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- May 2025
- Case
'Net Zero in Action': Impact Investing at the McKnight Foundation
By: Lauren Cohen, Christina R. Wing and Sophia Pan
Elizabeth McGeveran, Vice President of Investments at the McKnight Foundation, reflected on how to effectively advance the organization’s net-zero strategy. The foundation had committed 10% of its endowment to building a portfolio of impact investments and was among... View Details
Keywords: Investment Fund; Philanthropy; Charitable Donations; Sustainability; Foundation; Impact Investing; ESG; Family Business; Forecasting and Prediction; Private Sector; Renewable Energy; Social Entrepreneurship; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Financial Strategy; Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Institutional Investing; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Private Ownership; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Social Issues; Sustainable Cities; Financial Services Industry; Minnesota; United States
- 2025
- Chapter
Institutional Entrepreneurship and Climate Change
By: Ann-Kristin Bergquist and Geoffrey Jones
This chapter explores when and why private regulatory governance systems became the primary form of global environmental governance. The chapter explores two different historical paths in such private regulation and how they came about. The first path involved... View Details
- 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 (Revised May 2025)
- Background Note
Customer Acquisition and the Cash Flow Trap
By: E. Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller
Startups as well as existing firms recognize the need to invest in order to acquire customers for their new ventures. And as each customer is expected at some point to have generated sufficient gross margins to cover their CAC, management expects that, soon enough, the... View Details
- April 2025
- Case
Techint: Strategic Choices for Community Impact
By: Lauren Cohen, Virak Prum, Kenneth Charman, Pedro Levindo and Mariana Cal
In early 2024 Erika Bienek, Chief Community Relations Officer at Techint, had to decide whether to invest in a new company-owned and operated technical school in Veracruz, Mexico, or invest instead in strengthening the city’s public education system. Techint, a global... View Details
Keywords: Technical Institutes; Community Relations; Social Impact; Argentina; Mexico; Brazil; Conglomerate; Stakeholder Management; Government And Business; Community Impact; Philanthropy; Business Conglomerates; Business Subsidiaries; Business Headquarters; Family Business; Decision Making; Private Sector; Public Sector; Education; Curriculum and Courses; Middle School Education; Secondary Education; Teaching; Training; Learning; Energy; Engineering; Construction; Values and Beliefs; Geography; Global Range; Local Range; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Globalized Firms and Management; Government Legislation; Recruitment; Innovation and Invention; Disruptive Innovation; Knowledge; Resource Allocation; Industry Clusters; Infrastructure; Family Ownership; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Business and Government Relations; Creativity; Reputation; Social and Collaborative Networks; Civil Society or Community; Social Issues; Poverty; Strategy; Construction Industry; Education Industry; Energy Industry; Industrial Products Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Steel Industry; Europe; Italy; Latin America; North and Central America; Mexico; North America; United States; South America; Argentina; Buenos Aires; Brazil
- April 2025
- Case
Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters: Vickers Oils and Resolving Family Conflict over Generations
By: Lauren Cohen, Octavian Graf Pilati and Sophia Pan
Will Vickers, a seventh-generation (G7) member of the Vickers Family, grappled with a pressing challenge: how to re-integrate family members into the firm to recover lost talent. His father, Peter Vickers, was the lone leader of the Vickers Oils—despite having stepped... View Details
Keywords: Shareholder; Involvement; Family Office; Family Firms; Family Business; Business Growth and Maturation; Experience and Expertise; Retention; Leadership Development; Business or Company Management; Management Succession; Organizational Structure; Family Ownership; Family and Family Relationships; Diversification; Conflict and Resolution; Consumer Products Industry; United Kingdom
- April 2025
- Article
Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Elizabeth Friedman, Kannan Srinivasan, Ravi Dhar and Xupin Zhang
Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. While past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, relatively less is known about how smiling... View Details
- March 2025 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Xfund and Sam Altman: Finding Harvard's Best Generative AI Founders
By: Suraj Srinivasan
On May 1, 2024, Xfund Managing Partners Patrick Chung and Brandon Farwell, hosted a high-stakes venture pitch session designed to select one startup for a minimum $100,000 investment. This “Xperiment Stake” competition, dedicated to startups in the Generative AI... View Details
- March 2025
- Case
YouTube: Bidding for NFL Sunday Ticket
By: Anita Elberse and Crystal Yao
In December 2022, Erin Teague, a senior director and the global head of sports, movies and shows at YouTube, technology giant Alphabet Inc.’s video- sharing platform, received the news that Sundar Pichai, the chief executive officer of Alphabet and its subsidiary... View Details
- March 2025
- Case
Metaphysic AI: Rethinking the Value of Human Expertise
By: Zoë B. Cullen, Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
In early 2025, Thomas Graham, CEO of Metaphysic, a leading AI generative video company confronted fundamental questions about who should control digital identity in a world where AI could perfectly recreate human likeness. Founded in 2021, Metaphysic first rose to fame... View Details
- March 2025 (Revised March 2025)
- Case
Good for the Seller, Good for the Buyer and Good for Society: Sampo-yoshi, Sustainability and Trust at ITOCHU
By: Sandra J. Sucher and Bethelehem Y Araya
In 2024, ITOCHU CEO Masahiro Okafuji was at a crossroads. As the thirteenth CEO since ITOCHU’s founding in 1858, he had fueled the company’s growth since 2011 by bringing ITOCHU’s founding philosophy of Sampo-yoshi (good for the seller, good for the buyer and... View Details
- March 2025
- Article
Do Public Financial Statements Influence Private Equity and Venture Capital Financing?
By: Brian K. Baik, Natalie Berfeld and Rodrigo S. Verdi
We study whether private firm public financial statements influence the probability of raising venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) financing. In particular, we propose that private firms’ public financial statements can help the VC/PE search process by... 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
- 2025
- Working Paper
Code-Washing: Evidence from Open-Source Blockchain Startups
By: Ofir Gefen, Daniel Rabetti, Yannan Sun and Che Zhang
This study examines startups' management of source code repositories, distinguishing authentic developers ("code-producers''), from those inflating activity to mislead investors ("code-washers''). Using global blockchain startup and GitHub data, we find that... View Details
- February 2025
- Teaching Note
Influencer-Led Brand Building: Hairitage and the McKnights
By: William R. Kerr and James Palano
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 825-066. Mindy McKnight started in 2009 as an early influencer on social media whose videos of creative hairstyles for girls launched her family on an entrepreneurship journey. The McKnights transitioned from YouTube ad revenue to brand... View Details
- February 21, 2025
- Article
How a Company’s Ownership Model Shapes the Mistakes It Makes
By: Josh Baron
Why do some companies continue to thrive for decades and others die after an initial run of success? Like many kinds of accidents, company failure is generally the consequence of cascading effects that combine to overwhelm a previously effective strategy. But the... View Details
- February 2025 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
Align Partners and SM Entertainment: Korean Shareholder Activism Meets K-Pop (A)
By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Billy Chan
For years, institutional investors had experienced very limited success in influencing the management of listed companies through shareholder activist campaigns in Korea. The common practice of circular ownership and public resentment toward foreign shareholder... View Details
- February 2025
- Supplement
Align Partners and SM Entertainment: Korean Shareholder Activism Meets K-Pop (B)
By: Charles CY Wang and Billy Chan
For years, institutional investors had experienced very limited success in influencing the management of listed companies through shareholder activist campaigns in Korea. The common practice of circular ownership and public resentment toward foreign shareholder... View Details
- February 2025
- Case
RedBird Capital Partners
By: Anita Elberse and David Moreno Vicente
In July 2024, Gerry Cardinale, the founder and managing partner of RedBird Capital Partners (‘RedBird’) has helped orchestrate a high-profile deal in the world of entertainment: one in which Skydance Media (‘Skydance’), a content production studio led by David Ellison... View Details
- February 2025
- Case
Blue Owl Financing of Ping Identity
By: Victoria Ivashina and Srimayi Mylavarapu
In the fall of 2022, Blue Owl Capital's investment committee evaluated a potential investment in the technology sector. The proposed transaction centered on Ping Identity Corporation (“Ping”), a fast-growing identity access management (IAM) software company that was... View Details