Publications

October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
Case

KOKO Networks: Bridging Energy Transition and Affordability with Carbon Financing

By: George Serafeim, Siko Sikochi and Namrata Arora

The problem was massive: two million hectares of African forests were lost annually to charcoal production for cooking, an area equivalent to 13 times Greater London, resulting in one billion tons of carbon emissions yearly. At the same time, an estimated 700,000... View Details

November 2011 (Revised August 2012)
Background Note

Customer Discovery and Validation for Entrepreneurs

By: Frank V. Cespedes, Thomas Eisenmann and Steven G. Blank

Provides practical guidelines for conducting market research to explore and validate demand for entrepreneurial offering. Explains how the research objectives of entrepreneurs might differ from those relevant to managers evaluating product or service offerings to... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Entrepreneurship

June 2012 (Revised December 2017)
Technical Note

Strategy and Strategic Decisions

By: Eric Van den Steen

This note introduces a framework for formulating strategy that helps a manager identify which decisions are strategic—and thus which decisions to focus on (both when developing strategy and when executing it)—and that provides a practical test for whether a particular... View Details

Keywords: Formulating Strategy; Strategic Theory; Strategy Test; Strategic Analysis; Strategy; Theory; Strategic Planning

29 May 2012
News

Changing the Conversation in Your Company

04 Mar 2022
News

Sandra Sucher on How Companies Build, Lose & Regain Trust

Research: Investors Reward Companies That Talk Up Their Digital Initiatives

A study of how companies disclose their digital initiatives on earnings calls and written communications finds that more firms are using these technologies, that financial markets reward companies that disclose such initiatives, but that financial performance... View Details

September 2007
Supplement

Leadership in Law: Amy Schulman at DLA Piper (Video Supplement)

By: Boris Groysberg

What does it take to build a successful career over time? Describes Amy Schulman's career progression and role as a star senior litigator and top executive at one of the world's largest law firms. It focuses on different stages in her career and what she did to be... View Details

Keywords: Law; Personal Development and Career; Time Management; Work-Life Balance; Governing and Advisory Boards

22 May 2017
Lessons from the Classroom

A Luxury Industry Veteran Teaches the Importance of Aesthetics to Budding Business Leaders

tenure as Chairman of North America at the French luxury goods conglomerate, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. According to Brown, it’s important for senior executives to possess a combination of what she calls “aesthetic intelligence”... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Beauty & Cosmetics; Apparel & Accessories; Auto; Tourism

2015
Working Paper

Bottlenecks, Modules and Dynamic Architectural Capabilities

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

How do firms create and capture value in large technical systems? In this paper, I argue that the points of both value creation and value capture are the system's bottlenecks. Bottlenecks arise first as important technical problems to be solved. Once the problem is... View Details

Keywords: Architecture; Architectural Knowledge; Dynamic Capabilities; Bottleneck; Modularity; Organization Design; Organization Boundaries; Property Rights; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure

SSRN

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Teaching

Overview

I am interested in teaching topics related to supply chains and retail operations. At Harvard Business School, I have served as a Junior and Senior Teaching Fellow for the first year required Technology and Operations Management course. I have also served as an... View Details

01 Jan 2002
News

21 Oct 2011
News

Business School Students Agog over Gaga

05 Sep 2019
Sharpening Your Skills

Making the Right Technical Hire

having to let someone go, or having them quit, and finding a replacement not only stresses out the manager and team, but there is a productivity hit to all while you go through the process. Even though it may feel like you’re moving... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin; Technology

Guhan Subramanian

Guhan Subramanian is the Joseph Flom Professor of Law and Business at the Harvard Law School and the Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law at the Harvard Business School. He is the first person in the history of Harvard University to hold... View Details

13 May 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Just Say No to Wall Street: Putting A Stop to the Earnings Game

Keywords: by Joseph Fuller & Michael C. Jensen; Financial Services

Article

Contextual Intelligence

By: Tarun Khanna

The author has come to a conclusion that may surprise you: trying to apply management practices uniformly across geographies is a fool's errand. Best practices simply don't travel well across borders. That's because conditions not just of economic development but of... View Details

Find at Harvard

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January 2025
Teaching Note

AGENTS.inc: Pathways to Growth at an AI Startup

By: Frank Nagle and Susan Pinckney

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 724-444. In 2024, AI agent startup company AGENTS.inc faced multiple strategic decisions that could shape the company’s ability to grow into the future AI agent market leader. View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; AI and Machine Learning; Growth and Development Strategy; Open Source Distribution; Entrepreneurial Finance; Competition; Computer Industry; Technology Industry; Europe; Germany

March 2016
Case

N12 Technologies: Building an Organization and Building a Business

By: David A. Garvin and Aldo Sesia

N12 Technologies was a startup founded in 2010 that employed nanotechnology to manufacture a patented material to improve the performance of carbon fiber composites, which were used in a wide variety of products, ranging from bicycles to automobiles to aircraft parts.... View Details

Keywords: Startup; Organizational Structure; Nanotechnology; Business Processes; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Management Systems; Commercialization; Industrial Products Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry; Bicycle Industry; Transportation Industry; United States

Article

Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views

By: M. Yeomans, J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen and F. Gino

We examine “conversational receptiveness”—the use of language to communicate one’s willingness to thoughtfully engage with opposing views. We develop an interpretable machine-learning algorithm to identify the linguistic profile of receptiveness (Studies 1A-B). We then... View Details

Keywords: Receptiveness; Natural Language Processing; Disagreement; Interpersonal Communication; Relationships; Conflict Management