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- Summer 2025
- Article
Does Marriage Have a Future?
By: Debora L. Spar and Aryanna Garber
The article explores how technology is reshaping the institution of marriage, highlighting significant changes in societal norms and personal relationships. It discusses the decline in marriage rates in industrialized nations, particularly Japan and the United States,... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
TagHive: Edtech Pricing and Distributor Decisions
By: Isamar Troncoso, Frank V. Cespedes and Stacy Straaberg
Education technology (edtech) company TagHive, founded in 2017, used a direct sales team and third-party distributors to sell its Class Saathi hardware and software solution to 300 clients, mainly primary and secondary schools in India. The product aimed to improve... View Details
Keywords: Business Model; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Social Marketing; Information Infrastructure; Information Technology; Internet and the Web; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Technology Adoption; Education; Teaching; Price; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Satisfaction; Growth and Development; Technological Innovation; Education Industry; Technology Industry; India; South Korea
- May–June 2025
- Article
Algorithmic Assortment Curation: An Empirical Study of Buybox in Online Marketplaces
By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno
Most online sales worldwide take place in marketplaces that connect sellers and buyers. The presence of numerous third-party sellers leads to a proliferation of listings for each product, making it difficult for customers to choose between the available options. Online... View Details
- June 2025
- Case
Vail Resorts: Responding to Activist Pressure (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
On January 27, 2025, the head of a relatively small hedge fund named Late Apex Partners sent a highly critical letter to the board of directors of Vail Resorts, the world’s largest ski resort operator. In his letter, and the 88-slide presentation that accompanied his... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Finance; Capital Budgeting; Corporate Governance; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy; Leading Change; Valuation; Investment Activism; Climate Change; Management Succession; Financial Management; Risk Management; Business and Shareholder Relations; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; United States; Australia; Canada
- May 2025
- Case
stc Group: DARE to Transform
By: Sunil Gupta and Sadika El Hariri
Established as a government-owned entity in 1998, stc Group was the sole telecommunications operator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Soon after it was privatized in 2003, regional players started entering the Saudi market. To deal with the competition and to... View Details
- May 2025
- Teaching Note
Boutiqaat: Influencing Retail in MENA
By: Juan Alcacer and Noor Al Qadhi
Boutiqaat, a Kuwait-based e-commerce platform, scaled an influencer-driven beauty retail model across MENA and now faces critical strategic choices about offline expansion and globalization. Founded in 2015, Boutiqaat combined social commerce, localized logistics, and... View Details
- May 2025
- Case
Boutiqaat: Influencing Retail in MENA
By: Juan Alcacer and Noor Al Qadhi
Boutiqaat, a Kuwait-based e-commerce platform, scaled an influencer-driven beauty retail model across MENA and now faces critical strategic choices about offline expansion and globalization. Founded in 2015, Boutiqaat combined social commerce, localized logistics, and... View Details
- April 2025
- Case
Thrivent: From Insurance Agents to Financial Advisors
By: Hubert Joly, Leonard A. Schlesinger and Tom Quinn
Thrivent, a midwestern financial services company with a centuries-long history rooted in Lutheranism, had reached $10 billion in revenue mostly by selling life insurance. In the 2020s, however, CEO Terry Rasmussen began a transformation process centered around the... View Details
Keywords: Change Management; Transformation; Talent and Talent Management; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Forecasting and Prediction; Employee Relationship Management; Retention; Selection and Staffing; Job Design and Levels; Human Capital; Leading Change; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Insurance Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States; Minneapolis
- April 2025 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Adobe: GenAI Opportunity or Threat?
By: Sunil Gupta, Rajiv Lal and Allison Ciechanover
In December 2022, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen faced a pivotal strategic decision due to the rapid rise of generative AI image models from OpenAI, Midjourney, and StabilityAI. Adobe, a leader in digital media and marketing software with a 40-year legacy of innovation and... View Details
- April 2025
- Case
Sharon Goldberg and BastionZero
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, James Barnett and Maxim Pike Harrell
In December 2023, BastionZero co-founder and CEO Sharon Goldberg considered her startup’s future. Established in 2017 as a blockchain company focused on improving the security of cryptocurrency trading, in March 2020 the VC-backed startup shifted focus to a new... View Details
- April 2025
- Case
Salesforce Agentforce: The Limitless Workforce
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Allison Ciechanover and George Gonzalez
In early 2025, Salesforce was a global leader in cloud-based enterprise software, best known for pioneering customer relationship management (CRM) delivered as a service. Over the past two decades, the company had expanded into marketing, customer service, analytics,... View Details
- March 2025 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
ING Türkiye: Flexible Work in a Competitive Banking Environment
By: Ashley Whillans and Nico Schaefer
This case explores ING Türkiye’s journey toward workplace flexibility within the traditionally conservative Turkish banking sector. Beginning with early remote work experiments in 2015 and culminating in the FlexING model, by 2024 ING Türkiye had positioned itself as a... View Details
- March 2025
- Article
Novice Risk Work: How Juniors Coaching Seniors on Emerging Technologies Such as Generative AI Can Lead to Learning Failures
By: Katherine C. Kellogg, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Steven Randazzo, Ethan Mollick, Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland III, François Candelon and Karim R. Lakhani
The literature on communities of practice demonstrates that a proven way for senior professionals to upskill
themselves in the use of new technologies that undermine existing expertise is to learn from junior
professionals. It notes that juniors may be better able... View Details
- February 2025
- Supplement
Intenseye: Powering Workplace Health and Safety with AI (B)
By: Michael W. Toffel, Shane Greenstein and Sadika El Hariri
Intenseye used its $25 million series A funds to refine and expand its digital safety platform while refining its target markets and ideal customer profile. As the company implemented new approaches to create value for its clients, such as developing an AI-powered... View Details
Keywords: Safety Performance; Occupational Safety; Innovation; Safety; Operations; Health; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Digital Transformation; Supply Chain Management; Performance Improvement; Entrepreneurship; Product Development; Customer Relationship Management; Value Creation; Venture Capital; Growth and Development Strategy; Information Technology Industry; United States; Europe; Middle East; Turkey
- 2025
- Working Paper
Dynamic Personalization with Multiple Customer Signals: Multi-Response State Representation in Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) offers potential for optimizing sequences of customer interactions by modeling the relationships
between customer states, company actions, and long-term value. However, its practical implementation often faces significant
challenges.... View Details
- February 2025
- Article
Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency
By: Ryan W. Buell and MoonSoo Choi
Through a large-scale field experiment with 393,036 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
Hebbia: Redefining Productivity for Knowledge Workers Using AI
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Minoshka Narayan
In early 2025, George Sivulka, founder and CEO of Hebbia, reflected on the company’s rapid ascent as a pioneer in GenAI-powered productivity tools for knowledge workers. With its proprietary technology, Hebbia had redefined information retrieval and analysis and earned... View Details
Keywords: Transformation; Customer Relationship Management; AI and Machine Learning; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Service Delivery; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; United States; New York (city, NY)
- January 2025
- Case
A Tiger in the Tank: Exxon Sues Investors
By: Clayton S. Rose, Sarah Sasso and James Weber
In June 2024, investors were trying to make sense of ExxonMobil’s (Exxon) lawsuit against two impact investors, Arjuna Capital (Arjuna) and Follow This, that had just been dismissed by the U.S. District Court of Northern Texas. Exxon’s suit challenged the rights of two... View Details
Keywords: Disruption; Talent and Talent Management; Customer Satisfaction; Decision Making; Demographics; Ethics; Corporate Accountability; Employees; Recruitment; Retention; Leadership; Crisis Management; Risk Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Civil Society or Community; Social Issues; Adaptation; Investment Activism; Lawsuits and Litigation; Business and Shareholder Relations; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; United States; Netherlands; Norway
- January 8, 2025
- Article
Why Retailers Are Turning to Third-Party Marketplaces
By: Antonio Moreno
Some traditional retailers—including Walmart, Target, and Best Buy—are adopting third-party marketplaces, which connect customers with external sellers and thereby offer customers a much broader selection. Many other traditional retailers are considering whether to... View Details
- November–December 2024
- Article
How to Avoid the Agility Trap
By: Jianwen Liao and Feng Zhu
Agility is all the rage in strategy circles these days. According to conventional wisdom, organizations should rapidly react to technological advances, new market dynamics, and shifting consumer preferences. But in practice this is nearly impossible to pull off,... View Details