Publications

10 Sep 2001
Research & Ideas

Do You Have Change Fatigue?

you need heroic leaders in order to have meaningful, sustained change. Why Change Efforts Fail "Change is one of the few areas where experts have been in violent agreement for decades," declares David A. Garvin, Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of View Details

Keywords: by Nick Morgan

January 2025
Case

Untapped Global: Financing Africa's Missing Middle

By: Raymond Kluender and Emanuele Colonnelli

In November 2024, Jim Chu, founder and CEO of Untapped Global, faced mounting internal tensions over the company’s strategic direction. Untapped had developed a data-driven revenue-based financing (RBF) model to address the “missing middle” problem—the $5.2 trillion... View Details

August 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Supplement

Arla Foods: Data-Driven Decarbonization (B)

By: Michael Parzen, Michael W. Toffel, Susan Pinckney and Amram Migdal

The case describes Arla’s history, in particular its climate change mitigation efforts, and how it implemented a price incentive system to motivate individual farms to implement scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions mitigation measures and receive a higher milk price. The... View Details

16 Jul 2007
Research & Ideas

Understanding the ‘Want’ vs. ’Should’ Decision

should purchase the used Toyota Camry. How consumers weigh those decisions is crucial information for retailers, and is the subject of recent research by Harvard Business School doctoral candidates Todd Rogers and Katy Milkman, in... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Retail; Entertainment & Recreation

Research Summary

Cross-Boundary Coordination and Airline Performance

In the context of global airline alliances, this study explores how organizations engaged in partnerships for service delivery achieve coordination with each other. We will assess the impact of both cross-functional and cross-organizational coordination on the quality... View Details

23 Jun 2023
HBS Case

This Company Lets Employees Take Charge—Even with Life and Death Decisions

patients as they see fit. A new Harvard Business School case study explores Buurtzorg’s decentralized model in depth, with lessons for institutions struggling with morale and productivity. Buurtzorg’s... View Details

Keywords: by Annelena Lobb; Health

February 2024 (Revised July 2024)
Case

Taffi: Entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia

By: Paul A. Gompers and Fares Khrais

Taffi was a tech-enabled fashion styling startup founded by Shahad Geoffrey in Saudi Arabia in 2020. Within three years of operating, Geoffrey had pivoted the business multiple times. In 2023, Geoffrey was attempting the business’s most ambitious pivot yet, shifting... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Disruption; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Investment; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Strategy; AI and Machine Learning; Fashion Industry; Technology Industry; Saudi Arabia; Arabian Peninsula

Article

Innovation Contests for High-Tech Procurement

By: Jin Hyun Paik, Martin Scholl, Rinat A. Sergeev, Steven Randazzo and Karim R. Lakhani

Innovation managers rarely use crowdsourcing as an innovative instrument despite extensive academic and theoretical research. The lack of tools available to compare and measure crowdsourcing, specifically contests, against traditional methods of procuring goods and... View Details

Keywords: Open Innovation; Contests; Crowdsourcing; Nasa; Evaluation; Acquisition; Information Technology; Innovation and Invention; Performance Evaluation; Framework

Read Now

September 2007 (Revised January 2009)
Case

Reading Rehabilitation Hospital: Implementing Patient-Focused Care (A) (Abridged)

By: Roy D. Shapiro

Reading Rehab Hospital has experimented with a popular concept in health care--patient-focused care--intended to increase quality and reduce costs by organizing care delivery around particular diagnoses or "service lines," rather than around the functions or... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Medical Specialties; Quality; Cost; Management Practices and Processes; Business Strategy; Service Delivery; Health Industry

27 Jun 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, June 27

century and today. It tells the story of the extraordinary and often eccentric men and women who defied convention and imagined that business could help save the planet rather than consume it. The social and religious beliefs that drove... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

October 2020 (Revised November 2020)
Case

Wilderness Safaris: Impact Investing and Ecotourism Conservation in Africa

By: James E. Austin, Megan Epler Wood and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard

In 2018 the majority ownership of publicly owned Wilderness Safaris, the leading high-end ecotourism company in Africa with safari operations in eight countries, was acquired by The Rise Fund, one of the world’s largest private social impact investing funds, and by FS... View Details

May–June 2015
Article

Back to the Future: Implications for the Field of HRM of the Multi-stakeholder Perspective Proposed 30 Years Ago

By: Michael Beer, Paul Boselie and Chris Brewster

Thirty years on from the seminal work Managing Human Assets (MHA) by Beer et al., we examine how the subject has developed. We offer a normative review, based on that model, and we critique the assumption that the business of HRM is solely to improve returns to owners... View Details

Keywords: Management; Human Resources

Article

Liability Structure in Small-Scale Finance

By: Fenella Carpena, Shawn Cole, Jeremy Shapiro and Bilal Zia

Microfinance, the provision of small individual and business loans, has experienced dramatic growth, reaching over 150 million borrowers worldwide. Much of the success of microfinance has been attributed to attempts to overcome the challenges of information asymmetries... View Details

Keywords: Microfinance; Emerging Markets; Financial Markets; Legal Liability; Banks and Banking; Banking Industry; India

2013
Dissertation

Firm-to-Firm Matching Along the Global Supply Chain

By: Raluca Dragusanu

This paper examines the matching patterns between buyers and sellers at different stages of the global production chain. I construct a new dataset, which links firm-level information on Indian manufacturing exporters from the CMIE-Prowess database with firm-level... View Details

Keywords: Supply Chain; Relationships; Trade; United States; India

December 16, 2019
Article

Why Your Startup Won't Last

By: Ranjay Gulati and Vasundhara Sawhney

Why do some startups that have crossed the threshold of “product-market fit” and have a viable business model still fail? This article begins by exploring the argument that most startups need more professionalization to thrive. Founders resist putting in place... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Organizational Structure; Growth and Development Strategy

Read Now

January 2013
Case

Omidyar Network: Pioneering Impact Investment

By: Michael Chu and Lauren Barley

Omidyar Network, having deployed to date over $500 million in ways ranging from donations to commercial equity capital, must decide whether to back Anudip, an Indian organization dedicated to providing the rural unemployed and marginalized with livelihoods linked to... View Details

Keywords: Social Enterprise; Social Entrepreneurship; Investment; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; India

December 2002 (Revised October 2006)
Case

Commerce Bank

By: Frances X. Frei and Corey B. Hajim

Commerce Bank has become one of the fastest growing banks in the country, despite having defied conventional wisdom about how to grow deposits. Banks historically have grown either by competing on deposit rates or through acquisitions that expand their deposit base.... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Design; Growth and Development Strategy; Service Operations; Competition; Banking Industry

Article

Multilateral Matching

By: John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers

We introduce a matching model in which agents engage in joint ventures via multilateral contracts. This approach allows us to consider production complementarities previously outside the scope of matching theory. We show analogues of the first and second welfare... View Details

Keywords: Matching; Stability; Competitive Equilibrium; Core; Networks; Competition; Joint Ventures; Balance and Stability; Groups and Teams; Entrepreneurship