Publications

Find at Harvard

August 2018 (Revised September 2018)
Case

LendingClub (A): Data Analytic Thinking (Abridged)

By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

LendingClub was founded in 2006 as an alternative, peer-to-peer lending model to connect individual borrowers to individual investor-lenders through an online platform. Since 2014 the company has worked with institutional investors at scale. While the company assigns... View Details

Keywords: Data Science; Data Analytics; Investing; Loans; Investment; Financing and Loans; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Forecasting and Prediction; Business Model

Educators

06 Feb 2020
Research & Ideas

What We Learned from Reading Jeff Bezos’ Patents

patent activities at Amazon. To do so, we began by looking at Amazon’s patent history using the Derwent Innovation database for the years 1998-2018, which included more than 11,000 published patents in the United States. We View Details

Keywords: by Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg; Retail

09 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

Could Clean Hydrogen Become Affordable at Scale by 2030?

Hydrogen is poised to move from the sidelines of global clean energy as the industry learns to produce it more efficiently and at lower cost, according to newly published research led by Gunther Glenk, a climate fellow with Harvard Business School's Institute for the... View Details

Keywords: by Desmond Dodd; Energy; Green Technology

17 Jun 2019
Research & Ideas

What Hospitals Must Learn to Compete

the other, but that is not always true. The reasons are partly financial—meaning that by managing your operations well you may be able to eliminate wasteful activity, such as unnecessary hospitalizations. And partly I View Details

Keywords: by Alumni Bulletin Staff; Health

24 Sep 2014
Op-Ed

Tackling Climate Change Will Cost Less Than We Think

No one knows how much it will cost to keep the risks of significant climate disruption to a reasonable level. One commonly cited estimate puts the cost at roughly 1 percent of world GDP a year, or about $840 billion. This is a large number, but it seems smaller when... View Details

Keywords: by Rebecca Henderson; Energy; Utilities

12 Sep 2005
Research & Ideas

The Broadband Explosion: Thinking About a Truly Interactive World

co-chaired the conference and co-edited the book, with the idea of capturing as much as possible of the excellent thinking that came out during this event. By "broadband explosion" we mean the... View Details

Keywords: by Sara Grant; Technology; Communications; Telecommunications

05 Dec 2017
Research & Ideas

What We've Learned from 101 Entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets

about which the English language literature is minimal. Related Reading: Thriving in the Turbulence of Emerging Markets Building Histories of Emerging Economies One Interview at a Time What do you think about this research? Have you led... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2020
Book

Teaching by Heart: One Professor's Journey to Inspire

By: Thomas J. DeLong

The best teachers are leaders, and the best leaders are teachers. Teaching by Heart summarizes the author's key insights gained from more than 40 years of teaching and managing. It illustrates how teachers can both lift people up and let them down. It proposes... View Details

Keywords: Teaching; Leadership; Attitudes; Management; Business Education

August 2018 (Revised April 2019)
Case

Chateau Winery (A): Unsupervised Learning

By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

This case follows Bill Booth, marketing manager of a regional wine distributor, as he applies unsupervised learning on data about his customers’ purchases to better understand their preferences. Specifically, he uses the K-means clustering technique to identify groups... View Details

Keywords: Clustering; Data Science; Analytics and Data Science; Customers; Marketing; Analysis

Educators

25 Apr 2005
Research & Ideas

New Learning at American Home Products

penicillin for Canada's armed forces, provided American Home Products with a learning base in the antibiotic revolution at its very beginning. Early in the postwar era, American Home Products moved out of chemicals but continued to expand... View Details

Keywords: by Alfred D. Chandler Jr.; Chemical; Health; Manufacturing; Pharmaceutical

04 Jun 2018
Research & Ideas

Think of it as Professors in Cars Having Coffee

thinks about competitive strategy. One of the things I enjoy about having conversations with these two is I always learn something. One of the things I dislike about current events shows is when they bring... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Education; Entertainment & Recreation

28 May 2024
In Practice

Job Search Advice for a Tough Market: Think Broadly and Stay Flexible

need to get to breakeven and to deal with unreasonable valuation expectations of the last several years. That being said, my research and research by others has shown that venture capital and startup market slowdowns are opportune times... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

2018
Working Paper

Learning to Become a Taste Expert

By: Kathryn A. Latour and John A. Deighton

Evidence suggests that consumers seek to become more expert about hedonic products to enhance their enjoyment of future consumption occasions. Current approaches to becoming an expert center on cultivating an analytic mindset. In the present research the authors... View Details

Keywords: Hedonic; Wine; Expertise; Holistic; Analytic; Sensory; Taste; Learning; Experience and Expertise; Analysis; Perception

SSRN

May–June 2019
Article

Your Workforce Is More Adaptable Than You Think

By: Joseph B. Fuller, Manjari Raman, Judith K. Wallenstein and Alice de Chalendar

In 2018 the Project on Managing the Future of Work at HBS teamed up with the BCG Henderson Institute to survey 6,500 business leaders and 11,000 workers about the various forces reshaping the nature of work. The responses revealed a surprising gap: While the executives... View Details

Keywords: Management; Employees; Attitudes; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation

Find at Harvard

2023
Working Paper

Evaluation and Learning in R&D Investment

By: Alexander P. Frankel, Joshua L. Krieger, Danielle Li and Dimitris Papanikolaou

We examine the role of spillover learning in shaping the value of exploratory versus incremental R&D. Using data from drug development, we show that novel drug candidates generate more knowledge spillovers than incremental ones. Despite being less likely to reach... View Details

Keywords: Research and Development; Forecasting and Prediction; Valuation; Pharmaceutical Industry

2024
Article

Learning Under Random Distributional Shifts

By: Kirk Bansak, Elisabeth Paulson and Dominik Rothenhäusler

Algorithmic assignment of refugees and asylum seekers to locations within host countries has gained attention in recent years, with implementations in the U.S. and Switzerland. These approaches use data on past arrivals to generate machine learning models that can... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Refugees; Employment

October 2018
Case

Learning How to Honnold

By: Eugene F. Soltes, Sara Hess and Dutch Leonard

Alex Honnold is the world’s most accomplished free climber. To many, climbing sheer vertical faces of rock—like the famed El Capitan—without a rope is viewed as not simply risky but reckless. Honnold contrasts this sentiment by presenting his perspective on risk taking... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Goals and Objectives; Personal Development and Career; Perspective

Educators