Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,271)
- Faculty Publications (241)
- June 2012 (Revised December 2017)
- Technical Note
Strategy and Strategic Decisions
This note introduces a framework for formulating strategy that helps a manager identify which decisions are strategic—and thus which decisions to focus on (both when developing strategy and when executing it)—and that provides a practical test for whether a particular... View Details
- May 2012
- Case
Evergreen Natural Markets 2012
By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and Paul S. Myers
Evergreen Natural Markets is a successful food retailer located in the Rocky Mountain region of the U.S. Having grown through acquisition, it has a reputation for improving the companies it purchases while retaining previous management. This strategy has succeeded due... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
No News Is Good News: CSR Strategy and Newspaper Coverage of Negative Firm Events
By: Jiao Luo, Stephan Meier and Felix Oberholzer-Gee
One of the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, it has been argued, is that they build up a reservoir of public good will, shielding companies in times of trouble. In this paper, we test the view that CSR provides protection from public ire by... View Details
- September 2011
- Article
On Testing Business Models
By: D. Huelsbeck, K. Merchant and Tatiana Sandino
This study explored management decisions regarding formal empirical testing of business models. It documented a test of one company's business model under seemingly favorable conditions for such a test – a successful single product firm following a consistent strategy... View Details
- May 2011
- Background Note
Scale Effects, Network Effects, and Investment Strategy
By: Willy Shih
This technical note discusses scale economies, and direct and indirect network effects in the context of building better business models. Some of the great business disasters of the dot.com bubble were companies that scaled their infrastructure without working through... View Details
- February 2011 (Revised July 2013)
- Case
A123 Systems: Power. Safety. Life.
A123 Systems, the largest manufacturer of lithium ion batteries in North America, is producing and selling batteries for electric vehicles in China and electric buses in Europe and America. It just opened two plants in Michigan, partially funded by a grant from... View Details
- January 2011 (Revised March 2011)
- Case
Predictive Biosciences
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Jeffrey J. Bussgang and David Kiron
A small cancer diagnostics start-up is deciding whether to acquire a laboratory to make and sell its bladder cancer test or build its own manufacturing and sales team. View Details
- January – February 2011
- Article
How to Design a Winning Business Model
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Joan E. Ricart
Most executives believe that competing through business models is critical for success, but few have come to grips with how best to do so. One common mistake is enterprises' unwavering focus on creating innovative models and evaluating their efficacy in standalone... View Details
- January 2011
- Article
Let the Right One In: A Microeconomic Approach to Partner Choice in Mutualisms
By: Marco Archetti, Francisco Ubeda, Drew Fudenberg, Jerry R. Green, Naomi E. Pierce and Douglas W. Yu
One of the main problems impeding the evolution of cooperation is partner choice. When information is asymmetric (the quality of a potential partner is known only to himself), it may seem that partner choice is not possible without signaling. Many mutualisms, however,... View Details
- October 2010 (Revised January 2011)
- Case
Toyota Recalls (A): Hitting the Skids
By: John A. Quelch, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Ryan Johnson
In the fall of 2009, Toyota Motor Corporation, once revered for its commitment to quality and reliability, faced a highly publicized series of recalls in the United States representing approximately a year's worth of sales in one of its most important markets. While... View Details
- September 2010 (Revised November 2010)
- Case
Ze-gen: Commercializing Clean Tech
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Kaitlyn Lyons and Scott Prozeller
The Ze-gen case covers the first five years in the life of a clean-tech start-up. Ze-gen had developed an innovative technology that converted solid waste into synthesis gas (called syngas). This technology was in testing at the company's pilot plant, built next to the... View Details
- September 2010
- Case
Quanta Research Institute: Rainforest or Hothouse?
By: Willy C. Shih, Jyun-Cheng Wang and Ho Howard Yu
Barry Lam, the CEO and founder of Quanta Computer (the largest notebook computer manufacturer worldwide), has recognized for many years that he had to transform the company to decrease its dependence on producing commodity hardware for other global brands and move the... View Details
- September 2010
- Article
Making Self-Regulation More Than Merely Symbolic: The Critical Role of the Legal Environment
By: Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Using data from a sample of U.S. industrial facilities subject to the federal Clean Air Act from 1993 to 2003, this article theorizes and tests the conditions under which organizations' symbolic commitments to self-regulate are particularly likely to result in improved... View Details
- September 2010 (Revised November 2011)
- Case
Salud Digna: Successfully Competing with For-Profit Organizations
By: Allen S. Grossman and Regina Garcia-Cuellar
Hugo Moreno, CEO of Salud Digna, was considering his growth options for the next three years. Would becoming a for-profit with access to greater capital be the best strategy or would this cause the organization to lose its social mission? Salud Digna provided... View Details
- August 2010
- Article
Sell-Side School Ties
By: Lauren H. Cohen, Christopher J. Malloy and Andrea Frazzini
We study the impact of social networks on agents' ability to gather superior information about firms. Exploiting novel data on the educational backgrounds of sell-side equity analysts and senior officers of firms, we test the hypothesis that analysts' school ties to... View Details
- June 2010
- Article
Change for Change's Sake
By: Freek Vermeulen, Phanish Puranam and Ranjay Gulati
No one disputes that firms have to make organizational changes when the business environment demands them. But the idea that a firm might want change for its own sake often provokes skepticism. Why inflict all that pain if you don't have to? That is a dangerous... View Details
- 2010
- Chapter
Happiness Adaptation to Income beyond 'Basic Needs'
By: Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch
We test for whether, once "basic needs" are satisfied, there is happiness adaptation to further gains in income using three data sets. Individual German Panel Data from 1985 to 2000, and data on the well-being of over 600,000 people in a panel of European countries... View Details
- December 2009
- Case
TruEarth Healthy Foods: Market Research for a New Product Introduction
By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Sunru Yong
Topics covered include: consumer marketing, market research, new product introduction, and quantitative analysis. TruEarth Healthy Foods, a maker of gourmet pastas, sauces, and meals, wants to build on its successful introduction of fresh whole grain pasta by... View Details
- November 2009 (Revised March 2010)
- Case
Managing Drugs on the Forefront of Personalized Medicine: The Erbitux and Vectibix Story
By: Richard G. Hamermesh, Raju Kucherlapati and Rachel Gordon
In May 2007, Amgen Inc. (Amgen) received disappointing news from the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) that its drug Vectibix, developed to fight metastatic colorectal cancer, had been rejected. This was especially surprising news given that a similar rival drug had... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Operational Failures and Problem Solving: An Empirical Study of Incident Reporting
By: Julia Rose Adler-Milstein, Sara J. Singer and Michael W. Toffel
Operational failures occur in all industries with consequences that range from minor inconveniences to major catastrophes. Many organizations have implemented incident reporting systems to highlight actual and potential operational failures in order to encourage... View Details