Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(562)
- Faculty Publications (223)
- September 2010 (Revised May 2012)
- Case
Windward Investment Management
By: Luis M. Viceira and Ricardo Alberto De Armas
Windward Investment Management has experienced rapid growth in assets under management in just ten years, from under $30 million at year-end 1999 to $3.6 billion in 2010. Windward is one of the leading firms in the Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) industry that... View Details
- April 2010
- Module Note
Balancing Specialization and Diversification in Operations
This note describes a module—taught as part of Operations Strategy, a second–year MBA elective at Harvard Business School—that helps students understand and manage the tradeoff between specialization and diversification in operations. The module introduces students to... View Details
- October 2009 (Revised March 2011)
- Case
Qualcomm Incorporated 2009
By: David B. Yoffie, Andrei Hagiu and Elizabeth A. Kind
Paul Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm Incorporated, smiled as he reflected on the success of Qualcomm's code division multiple access (CDMA) technology. By the summer of 2009, CDMA was the basis for all third generation technologies available for cellular... View Details
- September 2009
- Case
Intel NBI: Image Components Organization
By: Willy C. Shih and Thomas Thurston
The Image Components Organization (ICO) was an internal venture that was part of Intel's New Business Initiatives. It sought to initially develop and sell a high performance integrated CMOS image sensor module for cellular phones. ICO's opening assumptions were that it... View Details
- August 2009 (Revised August 2009)
- Case
Intel NBI: Radio-Frequency Identification
By: Willy C. Shih and Thomas Thurston
The Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) group was a start-up that was part of Intel's New Business Initiatives. It sought initially to develop and sell a high performance Rf fast read rate module targeted at fixed position readers that might be found in loading docks... View Details
- August 2009
- Case
Intel NBI: Vivonic
By: Willy C. Shih and Thomas Thurston
Vivonic was a start-up that was part of Intel's New Business Initiatives that sought to develop and sell personal health monitoring hardware and software. When it was first funded, Intel was in the midst of record growth and was seeking diversification. But the company... View Details
- August 2009 (Revised September 2009)
- Case
Tenova: Mining for Growth in an Economic Crisis
By: Gary P. Pisano, Elena Corsi and Elisa Farri
In December 2008, Gianluigi Nova, CEO of Tenova SpA, a technology and equipment supplier to the metals and mining industry, had to choose between two options. The first was to continue growing in the company's core business: equipment for the steel production. The... View Details
- June 2009
- Journal Article
Taxes, Institutions and Foreign Diversification Opportunities
By: Mihir Desai and Dhammika Dharmapala
Investors can access foreign diversification opportunities through either foreign portfolio investment (FPI) or foreign direct investment (FDI). The worldwide tax regime employed by the U.S. potentially distorts this choice by penalizing FDI, relative to FPI, in... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Broadening Focus: Spillovers, Complementarities and Specialization in the Hospital Industry
By: Jonathan R. Clark and Robert S. Huckman
The long-standing argument that focused operations outperform others stands in contrast to claims about the benefits of broader operational scope. The performance benefits of focus are typically attributed to reduced complexity, lower uncertainty, and the development... View Details
- April 2009
- Article
Sovereign Wealth in Abu Dhabi
By: Rawi Abdelal
By the turn of the century, oil had already made the tiny emirate of Abu Dhabi rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams. A sovereign wealth fund, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), has invested extra oil revenues abroad for more than thirty years and amassed a... View Details
- March 2009 (Revised May 2011)
- Case
Addleshaw-Goddard LLP
By: Robert G. Eccles, Amy C. Edmondson and James Weber
Addleshaw-Goddard (AG), the 15th largest law firm in the U.K., is seeking ways to serve larger clients on more important legal matters. Part of this strategy involves its "Client Development Centre (CDC)," an innovative idea and set of services launched by Dr. Jim... View Details
- January 2009
- Case
Berkshire Hathaway
By: Bharat N. Anand and Samhita Patwardhan Jayanti
Berkshire Hathaway describes the history and strategy of one of the best known investment firms over the last forty years. The case describes the investment philosophy of Warren Buffett, its legendary chairman and CEO, the gradual diversification of its portfolio, its... View Details
- 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
- May 2009
- Article
Asymmetric Information Effects on Loan Spreads
The paper estimates the cost arising from information asymmetry between the lead bank and members of the lending syndicate. In a lending syndicate, the lead bank retains only a fraction of the loan but acts as the intermediary between the borrower and the syndicate... View Details
- October 2008 (Revised February 2012)
- Case
Amazon Web Services
By: Robert S. Huckman, Gary P. Pisano and Liz Kind
Considers the development of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a division of Amazon.com, Inc., specializing in the provision of web-based storage and computing services to web developers. The case focuses on the issues facing Andy Jassy, the head of AWS, in 2008 as AWS faces... View Details
- September 2008
- Teaching Note
Chi Mei Optoelectronics (TN)
By: Willy C. Shih
Teaching Note for [608-123]. View Details
- September 2008
- Article
Firm Heterogeneity and Credit Risk Diversification
By: Samuel G. Hanson, M. Hashem Pesaran and Til Schuermann
This paper examines the impact of neglected heterogeneity on credit risk. We show that neglecting heterogeneity in firm returns and/or default thresholds leads to under estimation of expected losses (EL), and its effect on portfolio risk is ambiguous. Once EL is... View Details
- August 2008 (Revised July 2009)
- Supplement
Gazprom (B): Energy and Strategy in a New Era
By: Rawi E. Abdelal, Sogomon Tarontsi and Alexander Jorov
President Putin publicly stated that Gazprom, the largest natural gas producer in the world, was a powerful political lever of the Russian state in the world and a keystone in the foundation of the country's energy security. Thus the top leadership of Russia has... View Details
- August 2008
- Case
Du Pont: The Birth of the Modern Multidivisional Corporation
By: Richard S. Tedlow and David Ruben
Du Pont's realization in 1921 that its "U-form" corporate structure was ill-suited to its new diversification strategy led to a pioneering new kind of organization—the "M" or multidivisional form—that has been called the most important innovation of capitalism in the... View Details
- May 2008 (Revised December 2010)
- Case
Chi Mei Optoelectronics
By: Willy C. Shih, Chintay Shih, Jyun-Cheng Wang and Ho Howard Yu
Chi Mei is a Taiwanese industrial group that makes a major diversification into the technology intensive TFT-LCD flat panel display industry. Because the diversification is far away from its core competence in petrochemicals, it is an opportunity to examine how the... View Details