Black-owned Businesses - Publications - Faculty & Research

2023
Working Paper

The Benefits of Revealing Race: Evidence from Minority-owned Local Businesses

By: Abhay Aneja, Michael Luca and Oren Reshef

Is there latent demand to support Black-owned businesses? To explore, we analyze a new feature that made it easier to identify Black-owned restaurants on a large online platform. We find that labeling restaurants as “Black-owned” increased customer engagement and... View Details

Keywords: Black-owned Businesses; Race; Prejudice and Bias; Ownership; Knowledge Dissemination; Digital Platforms; Consumer Behavior; Food and Beverage Industry

Citation

SSRN

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19 Apr 2021
News

Supplier Diversity Programs Are Failing Black-Owned Businesses

23 Oct 2020
News

Students Pair with Local Black-Owned Businesses in New MBA Field Course

24 Oct 2023
Research & Ideas

When Tech Platforms Identify Black-Owned Businesses, White Customers Buy

Democratic-leaning areas. And new customers of Black-owned businesses were more likely to be white, based on an analysis of reviewers’ profile photos, relative to prior customers. Luca and his coauthors also... View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald; Food & Beverage

13 Nov 2020
News

Harvard Class to Pair Students with Black-Owned Boston Businesses in Bid to Fight Systemic Racism

23 Sep 2021
News

Confronting Sustainability in Business; Pro-Bono Consulting for Black-Owned Companies

professor in Executive Education at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. “The OPN is a way to provide support to Black-owned businesses that are ready for growth but lack a few tools,” she says.... View Details

Keywords: Margie Kelley

03 Aug 2021
News

Leading Maryland’s Only Black-Owned and -Managed Commercial Bank to Be a Pandemic Resource

The Baltimore Sun recently highlighted the work of John Lewis (MBA 2004), President and Chief Operating Officer of Harbor Bank of Maryland, which the newspaper notes became a vital pandemic-era resource for businesses looking to obtain... View Details

TeachingInterests

Scaling Minority Businesses

By: Archie L. Jones

Scaling Minority Businesses (SMB) is a field course designed to leverage the intellectual power and community of Harvard Business School to address the vital needs of Black-owned enterprises as they face the twin tasks of surviving and growing. The course... View Details

24 Feb 2025
Video

Scaling a Family Business to Build Multigenerational Success

27 Feb 2025
News

Scaling a Family Business to Build Multigenerational Success

22 Feb 2022
News

An Rx for Small Business Recovery

Karen Gordon Mills served in President Barack Obama’s cabinet as head of the Small Business Administration (SBA) during the height of the Great Recession. “Back then, I thought small businesses were... View Details

Keywords: Deborah Blagg

13 Aug 2021
Blog Post

Exploring Racial Justice with the Scaling Minority Businesses Course

Stephanie Myles (fellow classmate, rockstar activist, and now dear friend!) and I were teamed up to support Cruz Companies, the largest Black-owned business in Massachusetts, with developing a five-year... View Details

11 Feb 2017
News

Harvard Business School Makes a Case for Diversity

shrink the diversity gap. He notes that, with a 35 percent increase in the number of US black-owned firms over the past decade and with black-owned business seen as the largest... View Details

Web

Agents of Change: The Founding of the AASU - The Value of Business Education

Atlanta Life Insurance Company (today the Atlanta Life Financial Group), founded by his father Alonzo. Atlanta Life became one of the most significant Black-owned businesses in the United States. Herndon... View Details

25 Apr 2014
Video

Selena Cuffe - Making A Difference

28 Aug 2020
Video

Peter Vundla

Peter Vundla, who co-founded the first Black-owned advertising agency HerdBuoys in South Africa in 1991, discusses how the business started by exploiting the fact that white-owned companies had no understanding of Black consumers and their languages, and by providing a... View Details

26 Jun 2020
Video

Peter Vundla

Peter Vundla, who co-founded the first Black-owned advertising agency in South Africa in 1991, discusses how the business started by exploiting the fact that White-owned companies had no understanding of Black... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Applications or Approvals: What Drives Racial Disparities in the Paycheck Protection Program?

By: Sergey Chernenko, Nathan Kaplan, Asani Sarkar and David S. Scharfstein

We use the 2020 Small Business Credit Survey to study the sources of racial disparities in use of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Black-owned firms are 8.9 percentage points less likely than observably similar white-owned firms to receive PPP loans. About 55% of... View Details

Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Small Business; Race; Financing and Loans

Citation

SSRN

February 2024 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Johnson Security Bureau: Building Multigenerational Success

By: Henry McGee, Annelena Lobb and David Muoser

Jessica Johnson-Cope, CEO of Johnson Security Bureau (JSB), pondered options for scaling the firm. JSB was the oldest Black-owned security firm in New York, and among the oldest Black-owned security firms in the United States. It provided mostly unarmed security guards... View Details

Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Gender; Race; Cybersecurity; Growth and Development Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Expansion; New York (state, US)

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January 2024
Case

Vibrant Health

By: Henry McGee and Sarah Mehta

This case is about nutritional supplements company Vibrant Health, among the 100 largest Black-owned businesses in the U.S. After acquiring the company from its white founder in 2007, co-owners Ted and Paige Parker significantly grew its sales. Set in September 2023,... View Details