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• Case | HBS Case Collection | 2013 (Revised from original 2013 version)

  Royal DSM: Fighting Hidden Hunger

  Rebecca Henderson, Noah Fisher and Mary Shelman

  In 2007 Royal DSM, a leading life science and materials company, entered a partnership with the World Food Programme (WFP) to combat hidden hunger around the world by providing micronutrient solutions. The case investigates the unexpectedly large impact the partnership had on DSM and on the global nutrition discussion, and discusses the benefits and challenges of scaling up the Nutrition Improvement Program—a key component of DSM's human nutrition and health division—beyond the WFP partnership, despite the need to build significant additional capabilities and its somewhat lower margins.

  Citation:

  Henderson, Rebecca, Noah Fisher, and Mary Shelman. "Royal DSM: Fighting Hidden Hunger." Harvard Business School Case 313-085, May 2013. (Revised from original January 2013 version.)

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• Technical Note | HBS Case Collection | 2013 (Revised from original 2013 version)

  Relational Contracts and the Roots of Sustained Competitive Advantage

  Rebecca M. Henderson

  This note focuses on organizational "competencies" or "capabilities" as a potential source of sustained competitive advantage. Research in this area hypothesizes that some firms outperform their competition because they can do things that their rivals cannot.

  Citation:

  Henderson, Rebecca M. "Relational Contracts and the Roots of Sustained Competitive Advantage." Harvard Business School Technical Note 313-105, April 2013. (Revised from original January 2013 version.)

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2013

  Managers and Market Capitalism

  Rebecca Henderson and Karthik Ramanna

  In a capitalist system based on free markets, do managers have responsibilities to the system itself, and, in particular, should these responsibilities shape their behavior when they are attempting to structure those institutions of capitalism that are determined through a political process? A prevailing view—perhaps most eloquently argued by Milton Friedman—is that managers should act to maximize shareholder value, and thus that they should take every opportunity (within the bounds of the law) to structure market institutions so as to increase profitability. We maintain here that if the political process is sufficiently 'thick,' in that diverse views are well-represented and if politicians and regulators cannot be easily captured, then this shareholder-return view of political engagement is unlikely to reduce social welfare in the aggregate and thus damage the legitimacy of market capitalism. However, we contend that sometimes the political process of determining institutions of capitalism is 'thin,' in that managers find themselves with specialized technical knowledge unavailable to outsiders and with little political opposition—such as in the case of determining certain corporate accounting standards that define corporate profitability. In these circumstances, we argue that managers have a responsibility to structure market institutions so as to preserve the legitimacy of market capitalism, even if doing so is at the expense of corporate profits. We make this argument on grounds that it is both in managers' self-interest and, expanding on Friedman, managers' ethical duty. We provide a framework for future research to explore and develop these arguments.

  Citation:

  Henderson, Rebecca, and Karthik Ramanna. "Managers and Market Capitalism." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 13–075, March 2013.

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