Publications

07 Jul 2019
HBS Case

Walmart's Workforce of the Future

explores how technology and demographics are changing the way companies like Walmart, and their workers, operate. “The pace of change in the retail sector is truly extraordinary,” says Kerr, the D’Arbeloff Professor of Business... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Retail

30 Mar 2018
What Do You Think?

What Should Mark Zuckerberg Do?

amesy SUMMING UP: Should Facebook Change Its Business Model? Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, received a great deal of advice from respondents to this month’s column. It included ideas that haven’t gained much attention in the press.... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Information Technology; Information Technology

30 Mar 2003
Research & Ideas

The Future of IT Consulting

have been several. First, innovation in frameworks and methodologies along with trained professionals have provided value-added services uniquely available from the consulting firm. For example, the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Johnston; Consulting

25 Oct 2017
Research & Ideas

Will Machine Learning Make You a Better Manager?

the firm will all rely on data science capabilities.” In short, to be competitive next decade, most companies should be thinking today about investing in data-driven technologies such as data analytics, machine learning, and Internet of... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Information Technology

May 2017
Other Article

Stepwise Distributed Open Innovation Contests for Software Development: Acceleration of Genome-Wide Association Analysis

By: Andrew Hill, Po-Ru Loh, Ragu B. Bharadwaj, Pascal Pons, Jingbo Shang, Eva C. Guinan, Karim R. Lakhani, Iain Kilty and Scott Jelinsky

BACKGROUND: The association of differing genotypes with disease-related phenotypic traits offers great potential to both help identify new therapeutic targets and support stratification of patients who would gain the greatest benefit from specific drug classes.... View Details

Keywords: Crowdsourcing; Genome-wide Association Study; Logistic Regression; Open Innovation; PLINK; Collaborative Innovation and Invention

Program

Competing in the Age of AI—Virtual

transformation strategy Business and technology leaders and contributors who want to understand how they can deploy the latest AI tools to unlock new sources of strategic and operating value Individuals in... View Details

26 Mar 2021
News

Planning for a Hybrid Workforce

04 Apr 2011
HBS Case

Reinventing the National Geographic Society

from foreign countries, raise their hand. "What do you associate with it?" The yellow border, answers one. Others note the stunning photography, detailed maps, and magazines piled up all around the house. A few minutes later... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Publishing

July 2023 (Revised July 2023)
Background Note

Generative AI Value Chain

By: Andy Wu and Matt Higgins

Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can create new content (e.g., text, image, or audio) in response to a prompt from a user. ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude are examples of text generating AIs, and DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are... View Details

Keywords: AI; Artificial Intelligence; Model; Hardware; Data Centers; AI and Machine Learning; Applications and Software; Analytics and Data Science; Value

January 2009 (Revised July 2009)
Case

Alibaba's Taobao (A)

By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Julie M. Wulf

This case examines the decision of Alibaba Group to diversify from an international business-to-business (B2B) exchange (Alibaba.com) into a B2C and C2C exchange (Taobao.com) for Chinese retailers and consumers. In China, Taobao had managed to displace the once... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Demand and Consumers; Market Transactions; Service Operations; Diversification; Internet and the Web; China

30 Jul 2007
Research & Ideas

Repugnant Markets and How They Get That Way

Unfair. Undignified. Inappropriate, unprofessional, distasteful—and most of all, repugnant. To the wonder and surprise of Alvin E. Roth, a Harvard economist, these harsh words are often hoisted to describe an important task of his: designing and building View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

2025
Working Paper

A Preference for Revision Absent Improvement

By: Ximena Garcia-Rada, Leslie K. John, Ed O’Brien and Michael I. Norton

People regularly encounter revised stimuli (e.g., revised versions of products, new editions of books, tweaked recipes, and technological updates). In principle, a world of constant revision should benefit people by affording them the most up-to-date offerings. In... View Details

Keywords: Product Change; Versioning; Expectancy Effects; Heuristics; Intuitive Processing; Product Marketing; Change; Perception; Consumer Behavior

SSRN

02 Jun 2014
News

The Secret to a Successful Social Media Strategy

02 Jan 2019
Blog Post

Leveraging Transferable Skills

Shelby, Jasmyn and Katie (MBA 2019) describe their summer internship experiences. All three students utilized transferable skills from their previous work experience to transition into new industries;... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Technology; Technology

2017
Working Paper

The Rise of American Ingenuity: Innovation and Inventors of the Golden Age

By: Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby and Tom Nicholas

We examine the golden age of U.S. innovation by undertaking a major data collection exercise linking inventors from historical U.S. patents to Federal Censuses between 1880 and 1940 and to regional economic aggregates. We provide a theoretical framework to motivate the... View Details

Keywords: Economic Development; Patents; Economic Growth; Innovation and Invention; Demographics

2021
Working Paper

The Project on Impact Investments' Impact Investment Database

By: M. Diane Burton, Shawn Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Josh Lerner, Fanele Mashwama, Yue (Cynthia) Xu and T. Robert Zochowski

Impact investing has grown significantly over the past 15 years. From a niche investing segment with only $25 billion AUM in 2013 (WEF 2013), it experienced double-digit growth and developed into a market with an estimated $502 billion AUM (Mudaliapar and Dithrich... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Investment; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis

SSRN

25 Sep 2000
Research & Ideas

More Than the Sum of Its Parts: The Impact of Modularity on the Computer Industry

a problem of nightmarish proportions [because of] the growing complexity of the systems and the interdependent structure of their designs. Each new computer system had to be designed from the ground up, and... View Details

Keywords: by Staff; Technology; Technology; Technology

26 Jul 2016
Research & Ideas

Where will Pokémon Go with Your Personal Information?

prior to coming to HBS in 2007. A member of the School’s Technology and Operations Management unit, Shih closely studies disruptive technology and technological strategy, and... View Details

Keywords: Re: Willy C. Shih; Video Game; Entertainment & Recreation

January 2008
Case

Lenovo: Building A Global Brand (Multimedia case)

By: John A. Quelch and Carin-Isabel Knoop

Announced in December 2004, the $1.75 billion acquisition of IBM's PC division by Lenovo, China's largest PC maker, made headlines around the world. A relative upstart in the business, Lenovo acquired the division of IBM that invented the PC in 1981. While Lenovo was... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Multinational Firms and Management; Information Infrastructure; Global Strategy; Acquisition; Brands and Branding; Manufacturing Industry; Computer Industry; China