As an MBA student at HBS, you will prepare yourself for leadership in a rapidly changing world in which natural resources are increasingly scarce and the threat of climate change ever more urgent.
Project Helios: Harvesting the Sun
- FEBRUARY 2021 (REVISED FEBRUARY 2021)
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- Teaching Material
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 219-009.
AptDeco: Circular Economy Furniture Marketplace
- FEBRUARY 2021
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- Case
AptDeco, a used furniture marketplace was growing rapidly in the tri-state area. The Co-Founders were confident that the business model, financial position, and unit economics positioned AptDeco for scaling in the massive $120 billion furniture market, despite its complexity and high costs. The co-founders were looking at different options to scale: working to convert sellers into buyers and vice versa, finding superusers that would fuel the supply for their platform, expand to new markets, rebrand with a sustainability focus. What is the best way for them to scale?
Reimagining the Balanced Scorecard for the ESG Era
- FEBRUARY 03, 2021
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- Harvard Business Review Digital Articles
Companies are increasingly aware that their customers and society in general expect businesses to adopt and work towards social and environmental objectives as well as the traditional financial ones. This involves not only re-evaluating firms’ models but re-imagining new, more inclusive ecosystems from a multi-stakeholder point of view. In this article, the authors propose an update to the Balanced Scorecard, one of the most successful management tools of all time, so that it can better help align stakeholders coming from very different places around each other’s goals as well as their own.
Bespoken Spirits: Disrupting Distilling
- JANUARY 2021
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- Teaching Material
On October 7, 2020, Bespoken Spirits publicly announced it had received $2.6 million of seed funding for its “sustainable maturation process,” a process that could produce award-winning whiskey’s in just days rather than years using a novel technology and data science. The technology dramatically reduced the time, cost, and environmental impact (it required less energy and less wood) of making whiskey. At the same time, the technology could also be used to enhance a whiskey’s taste profile which could allow producers to charge more for their products. To date, entrepreneurs Stu Aaron and Martin Janousek had proven they could produce whiskey at scale and with desired properties. Having validated the concept, they now had to decide whether to continue making whiskey themselves or use their technology to process it for others. In short, they had to decide whether to be a product-based, B2C company or a service-based, B2B company, or both? If they decided to be a service business, should they emphasis the Maturation-as-a-Service (MaaS, faster and lower cost production) or the Customization-as-a-Service (CaaS, creation of customized products with unique taste profiles) business in the short term?
Financial Regulation and Climate Risk Management
- 07 JUL 2020
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- Climate Rising
Explore different approaches to modeling and managing climate risk from the vantage
points of industry leaders Robert Litterman, a seasoned risk management expert; Nushin
Kormi, a specialist in sustainable finance; and Kevin Stiroh, a financial regulator.
The discussion, moderated by Professor Ramana Nanda, focuses on the concept of transition
risk—the potential consequences if climate regulations are imposed gradually or suddenly—and
investment strategies to prepare for and mitigate this risk. This is one of 4 new
episodes this summer based on live content from the Harvard Business School Climate
Risk conference held earlier in 2020.
Explore different approaches to modeling and managing climate risk from the vantage
points of industry leaders Robert Litterman, a seasoned risk management expert; Nushin
Kormi, a specialist in sustainable finance; and Kevin Stiroh, a financial regulator.
The discussion, moderated by Professor Ramana Nanda, focuses on the concept of transition
risk—the potential consequences if climate regulations are imposed gradually or suddenly—and
investment strategies to prepare for and mitigate this risk. This is one of 4 new
episodes this summer based on live content from the Harvard Business School Climate
Risk conference held earlier in 2020.
An advanced curriculum for corporate and nonprofit executives from all over the world to prepare them for new levels of leadership.
The Business & Environment Initiative connects alumni with students, faculty, and each other for learning, careers, and impact.
US election: What it means for climate change and ESG
Re: Vikram Gandhi
- 18 Nov 2020
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- Financial Times
Building a Just and Climate-Ready Economy in a Post-COVID World
- 02 Oct 2020
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- Harvard Business School