Publications

01 Apr 1998
News

Snapshot: Gary DiCamillo, Polaroid's CEO

DiCamillo notes, will be transposing some of the company's formidable technological know-how to the newer segments of the market and offering digital products that fit the user-friendly Polaroid tradition.... View Details

Keywords: Nancy O. Perry

Web

Podcast - HBS Online

Effective Leader 04 NOV 2024 | The Parlor Room Harvard Business School Professor Anthony Mayo joins host Chris Linnane to explore what distinguishes good leaders from great ones, emphasizing how emotional intelligence enables leaders to excel in dynamic environments.... View Details

01 Apr 2001
News

Student Conferences Tackle Business Issues

academics for an exploration of new economy themes ranging from getting back to sustainable business models to the emerging wireless landscape. “Over the past year, we have seen a flight to quality in the technology market, where MBA... View Details

Keywords: Business Schools & Computer & Management Training; Educational Services

Web

Prelude - Option Pricing in Theory & Practice: The Nobel Prize Research of Robert C. Merton - Exhibits - Historical Collections

lessons of probability theory to the stock market has been a key focus of twentieth-century American finance. As a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late '60s, Merton was able to both draw on the... View Details

November 2021 (Revised April 2022)
Case

EbonyLife Media (A)

By: Andy Wu, Feng Zhu, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Wale Lawal

Founded by Mosunmola “Mo” Abudu in 2012 with a mission to bring high-quality African stories to the world, EbonyLife was the company behind many of Nigeria’s biggest films and TV shows. The company began as a television channel on the Africa-wide direct broadcast... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Mission and Purpose; Growth and Development Strategy; Digital Platforms; Consumer Behavior; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Nigeria; Africa

May 2016 (Revised January 2018)
Case

Improving Repurchase Rates at zulily

By: Thales Teixeira and Sarah McAra

In February 2015, zulily cofounder and CEO Darrell Cavens faced a major challenge in his business, a Seattle-based daily deals site that catered to moms. The more he spent to acquire new customers, the less he retained them in the form of repeat purchases. This was an... View Details

Keywords: Zulily; Repurchase; E-commerce; Online Shopping; Fashion; Customer Relationship Management; Internet and the Web; Digital Marketing; Customer Satisfaction; Fashion Industry; Retail Industry; Seattle

March 2009 (Revised September 2011)
Case

Zopa: The Power of Peer-to-Peer Lending

By: Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, Isabel Fernandez-Mateo and David Chen

Zopa, a U.K.-based peer-to-peer lending company, connected individual lenders and borrowers via an online interface. The company charged a small fee for completed loan transactions but has not turned a profit. Zopa offered two platforms, Markets and Listings. Markets... View Details

Keywords: Financing and Loans; Personal Finance; Market Participation; Digital Platforms; Social and Collaborative Networks; Financial Services Industry; United Kingdom

January 2017 (Revised August 2019)
Supplement

X Fire Paintball & Airsoft: Is Amazon a Friend or Foe? (B)

By: Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella

Three years after launching his brick-and-mortar store, X Fire Paintball and Airsoft, Steve Herbert Sr. and his sons began selling products on Amazon.com’s third-party Marketplace and online sales expanded rapidly. Over time, X Fire noticed that products of which it... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Competition; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Small Business; Retail Industry; Canada

09 Oct 2012
First Look

First Look: October 9

Competency-destroying Technology Transitions: Why the Transition to Digital Is Particularly Challenging Willy ShihHarvard Business School Note 613-024 This note discusses technical aspects of the transition... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Profile

Rocio Parra

With a father who has a PhD in electrical engineering, and two older siblings who also pursued engineering degrees, it seemed only natural that Rocio Parra would continue the family's engineering tradition. "I always assumed that I would go into business on the... View Details

15 Jun 2021
News

The Path Ahead

talent to the funding you provide for key initiatives. We were able to move quickly and effectively in response to the pandemic because of the generosity of alumni whose gifts to the HBS Fund enabled the considerable investment in View Details

01 Jun 2008
News

The Prophet of Start-Ups

famous inventor Charles F. Kettering (MBA ’27) predicted ARD would go bust in five years. But Doriot proved him wrong over the next 25 years, as his firm financed and nurtured more than 100 start-ups, many of which became huge successes that pushed the frontiers of... View Details

Keywords: Spencer E. Ante; George Doriot; Charles F. Kettering; Lawrence Lowell; F. Warren Hellman; Finance; Securities, Commodities, and Other Financial Investments; Finance

May 2008 (Revised March 2010)
Supplement

Palm (D): Epilogue as of 2008

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Kevin Boudreau and Jordan Mitchell

This case series looks at three important inflection points in Palm's history that relate to decisions about its platform: when the company was debating whether to open its operating system (OS) for licensing to third-party hardware manufacturers; 2001, when the... View Details

Keywords: History; Decisions; Business Model; Technological Innovation; Value Creation; Digital Platforms; Rights; Competition

Web

HBS - From The Dean

community. It was also a year when we made significant progress on several important priorities. At a moment when AI took center stage with the advent of ChatGPT, our own digital transformation—exploring how we can leverage data and... View Details

2017
Working Paper

Platforms, Open/User Innovation, and Ecosystems: A Strategic Leadership Perspective

By: Elizabeth J. Altman and Michael L. Tushman

Platform, open/user innovation, and ecosystem strategies embrace and enable interactions with external entities. Firms pursuing these approaches conduct business and interact with environments differently than those pursuing traditional closed strategies. This paper... View Details

Keywords: Platforms; Open/user Innovation; Ecosystems; Crowdsourcing; Institutional Logics; Strategic Leadership; Top Management Teams; CEO Role; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Digital Platforms; Innovation and Invention; Organizational Design; Strategy; Managerial Roles

SSRN

Read Now

January 2014 (Revised February 2015)
Case

YouTube for Brands

By: Thales Teixeira and Leora Kornfeld

This case examines the changes employed by YouTube to make the massively popular site more attractive to brands. Building from its base of amateur, user-generated content, YouTube had turned to experimenting with professionally-made content and organizing its videos... View Details

Keywords: Marketing; Internet and the Web; Decision Choices and Conditions; Digital Marketing; Brands and Branding; Advertising Industry; Motion Pictures and Video Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry

February 2000 (Revised May 2001)
Case

eBricks.com

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann

eBricks.com is developing an online marketplace for construction materials. The start-up company faces two decisions: 1) whether to merge with BluelineOnline.com, a firm providing project management solutions for the construction industry; and 2) whether to develop an... View Details

Keywords: Strategic Planning; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Marketplace Matching; Decision Choices and Conditions; Business Startups; Construction Industry

09 Sep 2016
News

MaiTai Global and Kiteboarding

it basically, got started around a couple of my passions-- one being, at the time, windsurfing, which later grew in a kitesurfing. And technology start ups, which is what I do for a living, as a venture capitalist. White: Tell me what it... View Details

February 2021
Teaching Plan

Soofa: Displaying the Right Path?

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Amy Klopfenstein

This teaching plan serves as a supplement to the case “Soofa: Displaying the Right Path?” HBS 820-098. The case explores the tension between two different financing and expansion plans for a startup, and explores issues related to business model pivots and industry... View Details