Publications

May 2024
Supplement

gWorks (A)

By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff

In January of 2019, Joe Heieck, CEO of gWorks, was deciding whether to proceed with his acquisition of Data Tech, that was a business roughly the same size as gWorks. gWorks, which provided geospatial software to small city and rural county governments, was acquired by... View Details

24 Jul 2007
First Look

First Look: July 24, 2007

conclusion, the ecosystem appears to be working well and recovering from the financial excesses of the late 1990s. Software and hardware View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

23 Apr 2020
Research & Ideas

This Crisis Loan Program Preserved Jobs—and Made Money

more stable career path. The firms themselves also grew stronger, and the French government eventually saved more in unemployment benefits than the program cost, according to the study, Employment Effects of Alleviating Financing... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Financial Services

November 2000 (Revised November 2005)
Case

Tellme Networks, Inc.

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Nicole Tempest

Tellme, an early-stage, venture-backed company based in Silicon Valley, leverages speech-recognition technologies to provide: 1) a "voice portal" with news and other information accessible through any telephone, and 2) turnkey application development and hosting... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Digital Platforms; Business Conglomerates; Business Startups; Internet and the Web; Venture Capital; Technology Adoption; Internet and the Web; Brands and Branding; Information Technology; Telecommunications Industry; Technology Industry

26 Jan 2010
First Look

First Look: Jan. 26

When participation costs are large relative to the volume of traffic an ad platform can offer, an advertiser may forego use of an ad platform that the advertiser otherwise finds profitable. Mergers between... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

July 1996
Case

Edmund's--www.edmunds.com

Edmund's publishes an automobile price guide in books (600,000 units per year) and over the Internet (16,000 users a day and growing). The site can be visited at www.edmunds.com. In the marketplace, it makes money selling books. In the marketspace, they make their... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Digital Platforms; Marketplace Matching; Information Publishing; Information Industry; Auto Industry

01 Apr 2015
Research & Ideas

The Slow, Steady Battle to Fix Cancer Care

reach of providers, and building an information technology platform that supports value-based care. None of it comes easy, due to deep-seated, convoluted systems already in place. “We don't know what it... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Health

2016
Working Paper

The Impact of Patent Wars on Firm Strategy: Evidence from the Global Smartphone Market

By: Feng Zhu

Strategy scholars have documented in various empirical settings that firms seek and leverage stronger institutions to mitigate hazards and gain competitive advantage. In this paper, we argue that such “institution-seeking” behavior may not be confined to the pursuit of... View Details

Keywords: Patent Wars; Patent Litigation; Intellectual Property (IP) Enforcement; Institutions; Smartphone; Patent Thicket; Digital Platforms; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; Globalized Markets and Industries; Business Strategy; Telecommunications Industry

30 Apr 2013
First Look

First Look: April 30

to the conclusion that diaspora connections continue to be important even as online platforms provide many of the features that diaspora networks historically provided (e.g., information about potential workers, monitoring, View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

03 Mar 2014
Research & Ideas

Facebook’s Future

device is a part of a greater Nike+ ecosystem that has attracted over 18 million users who happily share their athletic achievements with others. Just do a search on #nikeplus on Twitter, and you will... View Details

Keywords: by Mikolaj Piskorski

12 Jul 2011
First Look

First Look: July 12

returns. Download the paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1734528 Platform Competition under Asymmetric Information Authors:Hanna Hałaburda and Yaron Yehezkel Abstract In the context of... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

29 Mar 2016
First Look

March 29, 2016

(a) fosters a longer-term perspective and (b) widens the firm’s scope; and ecosystem creation. While much of the dynamic capabilities literature has focused on testing causal... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

21 Feb 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research: February 21

Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=52291 Platforms, Open/User Innovation, and Ecosystems: A Strategic Leadership Perspective By: Altman, Elizabeth J., and Michael L. Tushman... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

March 2011
Case

MorphoSys AG: The Evolution of a Biotechnology Business Model

By: Gary P. Pisano, Ryan Johnson and Carin-Isabel Knoop

In the biotech world, the 18-year-old Munich-based company MorphoSys was a rarity: it was profitable. The company achieved this profitability not by developing and selling its own drugs, but by licensing access to its proprietary library of human antibodies. Recently,... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Profit; Intellectual Property; Rights; Risk Management; Digital Platforms; Product Development; Business and Shareholder Relations; Vertical Integration; Biotechnology Industry; Munich

08 Oct 2013
First Look

First Look: October 8

with the most experience and those who have worked most recently-precisely the individuals who would recognize that this is a gift. Download working paper: http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/Papers%20on%20RIS/oDesk.pdf Search Diversion View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

22 May 2020
In Practice

Post-COVID Health Care: More Screens, Less Red Tape?

devoted to linking health data sources and creating new data sources that facilitate monitoring and targeted intervention. This ecosystem will also involve innovation in... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

December 2018 (Revised February 2020)
Case

Fishbowl: Scaling Up

By: Leslie K. John

Fishbowl is a social media app that allows professionals to connect with other relevant professionals both within their company and across industry. Unlike many other social media apps, on which users typically present idealized portraits of themselves, on Fishbowl,... View Details