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- January 2025
- Case
Apax Partners: Deciding Whether to Bid for Trader Corp.
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
Apax Partners’ investment committee was schedule to meet on March 21, 2011, to decide whether to invest in Trader Corporation, a Canadian classified advertising business for used automobiles with both print (magazines) and digital (website) distribution. What made this... View Details
Keywords: Value Creation; Network Effects; Private Equity; Growth Management; Digital Marketing; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; E-commerce; Valuation; Competition; Digital Platforms; Digital Strategy; Digital Transformation; Transition; Information Industry; Information Industry; Information Industry; Canada; United Kingdom; New York (state, US); New York (city, NY)
- January 2025
- Article
Reducing Prejudice with Counter-stereotypical AI
By: Erik Hermann, Julian De Freitas and Stefano Puntoni
Based on a review of relevant literature, we propose that the proliferation of AI with human-like and social features presents an unprecedented opportunity to address the underlying cognitive and affective drivers of prejudice. An approach informed by the psychology of... View Details
- November 2024
- Supplement
AlphaGo (C): Birth of a New Intelligence
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
This case, the final of a three-part series, explores DeepMind's pivotal transition from mastering games to solving real-world scientific challenges. In December 2020, DeepMind's AI system AlphaFold 2 achieved a breakthrough by solving protein folding—a 50-year-old... View Details
Keywords: AI; Artificial Intelligence; Machine Learning; Research; Autonomy; Deep Learning; Drug Discovery; Healthcare Innovation; Neural Networks; Information Technology; Research And Development; Scientific Research; Technology Startup; AI and Machine Learning; Technological Innovation; United States
- November 2024
- Case
Polish Agro: Where Do We Grow from Here?
By: Willy C. Shih, Lena Duchene and Daniela Beyersdorfer
By July 2024, Polish Agro had grown into one of Poland’s fastest-growing agribusinesses, with €230 million in revenue, 82 employees, and operations across Northern Poland. The company supported farmers with essential agricultural inputs like fertilizers and seeds,... View Details
Keywords: Plant-Based Agribusiness; Distribution; Volatility; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Climate Change; Environmental Regulation; Profit; Trade; Digital Strategy; Innovation Strategy; Crisis Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Resource Allocation; Advertising; Brands and Branding; E-commerce; Business and Community Relations; Networks; Adaptation; Adoption; Competitive Advantage; Business Model; Health Pandemics; War; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Europe; Poland
- September 2024
- Article
Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship
By: Sabrina T. Howell and Ramana Nanda
We find that male participants in Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition who were randomly exposed to more VC investors on their panel were substantially more likely to start a VC-backed startup post-graduation, indicating that access to investors impacts... View Details
- July 2024
- Technical Note
What Is AI?
By: Michael Parzen and Jo Ellery
This note discusses definitions of artificial intelligence and covers the broad types of learning used in training AI, as well as explaining in detail how neural networks are built, trained, and used. View Details
Keywords: AI and Machine Learning
- June 2024
- Article
The Monitoring Role of Social Media
By: Jonas Heese and Joseph Pacelli
In this study, we examine whether social media activity can reduce corporate misconduct. We use the staggered introduction of 3G mobile broadband access across the United States to identify exogenous increases in social media activity and test whether access to 3G... View Details
- January 2024
- Case
National Football League and Private 5G
By: Andy Wu, Grant Son and Shuoyu Chen
On September 9, 2021, the National Football League (NFL) designated Verizon as its official 5G partner in a 10-year deal, committed to enhance the experience for NFL teams, players, and fans in stadiums. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said, “Verizon will help us... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
- Case
Private 5G Networks
By: Andy Wu and Maggie Yang
In the late 2010’s, 5G emerged as a new standard in communication technology. 5G was designed to enable ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), massive machine-type communication (MMTC), and enhanced mobile broadband (EMBB) (see Exhibit 1 for a detailed... View Details
- January 2024
- Article
Dog Eat Dog: Balancing Network Effects and Differentiation in a Digital Platform Merger
By: Chiara Farronato, Jessica Fong and Andrey Fradkin
Digital platforms are increasingly the subject of regulatory scrutiny. In comparison to multiple competitors, a single platform may increase consumer welfare if network effects are large or may decrease welfare due to higher prices or reduction in platform variety. We... View Details
- December 2023 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Research In Motion: Launching and Scaling the World's First Smartphone Empire (A)
By: Tatiana Sandino and Samuel Grad
In 2005, Research In Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry smartphone was a sensation. After its launch in 1999, the groundbreaking BlackBerry had captured the hearts and minds of corporate America through its secure wireless email service. The device was so addictive and... View Details
Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Decision Choices and Conditions; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Innovation and Management; Technological Innovation; Business or Company Management; Management Style; Product Development; Managerial Roles; Growth and Development Strategy; Technology Industry; United States; Canada
- 2023
- Article
M4: A Unified XAI Benchmark for Faithfulness Evaluation of Feature Attribution Methods across Metrics, Modalities, and Models
By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Xuhong Li, Mengnan Du, Jiamin Chen, Yekun Chai and Haoyi Xiong
While Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques have been widely studied to explain predictions made by deep neural networks, the way to evaluate the faithfulness of explanation results remains challenging, due to the heterogeneity of explanations for... View Details
Keywords: AI and Machine Learning
- November–December 2023
- Article
Network Centralization and Collective Adaptability to a Shifting Environment
By: Ethan S. Bernstein, Jesse C. Shore and Alice J. Jang
We study the connection between communication network structure and an organization’s collective adaptability to a shifting environment. Research has shown that network centralization—the degree to which communication flows disproportionately through one or more... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
TetraScience: Unlocking the Power of Scientific Data
By: Satish Tadikonda and William Marks
After pivoting from a focus on hardware to a focus on scientific data, TetraScience, led by veteran SaaS executive, Patrick Grady and Founder Spin Wang, has embarked on a journey from nearly cash-out to a player in the scientific data management space. This case... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Fortinet: Cybersecurity Pioneer Ken Xie Considers the Long Game
By: Tsedal Neeley, Jeff Huizinga and Emily Grandjean
Ken Xie, cofounder of cybersecurity giant Fortinet, faced a critical decision that would validate his leadership. Fortinet became the industry’s second-largest pureplay cybersecurity firm by developing differentiated hardware and investing in R&D. However, after a... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Black-box Training Data Identification in GANs via Detector Networks
By: Lukman Olagoke, Salil Vadhan and Seth Neel
Since their inception Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been popular generative models across images, audio, video, and tabular data. In this paper we study whether given access to a trained GAN, as well as fresh samples from the underlying distribution, if... View Details
- September 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
TetraScience: Noise and Signal
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
In 2019, TetraScience CEO “Spin” Wang needed advice. Five years earlier, he had cofounded a startup that saw early success with a hardware product designed to help laboratory scientists in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical spaces more easily collect data from... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Organization; Restructuring; Forecasting and Prediction; Digital Platforms; Analytics and Data Science; AI and Machine Learning; Organizational Structure; Network Effects; Competitive Strategy; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States; Boston
- September 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Atomwise: Strategic Opportunities in AI for Pharma
By: Satish Tadikonda
Abraham Heifets and his co-founder, Izhar Wallach, had founded Atomwise to develop i) an AI engine to transform drug discovery by creating better medicines faster, and ii) a machine learning-based discovery engine that combined the power of convolutional neural... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Spatial Mobility, Economic Opportunity, and Crime
By: Gaurav Khanna, Carlos Medina, Anant Nyshadham, Daniel Ramos-Menchelli, Jorge Tamayo and Audrey Tiew
Neighborhoods are strong determinants of both economic opportunity and criminal activity. Does improving connectedness between segregated and unequal parts of a city predominantly import opportunity or export crime? We use a spatial general equilibrium framework to... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Mapping Organizational-Level Networks Using Individual-Level Connections: Evidence from Online Professional Networks
By: Shelley Xin Li, Frank Nagle and Aner Zhou
Organization-level networks facilitate the flow of information and business activities in the
economy. Prior research relies solely on high-level connections to measure these networks. Therefore, to
understand the role of employee connections at all job levels in... View Details