Publications

April 2014 (Revised October 2015)
Case

Texas Teachers and the New Texas Way

By: Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, Luis M. Viceira, John D. Dionne and Nathaniel Burbank

In 2011 Britt Harris, the Chief Investment Officer for the $107.4 billion Teachers Retirement System of Texas (TRS), was considering whether to pursue strategic partnerships with a group of large private equity firms. After spending four years aggressively moving the... View Details

Keywords: Texas; TRS; Texas Teachers; Private Equity; Texas

04 Jan 2021
Blog Post

The First Alumni of the MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences Program

In May 2020, the MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences program graduated its first cohort of students, growing the program’s alumni base from 0 to 28. These alumni joined the program’s... View Details

17 Mar 2021
News

Are there enough hours in the day for hybrid work?

25 Jan 2010
Research & Ideas

A Macroeconomic View of the Current Economy

economy as a whole. Micro is about firms and individual actors and how they behave; macro is about aggregate performance of the economy: overall GDP, trade surplus or deficit, inflation. In principle, we... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2014
Working Paper

Entrepreneurship and Business Groups: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Growth of the Koç Group in Turkey

By: Asli M. Coplan and Geoffrey Jones

This working paper examines the origins and development of the Koç Group, which grew to be the largest business group in Turkey. This enterprise was an important actor in the emergence of modern business enterprise in the new state of the Republic of Turkey from the... View Details

Keywords: Business Groups; Turkey; Entrepreneurship In Emerging Markets; Entrepreneurship; History; Government and Politics; Auto Industry; Banking Industry; Electronics Industry; Middle East; Europe

SSRN

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Research Summary

Building Bridges: The Social Structure of Interdependent Innovation

Multidivisional firms often fail to take advantage of innovations that involve combining resources from distinct divisions. This failure of cross-line-of-business innovation is a consequence of design choices employed to execute the firm’s strategy: in organizing... View Details

17 Oct 2016
News

Does China deserve a reputation as the land of copycats?

March 2015
Supplement

MELF and Business Culture in the Twin Cities (B)

By: Clayton S. Rose and David Lane

Leaders of the many Fortune 500 firms headquartered in Minneapolis-St. Paul have a long history of engaging collectively, and with educational, political and social leaders, to deal with important community issues. Focusing on the participation of leading CEOs in the... View Details

Keywords: Education; Business and Community Relations; Management Teams; Minneapolis; Saint Paul

February 1995 (Revised August 1995)
Case

Microsoft in the People's Republic of China, 1993

By: Tarun Khanna

Explores some of the economic and political tradeoffs that need to be negotiated by a firm seeking to influence industry structure. The setting is the nascent personal computer software industry in the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1993. Microsoft has to localize... View Details

Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Product Marketing; Market Entry and Exit; Market Transactions; Industry Structures; Partners and Partnerships; Vertical Integration; Software; Information Technology Industry; China

07 May 2007
Research & Ideas

Rediscovering Schumpeter: The Power of Capitalism

in established companies. What can business leaders take away from his development of these ideas? A: The main takeaway is the absolute relentlessness of creative destruction and entrepreneurship. In a free... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Education

01 Mar 2019
News

The HBS Fund

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a firm believer that the professional advancement of women is key to addressing this issue, invited Professor Hirotaka Takeuchi to develop a program, now in its third year, to... View Details

September 2022
Background Note

On CUE: The Quest for Optimal Customer Unit Economics

By: Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller

Startups are often evaluated by how well they perform on unit economics, defined as the ratio of a customer’s lifetime value (LTV) to acquisition costs (CAC). A common target for unit economics, advocated by many VCs and analysts, is 3:1 (i.e., LTV/CAC=3). While there... View Details

Keywords: Unit Economics; Business Startups; Performance Evaluation; Customer Value and Value Chain; Customer Relationship Management; Analysis

2014
Article

Corporate Governance and the Financial Crisis in Italy

By: Dante Roscini

The financial crisis hit Italy harder than many other Eurozone countries. In part this was due to the fact that the crisis came upon a system that was weakened by years of sub-par economic growth. One of the several endogenous factors that explain the stagnation of the... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Financial Crisis; Italy

Find at Harvard

01 Jun 2000
News

The Right Connections

particularly crucial; yet it is also difficult for external parties to assess the quality of a young firm." Higgins had noticed that in many pre-IPO discussions, venture capitalists would invariably ask company executives what View Details

Keywords: Judith A. Ross

01 Dec 2023
News

Research Brief: Staying in the Game

Illustration by Peter Hoey In Monopoly, declaring bankruptcy has a very permanent consequence. Game over; you lose. In the paper “Life After Death: A Field Experiment with Small Businesses on Information Frictions, Stigma, and Bankruptcy,” HBS professor Shai Bernstein... View Details

Keywords: Jennifer Myers; Administration of Economic Programs; Government

06 Aug 2015
News

What Salespeople Need to Know About the New B2B Landscape

01 Dec 2022
News

Action Plan: To the Letter

most of his career in travel and in private equity. In 2019, the private equity firm HGGC acquired Monotype for $825 million and recruited Chacko in 2021 to run it. At Monotype, he learned to view type... View Details

Keywords: April White; design; typography; change management; leadership; Special Design Services; Professional Services

Web

About the Project - U.S. Competitiveness

and improve the competitiveness of the United States—that is, the ability of firms operating in the U.S. to... View Details

April 2011
Article

The Emotional Impact and Behavioral Consequences of Post-M&A Integration: An Ethnographic Case Study in the Software Industry

By: David Ager

This ethnographic case study has focused in depth on one type of acquisition, that of two small, young firms (each with less than 2,000 employees and less than ten years in operation) acquired by one company in the software development industry based in the United... View Details

Keywords: Integration; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Behavior; Groups and Teams; Mergers and Acquisitions; Emotions