Publications

30 May 2023
Research & Ideas

Can AI Predict Whether Shoppers Would Pick Crest or Colgate?

but large language models like generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) may allow companies to rely on AI to uncover consumers’ tastes, according to new research from Harvard Business School and Microsoft. Ayelet Israeli, an associate... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

January–February 2025
Article

Want Your Company to Get Better at Experimentation?: Learn Fast by Democratizing Testing

By: Iavor Bojinov, David Holtz, Ramesh Johari, Sven Schmit and Martin Tingley

For years, online experimentation has fueled the innovations of leading tech companies, enabling them to rapidly test and refine new ideas, optimize product features, personalize user experiences, and maintain a competitive edge. The widespread availability and lower... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Product Development; Competitive Advantage

Register to Read

November 2024
Supplement

Epic Games: Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite (B)

By: Andy Wu and Ronald Wang

In a significant ruling on April 24, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld portions of the district court’s decision against Epic Games back in September 2021. However, Apple’s anti-steering provisions, which restricted app developers from... View Details

Keywords: Lawsuits and Litigation; Market Transactions; Applications and Software; Technology Industry; Video Game Industry

October 2016
Case

Addicaid: Scaling a Digital Platform for Addiction Wellness and Recovery

By: Robert S. Huckman and Sarah Mehta

In 2013, Sam Frons founded Addicaid—a mobile application (app) that allowed people in addiction recovery to track their progress, check in with counselors, and connect with others in recovery programs. The app was grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy and used the... View Details

Keywords: Digital Health Interventions; Substance Use Disorder; Addiction Treatment; Addiction Recovery; Scale; Innovation; Health; Health Disorders; Health Industry; New York (city, NY)

Article

Matriarch: A Python Library for Materials Architecture

By: Tristan Giesa, Ravi Jagadeesan, David I. Spivak and Markus J. Buehler

Biological materials, such as proteins, often have a hierarchical structure ranging from basic building blocks at the nanoscale (e.g., amino acids) to assembled structures at the macroscale (e.g., fibers). Current software for materials engineering allows the user to... View Details

Keywords: Building Block; Category Theory; Hierarchical Protein Materials; Molecular Design; Open-Source Software; Structure Creation

2022
Working Paper

TalkToModel: Explaining Machine Learning Models with Interactive Natural Language Conversations

By: Dylan Slack, Satyapriya Krishna, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Sameer Singh

Practitioners increasingly use machine learning (ML) models, yet they have become more complex and harder to understand. To address this issue, researchers have proposed techniques to explain model predictions. However, practitioners struggle to use explainability... View Details

Keywords: Natural Language Conversations; Predictive Models; AI and Machine Learning

September 2020 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Hot Wheels: Launching The Mixed Play Experience

By: Elie Ofek, Andres Terech and Nicole Tempest Keller

Chris Down, Global Brand General Manager for Hot Wheels, and his team from the Advanced Play Group within Mattel, Inc., had developed an entirely new “mixed play” product experience that blended familiar Hot Wheels play in the physical world with breakthrough play in... View Details

Keywords: Toys; Go-to-market Strategy; Product Development; Technological Innovation; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Decision Making; Marketing; Strategy; Los Angeles

May 2003
Module Note

Product Development Process Design and Improvement

By: Stefan H. Thomke

Describes the conceptual foundations and pedagogy for a module on the design and improvement of processes for the development of products and services. Can also be used as part of a more general course on Managing Technology and Innovation. Central to Managing Product... View Details

Keywords: Product Development; Design; Performance Improvement; Innovation and Management; Information Technology; Customers; Information Management; Business Processes; Learning; Transformation; Service Operations

December 2015 (Revised May 2016)
Case

Jibo: A Social Robot for the Home

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Christine Snively

In January 2015, Jibo Inc. had completed a raise of $25.3 million in Series A financing after a successful 2014 crowdfunding campaign for preorders of Jibo, the first social robot for the home. Over 4,800 Jibo units were preordered, generating $2.6 million in sales. On... View Details

Keywords: Business Development; Entrepreneurship; Applications and Software; Information Infrastructure; Business Startups; Technology Industry

2023
Working Paper

Black-box Training Data Identification in GANs via Detector Networks

By: Lukman Olagoke, Salil Vadhan and Seth Neel

Since their inception Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been popular generative models across images, audio, video, and tabular data. In this paper we study whether given access to a trained GAN, as well as fresh samples from the underlying distribution, if... View Details

Keywords: Cybersecurity; Copyright; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science

2022
Article

OpenXAI: Towards a Transparent Evaluation of Model Explanations

By: Chirag Agarwal, Satyapriya Krishna, Eshika Saxena, Martin Pawelczyk, Nari Johnson, Isha Puri, Marinka Zitnik and Himabindu Lakkaraju

While several types of post hoc explanation methods have been proposed in recent literature, there is very little work on systematically benchmarking these methods. Here, we introduce OpenXAI, a comprehensive and extensible opensource framework for evaluating and... View Details

Keywords: Measurement and Metrics; Analytics and Data Science

03 Sep 2013
First Look

First Look: September 3

run ads on their blogs and receive 50% of the revenue generated by these ads. After analyzing 4.4 million blog posts, we find that, relative to nonparticipants, popular content increases by about 13... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

May–June 2025
Article

Branch-and-Price for Prescriptive Contagion Analytics

By: Alexandre Jacquillat, Michael Lingzhi Li, Martin Ramé and Kai Wang

Contagion models are ubiquitous in epidemiology, social sciences, engineering, and management. This paper formulates a prescriptive contagion analytics model where a decision maker allocates shared resources across multiple segments of a population, each governed by... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Mathematical Methods

June 2001
Teaching Note

Teaching IT Executive Education Courses TN

By: Richard L. Nolan

In the information age, it is important that IT be addressed in an effective way accessible to practicing executives. Teaching IT to executives continues to change in concepts and content as IT penetrates deeply into every area of business. Driven by Moore's Law, the... View Details

Keywords: Transformation; Developing Countries and Economies; Business Education; Managerial Roles; Organizational Structure; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Improvement; Information Technology

Article

Vungle Inc. Improves Monetization Using Big-Data Analytics

By: Bert De Reyck, Ioannis Fragkos, Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Casey Lichtendahl, Hammond Guerin and Andrew Kritzer

The advent of big data has created opportunities for firms to customize their products and services to unprecedented levels of granularity. Using big data to personalize an offering in real time, however, remains a major challenge. In the mobile advertising industry,... View Details

Keywords: Big Data; Monetization; Data and Data Sets; Advertising; Mobile Technology; Customization and Personalization; Performance Improvement