Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

Innovation used to be seen as a game best left to entrepreneurs, but now a new breed of corporate managers is flipping this logic on its head. These Corporate Explorers have the insight, resilience, and discipline to overcome the obstacles and build new ventures from inside even the largest organizations. Corporate Explorers are part entrepreneurs, using innovation disciplines to jump start cutting-edge ideas, and part change leaders, capable of creating support for investment. They see that corporations already own the ideas, resources, and—critically—the talent to build new ventures. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Bosch, LexisNexis, and Analog Devices enable managers to put these assets to use and gain an upper hand over startups that threaten to disrupt them.

• Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) 59, no. 2 (April 2022): 374-391.

We examine whether and how ride-sharing services influence the demand for home-sharing services. Our identification strategy hinges on a natural experiment in which Uber/Lyft exited Austin, Texas, in May 2016 due to local regulation. Using a 12-month longitudinal dataset of 11,536 Airbnb properties, we find that Uber/Lyft’s exit led to a 14% decrease in Airbnb occupancy in Austin. In response, hosts decreased the nightly rate by $9.3 and the supply by 4.5%. We argue that when Uber/Lyft exited Austin, the transportation costs for most Airbnb guests increased significantly because most Airbnb properties (unlike hotels) have poor access to public transportation.

• Health Care Initiative

Despite enthusiasm about the potential to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to medicine and health care delivery, adoption remains tepid, even for the most compelling technologies. In this article, the authors focus on one set of challenges to AI adoption: those related to liability. Well-designed AI liability insurance can mitigate predictable liability risks and uncertainties in a way that is aligned with the interests of health care’s main stakeholders, including patients, physicians, and health care organization leadership. A market for AI insurance will encourage the use of high-quality AI, because insurers will be most keen to underwrite those products that are demonstrably safe and effective. As such, well-designed AI insurance products are likely to reduce the uncertainty associated with liability risk for both manufacturers—including developers of software as a medical device—and clinician users and thereby increase innovation, competition, adoption, and trust in beneficial technological advances.

• Featured Case

Danish Crown, one of the world’s largest exporters of pork meat and one of Europe’s top five producers of beef, faced increasing headwinds in 2021, making CEO Jais Valeur feel like the core of the meat business was under attack. As a cooperative and prominent player in Denmark’s high-standard agriculture sector, the company had particular responsibilities and constraints including a high labor and production cost and strict regulatory environment. More recently growing concerns over climate change had led to increasing criticism of the environmental impacts of livestock production. Consumers in Denmark and worldwide were turning away from meat, for its climate impact but also for concerns about animal welfare and their own health. The case discusses these industry trends and describes Danish Crown’s efforts to respond by transitioning to a more sustainable company.

• Featured Case

To Cédric Jeannot, leveraging technology to promote financial inclusion was personal. After no established financial institution would accept his technology platform to lower transaction costs for free, Jeannot launched FinTech company Be Mobile Africa in May 2020. Within a year, the company had reached over 35 countries with many potential users pending on its waiting lists. A ‘for-profit with purpose’, Be Mobile Africa aimed to lift 100 million people out of poverty by extending financial services to previously unbanked populations across the African continent. Racing towards its goal, the company needed a longer-term expansion strategy to fulfill Jeannot’s mission.

• HBS Working Paper

We analyze a field experiment conducted on AngelList Talent, a large online search platform for startup jobs. In the experiment, AngelList randomly informed job seekers of whether a startup was funded by a top-tier investor and/or was funded recently. We find that the same startup receives significantly more interest when information about top-tier investors is provided. Information about recent funding has no effect. The effect of top-tier investors is not driven by low-quality candidates and is stronger for earlier-stage startups. The results show that venture capitalists can add value passively, simply by attaching their names to startups.

• HBS Working Paper

We investigate the role of evidence-based information in shaping individuals' preferences for trade policies through a series of survey experiments that contain randomized information treatments. Each information treatment provides a concise statement of economics research findings on how openness to trade has affected labor market outcomes and goods prices. Across annual surveys from 2018-2021, each administered on a representative sample of the U.S. general population, we find that information highlighting the link between trade and manufacturing job losses significantly raises respondents' propensity to select limits on imports as a preferred policy; this tendency is only partially offset if respondents receive additional information describing the accompanying expansion in non-manufacturing jobs.