Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,788)
- Faculty Publications (255)
- September 2014 (Revised June 2016)
- Case
edX: Strategies for Higher Education
By: David Collis, Matthew Shaffer and Ashley Hartman
In May 2012, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) founded edX, a new non-profit joint venture that would provide a platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs). edX did not produce original courses or instructional content—it made... View Details
- August 2014
- Case
Netflix in 2011
By: Willy Shih and Stephen Kaufman
Reed Hastings founded Netflix to provide a home movie service that would do a better job satisfying customers than the traditional retail rental model. But as it encountered challenges it underwent several major strategy shifts, ultimately developing a business model... View Details
Keywords: Netflix; DVD; DVD-by-mail; Streaming; Online Entertainment; Online Video; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Business Model; Disruption; Operations; Service Operations; Entertainment; Film Entertainment; Television Entertainment; Media; Strategy; Business or Company Management; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Corporate Strategy; Expansion; Technology; Technology Adoption; Technology Platform; Web; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; United States
- July 2014
- Article
Diasporas and Outsourcing: Evidence from oDesk and India
By: Ejaz Ghani, William R. Kerr and Christopher Stanton
This study examines the role of the Indian diaspora in the outsourcing of work to India. Our data are taken from oDesk, the world's largest online platform for outsourced contracts, where India is the largest country in terms of contract volume. We use an ethnic name... View Details
- Article
Analyzing Scrip Systems
By: Kris Johnson, David Simchi-Levi and Peng Sun
Scrip systems provide a nonmonetary trade economy for exchange of resources. We model a scrip system as a stochastic game and study system design issues on selection rules to match potential trade partners over time. We show the optimality of one particular rule in... View Details
- April 2014 (Revised July 2017)
- Case
The Tate's Digital Transformation
By: Jill Avery
John Stack was the visionary Head of Digital Transformation at the Tate, a collection of four major art galleries in the UK, including Tate Modern, the most visited gallery devoted to modern and contemporary art in the world. Stack was the architect of the Tate's... View Details
- January 2014 (Revised May 2015)
- Case
Open English
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Lisa Mazzanti
Open English, a Miami-based startup offering online English language learning services, had more than 30,000 active students across Latin America in 2012. The company had just closed a $43 million financing round in order to rapidly scale its service to the next level.... View Details
- September 2013
- Case
Homestrings, Inc.: Diaspora-Based Financing and the Crowd Funding of Development
By: William R. Kerr and Alexis Brownell
Homestrings is an online investment platform for overseas diasporas to link financially with their home countries. The founder believes crowd-funding can become a pillar for development, but U.S. regulatory hurdles and resources constraints are substantial. The company... View Details
- July 2013 (Revised January 2014)
- Case
Experience! The Finger Lakes: The Groupon Partnership Decision
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Chekitan S. Dev, Gabriele Piccoli and Arnold B. Peinado
In 2010, Experience! The Finger Lakes (ExperienceFLX), a tour operator offering guided tours and concierge services in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, was at a crossroads. The business was poised for growth, and its owners, Laura and Alan Falk, were... View Details
- January 2013 (Revised June 2018)
- Case
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google 2018
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
Four businesses had, by 2012, grown to dominate the infrastructure that all firms rely on to reach online customers. Will the balance of power among the four persist, will one take command at the expense of the other three, or are all four more vulnerable than they... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
The Market That Wasn't: The Non-Emergence of the Online Grocery Category.
By: C. Navis, G. Fisher, Ryan Raffaelli and Mary Ann Glynn
In this paper, we examine the non-emergence of a potential new market category. In the late 1990s, the entrepreneurial firms that attempted to sell groceries online in the US attracted significant resources, made impressive technological advancements, and generated... View Details
- December 2012
- Background Note
Are Daily Deals Good for Merchants?
By: Sunil Gupta, Timothy Keiningham, Ray Weaver and Luke Williams
In the relatively short time since Groupon was founded, the response to "daily deals"—services that promote businesses by marketing deeply discounted, pre-paid vouchers to an online subscriber base—has by all accounts been spectacular. Our evaluation of daily deals is... View Details
- Winter 2013
- Article
The New Patent Intermediaries: Platforms, Defensive Aggregators and Super-Aggregators
By: Andrei Hagiu and David B. Yoffie
The patent market consists mainly of privately negotiated, bilateral transactions, either sales or cross-licenses, between large companies. There is no eBay, Amazon, New York Stock Exchange, or Kelley's Blue Book equivalent for patents, and when buyers and sellers do... View Details
- Other Article
The Market That Wasn't: The Non-emergence of the Online Grocery Category
By: Chad Navis, Greg Fisher, Ryan Raffaelli and Mary Ann Glynn
We examine the non-emergence of a potential new market category. In the late 1990s the entrepreneurial firms that attempted to sell groceries online attracted significant resources, made meaningful technological advancements and generated immense publicity, yet online... View Details
- August 2012 (Revised July 2017)
- Case
Netflix: Valuing a New Business Model
By: Francois Brochet, Suraj Srinivasan and Michael Norris
In autumn 2011, Netflix was working to right the ship after publicly stumbling through a price hike and strategic shift and then retreat. The company was changing its business model to focus on streaming video service rather than the DVDs by mail that had brought the... View Details
- August 2012 (Revised December 2023)
- Background Note
Note on Health Insurance Coverage, Coding, and Payment
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Jo Ellen Slurzberg
This note explains how health care technology and service innovators receive payment from government insurers, in the U.S. and abroad, and from private insurers. It describes each of the three steps needed to obtain reimbursement: coverage, coding, and payment. It also... View Details
- July 2012
- Case
Droga5: Launching Jay-Z's Decoded
By: Anita Elberse and Kwame Owusu-Kesse
In 2010, David Droga and Andrew Essex, co-founders of advertising agency Droga5, hope to convince both John Meneilly, manager of hip-hop star Shawn Carter—better known as Jay-Z—and a partner in Carter's company Roc Nation and Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of... View Details
- June 2012 (Revised August 2013)
- Case
Driving Towards a Disruption?
By: Willy Shih and William Noble
As Clayton Christensen drove to the studio to deliver an online executive education class, he pondered the future of management education. How big a threat did online degree programs, corporate universities, and other innovations in the delivery of management training... View Details
- April 2012 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
Dovernet
By: Robert Simons and Natalie Kindred
This case illustrates the implications of using stringent performance measurement systems to create performance pressure, motivate employee achievement, and sharpen a firm's competitiveness. It opens by describing the downsides of the ruthlessly competitive culture at... View Details
- September 2011 (Revised March 2014)
- Case
Brightcove, Inc. in 2007
By: Andrei Hagiu and David B. Yoffie
Brightcove, a technology and services provider to content owners in the Internet television field, aimed to become a media distribution company in its own right. On October 30, 2006, it relaunched its Website—and, in effect, its business. With its new, consumer-facing... View Details
- September 2011 (Revised February 2013)
- Case
Trucost: Valuing Corporate Environmental Impacts
By: Michael W. Toffel and Stephanie van Sice
Trucost provided corporate environmental performance data and analysis to institutional investors and corporate managers, but after operating for a decade had yet to achieve profitability. Trucost was struggling to effectively differentiate its high quality products... View Details