Research - Global - Harvard Business School

November 2024
Case

Ather Energy: The Future of Mobility

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kannan Srinivasan and Malini Sen

Ather Energy, India’s third-largest electric scooter maker by volume, was founded in 2013. Five years later, the start-up launched its first electric scooter, Ather 450, which was powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), to navigate...

October 2024
Case

Allurion: Competing in the Age of GLP-1

By: Satish Tadikonda, Rajiv Lal, David Lane and Sarah Sasso

Shantanu Gaur had built Allurion into a formidable business internationally, providing obesity patients with a less invasive option long before GLP-1 drugs became the latest craze. Selling Allurion's medical device across 60+ countries, he awaited FDA approval to bring...

August 2024
Teaching Material

Development while Decarbonizing: India's Path to Net-Zero

By: Vikram S Gandhi and Radhika Kak

August, 2024
Article
Journal of the European Economic Association

Absenteeism, Productivity, and Relational Contracts Inside the Firm

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Jean-François Gauthier, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

We study relational contracts among managers using a unique dataset that tracks transfers of workers across teams in Indian ready-made garment factories. We focus on how relational contracts help managers cope with worker absenteeism shocks, which are frequent, often...

July 2024
Case

RMZ 4.0: 'How Fast Do We Want to Run?'

By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott

In 2023, RMZ Corporation (“RMZ”) a large family-owned real estate firm based in Bengaluru, India, announced plans to transform from a commercial real estate developer to a diversified alternative asset owner. Over the next 5 years, RMZ looked to grow its real estate...

July 2024
Article
Journal of Urban Economics

JUE Insight: Infrastructure and Finance: Evidence from India's GQ Highway Network

By: Abhiman Das, Ejaz Ghani, Arti Grover, William Kerr and Ramana Nanda

We use data from Reserve Bank of India to study the impact of India's Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway project on finance-dependent activity. Loan volumes increase by 20-30% in districts along GQ and are stronger in industries more dependent upon external finance....

June 2024
Case

PRAN-RFL Group: A Diversified Family Business

By: Christina R. Wing, Paul Wuensche and Brittany L. Logan

The PRAN-RFL Group was founded in 1980 by Amjad Khan Chowdhury, and grew to become one of the largest conglomerates in Bangladesh in 2023. Throughout the years, Amjad established fast food chains, production manufacturing lines, retail stores, and his own foundation...

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...

April 2024 (Revised July 2024)
Case

Market Dynamics and Moral Dilemmas: Novo Nordisk’s Weight-Loss Drugs

By: Joseph L. Badaracco, Tom Quinn and John Schultz

Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk was owned by a charitable foundation, and since its founding in the 1920s had focused on producing insulin to treat diabetes. In 2017, however, it released Ozempic, a diabetes treatment with the revolutionary side effect of...

Spring 2024
Article
Daedalus

One Aspirational Future for India’s Higher Education Sector

By: Tarun Khanna

Several recent encouraging experiments in Indian higher education suggest a plausible aspirational path toward a more salubrious future than that suggested by an otherwise struggling system. Four case studies of privately conceived and funded universities each exhibit...

March 2024
Case

ixigo

By: Ranjay Gulati and Rachna Tahilyani

Ixigo is India’s second-largest online travel aggregator (OTA) and the market leader among private train OTAs. It has overcome numerous near-death crises to emerge as a customer-centric, profitable firm. It aspires to become the leading OTA in the next billion Internet...

February 2024 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Lina Khan at the FTC: Redefining Antitrust in the Age of Big Tech

By: Joseph L. Badaracco Jr. and Susan Pinckney

In 2023 and 2024, the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice sued Google, Amazon, and Apple claiming antitrust violations. These lawsuits marked a shift in U.S. antitrust enforcement away from the Chicago School and towards the New Brandeis school of...

February 2024 (Revised February 2024)
Case

CLSA: Integrating ESG in Stock Valuation

By: Shirley Lu, Aaron Yoon and Billy Chan

In 2023, a senior financial analyst at the Hong Kong-based stock brokerage firm CLSA was surprised to see that, based on his calculations, the financial impact from climate risks on a major Indian cement manufacturing company’s projected earnings could be massive....

February 2024
Teaching Material

ReNew (B): A New Direction

By: Gunnar Trumbull and Malini Sen

The global renewables sector was in a slump, but the Indian market was booming. India’s largest renewable electricity generator, ReNew, faced a dilemma: it traded on the Nasdaq in New York, but saw huge opportunity in the Indian market. In response, CEO Sumant Sinha...

December 2023
Teaching Material

India: Will the Giant Emerge?

By: Christian Ketels
This teaching note outlines a plan for conducting a discussion of the case "India: Will the Giant Emrge?". The case provides information on the Indian economy, a key driver of future global growth,. It discusses how India's challenges in defining an effective...

December 2023
Case

TikTok: The Algorithm Will See You Now

By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai

In a world where attention is a scarce commodity, this case explores the meteoric rise of TikTok—an app that transformed from a niche platform for teens into the most visited domain by 2021—surpassing even Google. Its algorithm was a sophisticated mechanism for...

November 2023 (Revised April 2024)
Case

Paytm: A Payments Journey in India

By: Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui, Amram Migdal and Kanika Jain
Paytm was an Indian financial technology company. Since its launch in 2010, it had built a dominant payments system in India, comprising mobile wallets, offline payments via QR codes, and a payments bank that offered no-frills banking. However, in 2016, the Indian...

November 2023
Case

Tata Group in 2021: Pursuing Profits through Purpose

By: Tarun Khanna, Krishna G. Palepu and Vidhya Muthuram

October 8, 2021: Tata Sons won a bid to acquire India’s national carrier Air India, marking the airline's return to its original owners after 68 long years. The winning bid of $2.4 billion gave Tata Sons full ownership of the airline and its coveted network of 6,200...

November 2023
Case

Chai Point

By: Rembrand Koning, Daniel W. Elfenbein and Kanika Jain

Chai Point was an Indian food and beverage company focused on chai. It started in 2010 as a retail store network but soon expanded to corporate offices by developing an IoT-enabled automatic tea and filter coffee machine. By 2023, Chai Point had 170 stores and 5000...

October 2023
Case

India: Will the Giant Emerge?

By: Christian Ketels and Radhika Kak
The case describes India's economic development trajectory, with a specific focus on the last few years under the Modi administration. It provides insights into the current economic profile and competitiveness of the country. The case enables students to identify the...