Publications
Publications
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(6,259)
- Faculty Publications (1,318)
- March 2023
- Case
Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (A)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards
In 2018, Ana Owczarzak was appointed to lead Google Ads' new innovation and accelerator team - the Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL). The purpose of SAIL was to offer testing and incubation services for individuals within Google Ads who were developing new... View Details
- March 2023
- Supplement
Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (B)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards
In 2018, Ana Owczarzak was appointed to lead Google Ads' new innovation and accelerator team - the Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL). The purpose of SAIL was to offer testing and incubation services for individuals within Google Ads who were developing new... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
On (A)
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Karolin Frankenberger and Sascha Mader
Founded in 2010, in just one decade, the Swiss company On had established itself as a main player in global sports footwear and apparel. Based on an unconventional strategy which one of the founders labeled as “obsessively distinct,” On grew its sales with a compound... View Details
Keywords: Brands and Branding; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Model; Business Startups; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Satisfaction; Digital Marketing; Disruptive Innovation; Distribution Channels; Entrepreneurship; Environmental Sustainability; Global Strategy; Initial Public Offering; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Marketing Strategy; Product Design; Product Development; Product Marketing; Social Media; Strategy; Supply Chain Management; Technological Innovation; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Retail Industry; Sports Industry; Europe; Switzerland; Germany; United States
- March 9, 2023
- Article
Linking Growth and the Frontline
By: Frank V. Cespedes, Jay Galeota and Michael Wong
Most strategies are about growing the business. But about one quarter of companies do not grow at all and, even before the pandemic, only one in eight achieved more than 10% revenue growth annually, according to data from S&P Global regulatory filings. One reason is a... View Details
- March 2023
- Article
Not from Concentrate: Collusion in Collaborative Industries
By: Jordan M. Barry, John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery
The chief principle of antitrust law and theory is that reducing market concentration—having more, smaller firms instead of fewer, bigger ones—reduces anticompetitive behavior. We demonstrate that this principle is fundamentally incomplete.
In many... View Details
In many... View Details
Keywords: Antitrust; Antitrust Law; Antitrust Theory; Law And Economics; Collusion; Collaboration; Collaborative Industries; Regulation; ＂Repeated Games＂; IPOs; Initial Public Offerings; Underwriters; Real Estate; Real Estate Agents; Realtors; Syndicated Markets; Syndication; Brokers; Market Concentration; Competition; Law; Economics; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Game Theory; Initial Public Offering
- February 2023
- Supplement
The Swatch Group (B): Omega X Swatch
By: Rohit Deshpandé and Daniela Beyersdorfer
In March 2022, the Swatch Group launched the MoonSwatch, born out of a secret in-house collaboration among its street Swatch and its luxury Omega brand, in tribute to one of Omega’s most legendary watches. The launch created a frenzy among watch fans worldwide, with... View Details
- February 2023
- Supplement
Performance Management at Afreximbank (B)
By: Robert S. Kaplan, Siko Sikochi, Anna Ngarachu and Namrata Arora
Supplements the (A) case. Founded in October 1993, the Cairo-based African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) was a specialized continental financial institution designed to address the low level of intra-African trade, the decline in financial flows to Africa, the... View Details
- January 2023 (Revised June 2024)
- Supplement
Zaoui & Co. (B): Executing the Odyssey SPAC Transaction
By: Ashish Nanda, Alex Kitsberg and Zack Kurtovich
In September 2019, founding partners Michael and Yoel Zaoui decided to add principal investing to Zaoui & Co.’s offerings. The case outlines how, over the next two years, Zaoui & Co. pursued the formation of a SPAC, Odyssey Acquisitions, followed by the identification... View Details
Keywords: Finance; Investment Banking; SPACs; M＆A; Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Europe; United Kingdom
- January 2023
- Case
EKI Energy Services: One Billion Carbon Credits
By: George Serafeim
Within nine months from the time of its Initial Public Offering (IPO) in April of 2021, EKI Energy Services (EKI) shares had increased by more than 8,000%. Equally explosive was the growth of the company’s revenues and Earnings Before Interest, Taxes and Depreciation... View Details
- January 2023
- Teaching Note
The Opioid Settlement and Executive Pay at AmerisourceBergen
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Li-Kuan Ni
Teaching Note for HBS Case No 122-014. In 2020, AmerisourceBergen Corporation, a Fortune 50 company in the drug distribution industry, agreed to settle thousands of lawsuits filed nationwide against the company for its opioid distribution practices that critics alleged... View Details
Keywords: Opioids; Shareholder Activism; Investment Activism; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Governance; Governance Compliance; Governance Controls; Executive Compensation; Risk Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Shareholder Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Distribution Industry; Health Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States; West Virginia; Tennessee; Ohio; Pennsylvania
- January 2023 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Belden and Digital Transformation: From Product Sales to Solutions Sales
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Amy Klopfenstein
This case concerns the industrial automation division at Belden, a hardware manufacturer. While Belden historically sold products such as cables, wires, and other networking devices, EVP of Industrial Automation Ashish Chand recognized that IT vendors were entering the... View Details
- January 2023
- Case
Cleave Therapeutics: Taking a Risk on Oncology Drug Discovery
By: Regina Herzlinger and Brian Walker
What should a successful executive (HBS Baker Scholar) assess as her next move as the CEO of a firm with a promising and yet uncertain new drug? Amy Burroughs’ mandate to successfully commercialize Cleave Therapeutics’ drug for a cancer with no current successful... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
External Interfaces and Internal Processes: Market Positioning and Divergent Professionalization Paths in Young Ventures
By: Alicia DeSantola, Ranjay Gulati and Pavel Zhelyazkov
We explore how the initial market positioning of entrepreneurial ventures shapes how they professionalize over time, focusing specifically on the development of functional roles. In contrast to existing literature, which has presumed a uniform march toward... View Details
- 13 Dec 2022
- Interview
Why Some Start-Ups Fail to Scale
By: Jeffrey Rayport and Curt Nickisch
Managing rapid growth is a huge challenge for young businesses. Even start-ups with glowing reviews and skyrocketing sales can fail. That’s because new ventures and corporate initiatives alike have to sustain profitability at scale, according to Harvard Business School... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
KKR at CHI Overhead Doors (A)
By: Dennis Campbell and Ethan Rouen
This case examines the decision by private equity firm KKR to grant equity to every employee at portfolio company CHI Overhead Doors upon purchasing the company in 2015. The case explores whether this initiative will create shared value, growing profits through better... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Hacking the U.S. Election: Russia's Misinformation Campaign
By: Shikhar Ghosh
The case discusses the relatively low technology approach used by Russia to influence the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016. Although political parties manipulating the media was not a new phenomenon, the Russians ran a broad, well-financed, and sophisticated social... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Success and Post-ICO Performance
By: Evgeny Lyandres, Berardino Palazzo and Daniel Rabetti
We compile a comprehensive data set of initial coin offerings (ICOs) from 19 data sources including 11 ICO aggregators. We alleviate severe limitations of available ICO data by performing the first systematic analysis of ICO data quality. We use our data set to study... View Details
- November 2022 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Replika AI: Monetizing a Chatbot
By: Julian De Freitas and Nicole Tempest Keller
In early 2018, Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based chatbot Replika AI, was deciding how to monetize the app she had built. Launched in 2017, Replika was a consumer AI “companion app” developed by a team of AI software engineers originally based in... View Details
- November 2022 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
The Globalization of Manchester City Football Group
By: Maria P. Roche, Tiona Zuzul, Exequiel Hernandez and Amy Klopfenstein
This case describes the efforts of City Football Group (CFG) to purchase Esporte Clube Bahia (Bahia), a Brazilian professional soccer club. CFG’s strategy was to acquire under-performing clubs worldwide, invest money in high-profile players, and improve the teams’... View Details
Keywords: Business Ventures; Acquisition; Business Conglomerates; Geography; Geographic Location; Geographic Scope; Globalization; Global Strategy; Globalized Markets and Industries; Markets; Demand and Consumers; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Organizations; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Sports; Strategy; Competition; Competitive Advantage; Diversification; Expansion; Sports Industry; Europe; United Kingdom; England; South America; Brazil
- 2024
- Working Paper
Sharing Models to Interpret Data
By: Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam
To understand new data, we share models or interpretations with others. This paper studies such exchanges of models in a community. The key assumption is that people adopt the interpretation in their community that best explains the data, given their prior beliefs. An... View Details