Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,404)
- Faculty Publications (382)
- 2019
- Working Paper
Rehabilitating Corporate Purpose
In this paper, I address how the ascendance of the theory of shareholder value maximization into the central consciousness of public corporations and its canonization as the only legitimate expression of corporate purpose has contributed to both a widening breach... View Details
- February 2019 (Revised August 2019)
- Case
KangaTech
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Patrick J. Ferguson, Sarah Fleischer, Jin Hyun Paik and Steven Randazzo
On a warm January afternoon in 2019, Steve Saunders, Dave Scerri, Carl Dilena, and Nick Haslam (see Exhibit 1 for biographies), co-founders of KangaTech, wrapped up the latest round of discussions about the future direction of their sports-technology start-up. Focused... View Details
- January 2019 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
CrossBoundary Energy
By: John Macomber
Almost 500 million people are without electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. Governments and public utilities are challenged to bring generation and distribution to most of them. Considerable promise exists in “off-grid” or “mini-grid” technologies, notably using renewable... View Details
Keywords: Energy Investing; Economic Development; Renewable Energy; Business Growth and Maturation; Developing Countries and Economies; Project Finance; Emerging Markets; Industry Structures; Infrastructure; Segmentation; Private Equity; Decision Choices and Conditions; Energy Industry; Utilities Industry; Africa; Tanzania; Ghana
- December 2018
- Case
Bata versus Relaxo—Analyzing Performance
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Iris Leung and Quinn Pitcher
Set in 2016, “Bata India versus Relaxo—Analyzing Performance” compares the strategies and financial performance of two Indian footwear companies. Bata India had long been the market leader in footwear in India, but its leading market position was being challenged by... View Details
- September 26, 2018
- Article
Ownership and Power Structure: Together at Last
By: Laura Alfaro, Nicholas Bloom, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger, Patrick Legros, Andrew Newman, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
Economists have largely ignored the deep interdependency between integration and delegation. This column describes a new theory of integration and delegation choices aimed at shedding light on how these distinct elements of organizational design interact. Contrary to... View Details
- July 2018
- Case
Leading Open Innovation at BT
By: Amy C. Edmondson, Jean-François Harvey and Johnathan R. Cromwell
This case focuses on the genesis and development of the open innovation unit at BT, the strategic value of the unit, and its operating model. As the business environment becomes increasingly dynamic and firms are pressured to achieve faster innovation rates, there may... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting
By: Michael Webb, Nick Short, Nicholas Bloom and Josh Lerner
Patenting in software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has grown rapidly in recent years. Such patents are acquired primarily by large U.S. technology firms such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, and HP, as well as by Japanese multinationals such as Sony, Canon,... View Details
- July–August 2018
- Article
The Other Diversity Dividend
By: Paul Gompers and Silpa Kovvali
Researchers have struggled to establish a causal relationship between diversity and financial performance—especially at large companies, where decision rights and incentives can be murky, and the effects of any given choice can be tough to pin down. So the authors... View Details
- June 2018
- Article
Firm Turnover and the Return of Racial Establishment Segregation
By: John-Paul Ferguson and Rembrand Koning
Racial segregation between American workplaces is greater today than it was a generation ago. This increase has happened alongside the declines in within-establishment occupational segregation on which most prior research has focused. We examine more than 40 years of... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
The Strategic Imperative of Psychological Safety and Organizational Error Management
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Paul Verdin
Despite discussion in the management literature about agile organizations or learning organizations, many large organizations are top-down, slow to change, and fraught with obstacles to learning. We describe “strategy-as-learning” to contrast with the traditional... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
Britain: Global Legacy and Domestic Persistence
By: Geoffrey Jones
This chapter explores the British experience in a volume which examines the historical evolution of business groups in developed Western economies. The chapter argues that during the nineteenth century British merchant houses established business groups with... View Details
- March 2018
- Article
Enacting Knowledge Strategy Through Social Media: Passable Trust and the Paradox of Non-work Interactions
By: Tsedal Neeley and Paul Leonardi
Despite the recognition that knowledge sharing among employees is necessary to enact knowledge strategy, little is known about how to enable such sharing. Recent research suggests that social media may promote knowledge sharing because they allow social lubrication and... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
The United States in Contemporary Perspectives: Evolving Forms, Strategy, and Performance
By: David J. Collis, Bharat Anand and J. Yo-Jud Cheng
BOOK ABSTRACT: In spite of surging interest in the business group organization among business scholars, economists, and historians in recent years, academic research on business groups has, to date, remained within the boundary of emerging markets. The major aim of... View Details
- January 2018
- Case
Environmental Technology Fund Partners and E-Leather
By: Vikram S. Gandhi and Aldo Sesia
It is 2014 and Environmental Technologies Fund (ETF) Partners, a UK-based venture capital firm, has an opportunity to invest in a privately held UK company that manufactured engineered composition leather extracted from waste leather using an environmentally friendly... View Details
- January–February 2018
- Article
Some Customers Would Rather Leave Without Saying Goodbye
By: Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer and Bruce G.S. Hardie
We investigate the increasingly common business setting in which companies face the possibility of both observed and unobserved customer attrition (i.e., “overt” and “silent” churn) in the same pool of customers. This is the case for many online-based services where... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Real Exchange Rate, Innovation and Productivity
By: Laura Alfaro, Alejandro Cuñat, Harald Fadinger and Yanping Liu
We evaluate manufacturing firms' responses to changes in the real exchange rate (RER) using detailed firm-level data for a large set of countries for the period 2001–2010. We uncover the following stylized facts about regional variation of manufacturing firms'... View Details
- September 2017 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
Dianrong: Marketplace Lending, Blockchain, and 'The New Finance' in China
By: Christopher J. Malloy, Lauren H. Cohen and Anthony K. Woo
This case examines the strategic positioning of Dianrong, one of the largest online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms in China, in its attempt to become a foundational player in the expansion of the FinTech sector in Asia. Dianrong had recently announced the... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Compensation Consultants and the Level, Composition, and Complexity of CEO Pay
By: Kevin J. Murphy and Tatiana Sandino
We provide fresh evidence regarding the relation between compensation consultants and CEO pay. First, firms that employ consultants have higher-paid CEOs—this result is robust to firm fixed effects and matching on economic and governance variables. Second, while this... View Details
- September 2017
- Article
The Real Effects of Capital Controls: Firm-Level Evidence from a Policy Experiment
By: Laura Alfaro, Anusha Chari and Fabio Kanczuk
Emerging-market governments adopted capital control taxes to manage the massive surge in foreign capital inflows in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Theory suggests that the imposition of capital controls can drive up the cost of capital and curb... View Details
- August 2017 (Revised November 2021)
- Case
Ryan Greene at Rainier Wearables
By: Shikhar Ghosh, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Christopher Payton
This case provides a platform for discussing mental health and depression in entrepreneurship. Why do entrepreneurs have more mental health issues than other professions? What can an entrepreneur do if they face a situation where their mental well-being is being... View Details