholders to take public stances on sociopolitical issues. However, many are hesitant to do so lest they make missteps, promises they cannot keep, appear inauthentic, or alienate consumers, employees, or... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Customer Journey as a Source of Information
By: Nicolas Padilla, Eva Ascarza and Oded Netzer
In the face of heightened data privacy concerns and diminishing third-party data access,
firms are placing increased emphasis on first-party data (1PD) for marketing decisions.
However, in environments with infrequent purchases, reliance on past purchases 1PD... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
AB InBev: Brewing Up Forecasts during COVID-19
By: Mark Egan, C. Fritz Foley, Esel Cekin and Emilie Billaud
In July 2021, the CEO of AB InBev's European operations and his team strategized to position the company for success post-pandemic. As the world's largest beer company, boasting over 500 brands, revenue of $46 billion, and a workforce of 160,000 in 2020, AB InBev... View Details
Keywords: Beer; Forecasting; COVID-19; Decision; Forecasting and Prediction; Analytics and Data Science; Crisis Management; Decisions; Financing and Loans; Investment Return; Resource Allocation; Distribution; Production; Business Processes; Strategic Planning; Health Pandemics; Digital Transformation; Markets; Food and Beverage Industry; Belgium; Europe; Latin America; North and Central America
- September 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
TetraScience: Noise and Signal
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
In 2019, TetraScience CEO “Spin” Wang needed advice. Five years earlier, he had cofounded a startup that saw early success with a hardware product designed to help laboratory scientists in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical spaces more easily collect data from... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Organization; Restructuring; Forecasting and Prediction; Digital Platforms; Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning; Organizational Structure; Network Effects; Competitive Strategy; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States; Boston
- September 2023
- Teaching Note
Apple’s iPhone Revolution: Pioneering the Circular Economy
By: George Serafeim
Teaching Note for HBS Case 123-089. The case describes the Trade-In system for iPhones that allow iPhones to be refurbished and reused or to be recycled. The case provides information for the students to analyze the financial attractiveness of the Trade-In system and... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
RightHand Robotics: Choosing the First Market
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Stacy Straaberg
In early 2015, RightHand Robotics’s (RHR) leadership faced several decisions in commercializing the startup’s robotic picking solution. RHR’s central product was the RightPick integrated robotic picking system which featured a robotic arm, a three-fingered robotic hand... View Details
- September 2023
- Case
Super Quantum: Using Artificial Intelligence to Transform Asset Management (A)
By: Feng Zhu and Kerry Herman
Dr. Zhang, CEO of Super Quantum, an AI-driven hedge fund, is considering an investor’s request to withdraw their funds as the markets experience volatility. Should he pull the investor’s funds? View Details
- September 2023
- Article
(Not) Paying for Diversity: Repugnant Market Concerns Associated with Transactional Approaches to Diversity Recruitment
In a 20-month ethnographic study, I examine how a technology firm, ShopCo (a pseudonym), considered 13 different recruitment platforms to attract racial minority engineering candidates. I find that when choosing whether to adopt recruitment platforms focused on racial... View Details
- September 2023
- Article
Stock Price Reactions to ESG News: The Role of ESG Ratings and Disagreement
By: George Serafeim and Aaron Yoon
We investigate whether ESG ratings predict future ESG news and the associated market reactions. We find that the consensus rating predicts future news, but its predictive ability diminishes for firms with large disagreement between raters. Relation between news and... View Details
Keywords: ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; ESG Disclosure; ESG Ratings; ESG Reporting; ESG Disclosure Metrics; Sustainability; Investments; Disagreement; Rating Disagreement; Ratings; Environmental Sustainability; Social Issues; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Performance; News; Investment; Financial Markets; Stocks; Price
- 2023
- Working Paper
LALIGA—From a Soccer Competition Organizer to a Global Player in the Sports and Entertainment Industry
By: Stephen A. Greyser, Kenneth Cortsen and Juan Fuentes Fernández
LALIGA, the first- and second-tier professional soccer league (known as “football” outside of the U.S. and Canada) in Spain, enters its 100th soccer season later this decade. The most popular game in the world (Giulianotti, 2012) has gone through many changes since... View Details
- August 2023
- Case
Floward
By: Krishna Palepu and Namrata Arora
In 2022, Abdulaziz B. Al Loughani, CEO and co-founder of Floward, an online flower and gifting company established in Kuwait in 2017, contemplated the firm's growth trajectory. Floward, an e-commerce enterprise that offered fresh-cut flowers sourced directly from... View Details
- August 2023
- Case
Kariyer.net: Recruiting AI
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Fares Khrais and Namrata Arora
In 2017, Fatih Uysal (AMP 2021) became CEO of Kariyer.net. By then, the business was already the industry leading online job board in Turkey. However, faced with stalling growth, a turbulent macroenvironment, and growing competition from international players, Uysal... View Details
Keywords: Online Technology; Marketing; Websites; Artificial Intelligence; Innovation; Two-sided Platforms; Internet and the Web; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Job Search; Employment; Transformation; Volatility; Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Management Practices and Processes; Business Growth and Maturation; Competitive Strategy; Business Startups; Talent and Talent Management; Cost vs Benefits; Macroeconomics; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Emerging Markets; Digital Platforms; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Middle East; Turkey