Publications

July 2020 (Revised September 2020)
Case

The Honor Foundation: Accessing Special Operations Talent

By: Boris Groysberg and John Masko

In 2020, The Honor Foundation (THF), a nonprofit dedicated to helping U.S. military special operators to transition into civilian careers, was facing a series of strategic challenges. THF had been founded in 2013 by former Navy SEAL trainee Joe Musselman, who observed... View Details

May 2023 (Revised June 2023)
Supplement

Novartis (B): Reimagining Medicine

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Claudio Feser, Karolin Frankenberger and David Redaschi

This case unfolds around the first-ever approved personalized cancer treatment, how Novartis wrapped it into a new business model design, and how Novartis scaled it. Novartis — one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world — is, among other ventures,... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Business Model; Production; Business Strategy; Pharmaceutical Industry

24 Apr 2020
Op-Ed

Lessons from the NFL: Virtual Hiring, Leadership, Building Teams and COVID-19

Prospects from small schools are being hurt even more. The first ever HBCU Combine was cancelled, many college pro days were cancelled, and with the NFL cancelling in-person interviews the hurdles faced by HBCU and other small school... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Abbott , Boris Groysberg, Tali Groysberg, and Abhijit Naik; Sports

October 1999 (Revised February 2000)
Case

Steinway & Sons: Buying a Legend (A)

By: John T. Gourville and Joseph B. Lassiter III

It is 1995 and Steinway & Sons has just been purchased by two young entrepreneurs. For 140 years, Steinway has held the reputation for making the finest quality grand pianos in the world. The past 25 years have proven to be a challenge, however. First, the company has... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Decisions; Entrepreneurship; Globalization; Crisis Management; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Quality; Competitive Strategy; Manufacturing Industry; Japan; New York (state, US)

02 Oct 2000
Research & Ideas

Networked Incubators: Hothouses of the New Economy

valuable networking benefits through networked incubators. The first is Brainshark.com, a year-old company that got started in a Boston-based incubator called Reach Internet Incubator. A year ago, founders Joe Gustafson and Mark Yacovone... View Details

Keywords: by Morten T. Hansen, Henry W. Chesbrough, Nitin Nohria & Donald N. Sull

May 2006 (Revised July 2007)
Case

Tropos Networks

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Elizabeth Kind

As Ron Sege, president and CEO of Tropos Networks, walked through the halls of the firm's offices, he realized that the space they had moved into only about a year ago was already becoming too small. The company, based in Sunnyvale, California, was founded in late 2000... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Growth Management; Wireless Technology; Sunnyvale

March 2013 (Revised March 2014)
Case

C12 Energy

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and James McQuade

C12 aimed to build not only a company, but an entire industry around carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). "You change the world by building a market, and you build a market by building a profitable company that other people copy," said Dawe, C12 Energy's CEO. "In... View Details

Keywords: Carbon Sequestration; Sustainability; Cleantech; Oil And Gas; Business Model; Energy; Entrepreneurship; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology Industry; Energy Industry; North America

September 2008 (Revised July 2012)
Case

Khosla Ventures: Biofuels Strategy

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, William A. Sahlman and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld

By 2008, a number of the firm's early cleantech investments were showing promise, and the companies were starting to need significantly more money to create the massive scale required in the energy sector. As Khosla thought about the hundreds of millions of dollars... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurial Marketing; Entrepreneurial Finance; New Product Development; Partnerships; Entrepreneurial Management; Venture Capital; Strategy; Partners and Partnerships; Renewable Energy; Entrepreneurship; Investment Funds; Environmental Sustainability; Product Development; Biotechnology Industry; Financial Services Industry

12 Oct 2006
First Look

First Look: October 12, 2006

Legal Aspects of Management. This module deals with the way in which intellectual property rights—as protected by patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets—enable firms to achieve competitive advantage. Purchase this note:... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

April 2004 (Revised July 2007)
Case

OfficeTiger

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Johanna Regine Naunton Blaxall

OfficeTiger was founded in late 1999 with an innovative approach to global outsourcing. The company's employees, located primarily in India, provided services for corporations, investment banks, and professional services firms throughout the United States, Europe, and... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Globalized Markets and Industries; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Growth and Development Strategy; Service Operations; India

Article

Financial Shame Spirals: How Shame Intensifies Financial Hardship

By: Joe J. Gladstone, Jon M. Jachimowicz, Adam Eric Greenberg and Adam D. Galinsky

Financial hardship is an established source of shame. This research explores whether shame is also a driver and exacerbator of financial hardship. Six experimental, archival, and correlational studies (N = 9,110)—including data from customer bank account histories and... View Details

Keywords: Financial Hardship; Financial Decision-making; Shame; Guilt; Personal Finance; Financial Condition; Decision Making; Emotions

Find at Harvard

September 2011 (Revised July 2012)
Case

Khosla Ventures: Biofuels Gain Liquidity

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, William A. Sahlman, Alison Berkley Wagonfeld and Evan Richardson

Samir Kaul, a Partner at Khosla Ventures, looked out his office window. It was late June, 2011, and like almost every day in Menlo Park, the sun was shining. Kaul was reflecting on what had been a very positive 10 months in the venture capital business. Over that span,... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Financial Strategy; Business or Company Management; Partners and Partnerships; Product Development; Investment Portfolio; Financial Services Industry

Article

DEA Model with Shared Resources and Efficiency Decomposition

By: Yao Chen, Juan Du, H. David Sherman and Joe Zhu

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has proved to be an excellent approach for measuring performance of decision making units (DMUs) that use multiple inputs to generate multiple outputs. In many real world scenarios, DMUs have a two-stage network process with shared input... View Details

Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA); Efficiency; Intermediate Measure; Performance Efficiency

March 2011 (Revised April 2018)
Case

1366 Technologies: Scaling the Venture

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, Ramana Nanda, David Kiron and Evan Richardson

For some time, 1366's co-founders, Frank van Mierlo and Ely Sachs, had faced a choice, which was now made all the more stark: 1366 could expand to produce silicon wafers itself, raising the required capital from "friendly" investors and building shipment volume slowly,... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Innovation Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Intellectual Property; Management Teams; Renewable Energy; Financial Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Corporate Finance; Energy Industry; Technology Industry; United States

05 Feb 2015
Research & Ideas

How New BofA Executives Learn its ’Deep Smarts’

exercise. Information provided by Joe Bonito, senior vice president, leadership development, Bank of America, interview with the authors (DL, WS), August 5, 2013. View Details

Keywords: Re: Dorothy A. Leonard; Banking

June 2003 (Revised October 2004)
Case

StorageNetworks: Restarting a Public Company (A)

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Todd H Thedinga

Peter Bell, founder and CEO of StorageNetworks, faces the problem of "restarting" a public company by changing its business model from being a storage-services provider to being a storage software developer. The task seems challenging, but surely doable, with $200... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Diversification; Change Management; Cash; Entrepreneurship; Problems and Challenges; Corporate Finance; Information Technology Industry