Research
Research
Featured Reports
42
Results
- September 2021 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Katie Couric Media: Landing the First Client
By: N. Louis Shipley and William R. Kerr
| In May 2018, celebrated journalist Katie Couric and her husband, John Molner, had recently launched a full-service media firm called Katie Couric Media (KCM). Couric treasured the opportunity to address important social issues like gender equality, environmental... |
- July 2020 (Revised September 2020)
- Case
MobSquad
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, William R. Kerr and Susie L. Ma
| Irfhan Rawji (MBA 2004) launched MobSquad in October 2018 to help American tech start-ups retain hard-to-find talent, many of whom struggled with U.S. work visa issues, such as software engineers with experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data... |
- June 2020
- Case
Agile Consumer Product Innovation with Alibaba's Tmall Innovation Center
By: William R. Kerr, Daniel O'Connor and James Palano
| Consumer products companies were beset by changes on all sides during the 2010s. Customers were increasingly turning to ecommerce platforms rather than shopping in-store. Meanwhile, nimble, digitally-savvy competitors were gaining market share by capitalizing on the... |
- April 2020 (Revised October 2020)
- Case
Unilever's Response to the Future of Work
By: William R. Kerr, Emilie Billaud and Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej
| In February 2020, Nick Dalton, executive vice president HR business transformation at Unilever, reflected on the changing nature of work marked by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation. Launched in 2016, Unilever’s Future of Work... |
- March 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Culture at Google
By: Nien-hê Hsieh, Amy Klopfenstein and Sarah Mehta
| Beginning in 2017, technology (tech) company Google faced a series of employee-relations issues that threatened its unique culture of innovation and open communication. Issues included protests surrounding Google’s contracts with the U.S. government, restrictions of... |
- February 2020 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Wellthy: The Economics of Caring
By: Brian L. Trelstad and Joseph B. Fuller
| In 2014, Lindsay Jurist-Rosner (MBA ’09) founded Wellthy, a B2C business that coordinates care for working professionals seeking help to support loved ones with chronic diseases or aging parents. With personal experience as a young professional providing care for her... |
- February 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Catalant's Operating System for the Future of Work
By: Christopher Stanton, William R. Kerr, James Palano and Kendall Smith
| This case touches on the topics of project-based work, agile methodology, and skill and talent management through Catalant's evolution as a company. Catalant’s journey to becoming a software platform and talent marketplace provides context for students to explore new... |
- January 2020
- Case
Freelancer, Ltd.
By: Christopher Stanton, Karim R. Lakhani, Jennifer L. Hoffman, Jin Hyun Paik and Nina Cohodes
| Over the course of the 2010s, the rapid advancement of mobile technologies and the rise of online freelancing platforms seemed to portend a radical transformation of labor markets into on-demand, flexible talent pools. Even though several Fortune 500... |
- November 2019
- Case
DeepMap: Charting the Road Ahead for Autonomous Vehicles
By: Shane Greenstein and Nicole Tempest Keller
| Founded in 2016, DeepMap developed high definition (HD) mapping software and localization services for Level 4+ autonomous vehicles. Traditional navigational maps were accurate to a few meters, which was sufficient for drivers but not for machine-driven vehicles that... |
- October 2019 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
The Predictive Index
By: Lynda M. Applegate and James Weber
| Mike Zani and Daniel Muzquiz needed to decide next steps to create a new category in the human resources consulting industry and scale their company. Zani and Muzquiz, serial entrepreneurs, acquired Predictive Index in 2014. Previously, as clients of the 65-year-old... |
- September 2019 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
Google: To TVC or Not to TVC?
By: William R. Kerr and Carl Kreitzberg
| In late 2018, evidence emerged that many of Google’s temporary help agency workers, vendors, and independent contractors (“TVCs”) were unhappy with the company. TVCs, who reportedly made up 49.95% of Google’s 170,000-person global workforce, had raised concerns of... |
- September 2019
- Case
Shell: A Company of Opportunity?
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Emer Moloney
| The Opportunity Hub was a cloud-based platform that enabled managers to market projects they were working on and associated resourcing needs as “Opportunity Owners” and employees, or “Opportunity Seekers,” to browse these statements of need and engage when they had... |
- March 2019 (Revised August 2019)
- Case
- Harvard Business Publishing
CareerWise Colorado
By: Joseph B. Fuller, Rawi Abdelal, and Matthew Preble
- August 2019 (Revised December 2022)
- Case
Endeavor in 2019: Leading Through Inflections
- August 2019
- Case
Twiggle: E-Commerce with Semantic Search
By: Shane Greenstein and Danielle Golan
| Four years after being founded, in 2014, by former Google executives Amir Konigsberg (CEO) and Adi Avidor (CTO), Twiggle had developed a search enhancement that plugged into an online merchant’s existing framework. The company utilized advanced structuring and... |
- May 2019 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
- Harvard Business Publishing
Walmart's Workforce of the Future
By: William R. Kerr and Jordan Bach-Lombardo
- July 2019 (Revised May 2020)
- Case
AT&T, Retraining, and the Workforce of Tomorrow
By: William R. Kerr, Joseph B. Fuller and Carl Kreitzberg
| By the late 2000s, rapid changes in the telecommunications industry forced AT&T’s management team to take on a task that CEO Randall Stephenson called the “biggest logistical challenge” they had ever seen: retraining 100,000 workers by 2020. In 2012, internal company... |
- July 2019 (Revised November 2019)
- Case
Osaro: Picking the Best Path
By: William R. Kerr, James Palano and Bastiane Huang
| The founder of Osaro saw the potential of deep reinforcement learning to allow robots to be applied to new applications. Osaro targeted warehousing, already a dynamic industry for robotics and automation, for its initial product—a system which would allow robotic arms... |
- April 2019 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
- Harvard Business Publishing
Western Governors University: 10x Vision
By: William R. Kerr and Susie L. Ma