Publications

June 2024 (Revised August 2024)
Case

Revlon India's Turnaround: Navigating Online-Offline Decisions Using a Balanced Scorecard

By: Tatiana Sandino and Samuel Grad

Revlon India was founded as a joint venture in 1995, pairing the industrial conglomerate UMG with the global beauty brand Revlon, Inc. to bring international color cosmetics to India. After growing rapidly and pioneering the Beauty Advisor (BA) model in India, the... View Details

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2023
Working Paper

Financial and Informational Integration Through Oracle Networks

By: Lin William Cong, Eswar Prasad and Daniel Rabetti

Oracles are software components that enable data exchange between siloed blockchains and external environments, enhancing smart contract capabilities and platform interoperability. We find that oracle integration is positively associated with total value locked and... View Details

Keywords: Decentralized Finance; Blockchain; Smart Contract; International Economy; Interoperability; Risk Sharing; Applications and Software; Financial Markets; Economics; Risk Management

SSRN

May 25, 2024
Article

How to Prevent Silos from Becoming an Enemy of Collaboration

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Organizational Structure

December 2021 (Revised September 2022)
Case

Moleskine: Daniela Riccardi Turns the Page

By: Ryan Raffaelli and Sarah Gulick

Newly appointed CEO Daniela Riccardi needed to develop and present an action plan to the board of the company that owned Moleskine. Riccardi was hired because Moleskine had recently overextended its reach and needed more focus and discipline. Having previously served... View Details

Keywords: Rebranding; Brands and Branding; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Operations; Planning; Retail Industry; Italy

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Spring 2021
Article

Building Cities' Collaborative Muscle

By: Jorrit De Jong, Amy C. Edmondson, Mark Moore, Hannah Riley-Bowles, Jan Rivkin, Eva Flavia Martínez Orbegozo and Santiago Pulido-Gomez

The most pressing social problems facing cities today require multiagency and cross-sector solutions. We offer tools and techniques to facilitate the process of diagnosing and solving problems by breaking down silos to build up cities. View Details

Keywords: Collaboration; Cross-sector Collaboration; City; Governance; Problems and Challenges; Cooperation

Article

Dynamic Silos: Modularity in Intra-organizational Communication Networks during the Covid-19 Pandemic

By: Jonathan Larson, Tiona Zuzul, Emily Cox Pahnke, Neha Parikh Shah, Patrick Bourke, Nicholas Caurvina, Fereshteh Amini, Youngser Park, Joshua Vogelstein, Jeffrey Weston, Christopher White and Carey E. Priebe

Workplace communications around the world were drastically altered by Covid-19, work-from-home orders, and the rise of remote work. We analyze aggregated, anonymized metadata from over 360 billion emails within over 4000 organizations worldwide to examine changes in... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Remote Work; Organizational Silos; Health Pandemics; Organizations; Communication; Networks

November 1, 2019
Article

Companies Think They Want New Ideas. But They Don’t Act Like It

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Leaders say that they want more innovation. But then they trap themselves and their associates inside the structures that keep them stuck–inside the building, so to speak, where ideas get stale fast. That’s dangerous in a world of disruption and change. View Details

Keywords: Silos; Community; Innovation and Invention; Leadership; Change; Perspective; Learning; Attitudes

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May–June 2019
Article

Cross-Silo Leadership

By: Amy C. Edmondson, Tiziana Casciaro and Sujin Jang

Today the most promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must break down silos and get people working together across boundaries. But that’s a challenge for many... View Details

Keywords: Cross-functional Management; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Groups and Teams; Employees; Attitudes

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Article

One Obstacle to Curing Cancer: Patient Data Isn't Shared

By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Kathy Giusti

Precision Medicine requires large datasets to identify the mutations that lead to various cancers. Currently, genomic information is hoarded in fragmented silos within numerous academic medical centers, pharmaceutical companies, and some disease-based foundations. For... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare; Technological And Scientific Innovation; Cancer Care In The U.S.; Cancer Treatment; Precision Medicine; Personalized Medicine; Data Sharing; Technological Innovation; Analytics and Data Science; Health Disorders; Medical Specialties; Research and Development; Customization and Personalization; Health Industry; United States

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Summer 2013
Article

Strategic Management of Intellectual Property: An Integrated Approach

By: William W. Fisher III and Felix Oberholzer-Gee

In many organizations, the R&D, strategy, and legal functions are poorly integrated. As a consequence, firms miss opportunities to create and exploit the value of intellectual property. Functional silos are one reason for the lack of integration. More important,... View Details

Keywords: Innovation Management; Strategic Management; Legal Aspects Of Business; Licensing; Law; Innovation and Management; Knowledge Management; Intellectual Property; Business Strategy

Article

Experiments in Open Innovation at Harvard Medical School

By: Eva C. Guinan, Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani

Harvard Medical School seems an unlikely organization to open up its innovation process. By most measures, the more than 20,000 faculty, research staff and graduate students affiliated with Harvard Medical School are already world class and at the top of the medical... View Details

Keywords: Health Disorders; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Boston

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

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Innovation and Invention; Leading Change; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Structure; Creativity; Power and Influence; Adaptation

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2009
Book

Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Organization

In an era of raging commoditization and eroding profit margins, survival depends on resilience: staying one step ahead of your customers. Sure, most companies say they're "customer focused," but they don't deliver solutions to customers' thorniest problems. Why?... View Details

Keywords: Competency and Skills; Customer Focus and Relationships; Profit; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure; Cooperation

May 2007
Article

Silo Busting: Transcending Barriers to Build High Growth Organizations

Keywords: Growth and Development; Organizations

Forthcoming
Article

Achieving Epilepsy Care for All: Ecosystem-Based Transformation

By: Susanna Gallani, Bernice Martin Lee and Lidia M. V. R. Moura

Epilepsy exemplifies many of the systemic challenges of modern health care— fragmented care delivery, inequitable access, financial strain, and so on. The current “system of systems” (SoS) structure of U.S. health care fosters siloed operations among its member systems... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare Delivery; Epilepsy; Seizures; Health Care and Treatment; Health Disorders; Equality and Inequality; Framework; Service Delivery

Research Summary

Customer-Centricity as a Vehicle for Organic Growth