Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(7,662)
- Faculty Publications (1,368)
- November 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Infarm: Betting the (Indoor) Farm on Food Security
By: Elie Ofek
In the summer of 2023, the co-founders of Infarm, a controlled environment agriculture (CEA) company, were contemplating a major pivot going forward. While Infarm had successfully shown it could grow over 75 products—mainly herbs, leafy greens and mushrooms—in modular... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Kickstarter: Crowdfunding for the Arts
By: Rohit Deshpandé and Alexis Lefort
Kickstarter was a virtual crowdfunding platform and community that allowed creators of all kinds to raise funding for creative projects. The executive team was wrestling with a tension in its business model: the organization earned the majority of its revenue from... View Details
- November 2023
- Case
Will Fintechs and Central Banks Play in Emtech's Sandbox?
By: Daniel Isenberg and William R. Kerr
In February 2023, Emtech’s founder Carmelle Cadet is facing a dilemma. Rapidly running out of cash, Cadet has a term sheet from a leading VC but has a choice of how to structure the investment. The decision will have significant implications for Cadet’s own stake, as... View Details
- November 2023
- Case
Apple Inc. in 2023
By: David B. Yoffie and Sarah von Bargen
Under CEO Tim Cook, Apple became the first trillion dollar market cap company, the first two trillion dollar company, and the first three trillion dollar company. Since the COVID pandemic, Apple gained over 20% of the world smartphone market and 50% of the U.S. market,... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Votorantim: Uniting Family and Business Across Generations
By: Christina R. Wing, Carla Larangeira and Pedro Levindo
Over a 105-year span, the Ermírio de Moraes family built Votorantim, one of Latin America’s largest industrial conglomerates, and among Brazil’s topmost businesses, also credited for helping “build” the country over decades. By early 2023, Votorantim included... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Celsius Network Inc.: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in the Brave New World of Crypto Bankruptcy
By: Stuart C. Gilson and Sarah L. Abbott
In July 2022, Celsius Network filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. CEO Alex Mashinsky acknowledged that Celsius had grown its assets “faster than the Company was prepared to deploy [them]” and as a result had made “certain poor asset deployment decisions.” Two months after... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Why Do Index Funds Have Market Power? Quantifying Frictions in the Index Fund Market
By: Zach Y. Brown, Mark Egan, Jihye Jeon, Chuqing Jin and Alex A. Wu
Index funds are one of the most common ways investors access financial markets and are perceived to be a transparent and low-cost alternative to active investment management. Despite these purported virtues of index fund investing and the introduction of new products... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
GameStop: Social Media Finds a Cheat Code (A)
By: Joseph Pacelli and Sarah Mehta
This case covers the events leading up to the 2021 GameStop short squeeze. Using GameStop as an illustrative example, the case explores the rise in retail trading, increased financial information sharing on social media, and the gamification of investing enabled by... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Technical Note
Design and Evaluation of Targeted Interventions
By: Eva Ascarza and Ta-Wei (David) Huang
Targeted interventions serve as a pivotal tool in business strategy, streamlining decisions for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. This note delves into two central facets of such interventions: first, the design of potent decision guidelines, or targeting... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Fantuan
By: Feng Zhu and David Lane
In 2023, CEO Randy Wu was considering the optimal growth strategy for Fantuan, a restaurant food delivery platform that had expanded from its 2014 founding in Vancouver, Canada to serve the Chinese demand for Asian cuisine in urban markets across Australia, Canada, the... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised June 2024)
- Case
Catalent: Catalyzing the Next Era of Growth
By: Satish Tadikonda, William Marks and Kevin Emancipator
Catalent's newly appointed CEO, Alessandro Maselli, experienced the highs of the pharmaceutical contract development manufacturing (CDMO) space during COVID-19 while helping Moderna and others bring vaccines to market quickly and safely. After rushing to add capacity... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Kevin O'Leary: Building a Brand in Shark-infested Waters
By: Reza Satchu and Patrick Sanguineti
For more than fifteen years, successful Canadian entrepreneur and investor Kevin O’Leary had developed his brand into a global powerhouse. Since his first appearance on the Canadian television program Dragons’ Den in 2006 and his meteoric rise to stardom through the... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Loris
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Das Narayandas, Stacy Straaberg and David Lane
In December 2022, Loris’s executive team considered their go-to-market strategy. Loris was an artificial intelligence (AI) software startup for the customer service industry with two products on the market: 1) Agent Assist which provided customer service agents (CSAs)... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Improving Regulatory Effectiveness Through Better Targeting: Evidence from OSHA
By: Matthew S. Johnson, David I. Levine and Michael W. Toffel
We study how a regulator can best target inspections. Our case study is a U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program that randomly allocated some inspections. On average, each inspection averted 2.4 serious injuries (9%) over the next five years.... View Details
- September 2023
- Supplement
Design and Evaluation of Targeted Interventions
By: Eva Ascarza
Targeted interventions serve as a pivotal tool in business strategy, streamlining decisions for enhanced efficiency and effectiveness. This note delves into two central facets of such interventions: first, the design of potent decision guidelines, or targeting... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised June 2024)
- Case
Kaspi.kz: Building Trust through Innovation
By: Sandra J. Sucher, Fares Khrais and Marilyn Morgan Westner
This case is written to help students explore how companies can maintain and develop trust while innovating, how to identify and respond effectively to warning signs that they may not be as trusted as they believe, and how being trusted can aid in expanding and growing... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
Twiddy & Company: Trust in a Chaotic Environment
By: Sandra J. Sucher, Shalene Gupta and Tom Quinn
Twiddy & Company, known for Southern hospitality rooted in personal interactions, needed to adjust to contactless remote customer service as fear of the contagious virus prevented person-to-person contact. Local elected officials, in a bid to stop tourists from... View Details
- September 2023
- Case
Derek Aguirre
By: Leslie Perlow and Hannah Weisman
Derek Aguirre is the executive director of a nonprofit organization in Detroit, Michigan that uses the sport of squash as a vehicle to support young people in low-income urban areas. The case discusses his path to pursue meaningful work and his reflections on the... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
Going Mobile-First? The Digital Transformation of Davivienda Bank in Colombia
By: Jorge Tamayo and Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago
Set in 2017, this case describes the digital transformation strategy of Davivienda—a leading player in Colombia’s commercial banking and one of the companies belonging to Grupo Bolívar, a major Colombian financial conglomerate. The case also describes the pioneer role... View Details
Keywords: Change Management; Transformation; Decision Choices and Conditions; Information Technology; Digital Strategy; Digital Transformation; Internet and the Web; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Strategy; Banking Industry; Latin America; Central America; South America; Colombia
- September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
RightHand Robotics: Choosing the First Market
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Stacy Straaberg
In early 2015, RightHand Robotics’s (RHR) leadership faced a set of decisions in commercializing the startup’s robotic picking solution. RHR’s central product was the RightPick integrated robotic picking system which featured a robotic arm, a three-fingered robotic... View Details