Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World: Course Overview Note

Alan D. MacCormack

Background Note | HBS Case Collection | March 2006

Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World: Course Overview Note

Abstract

The Harvard Business School Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World course helps students understand the challenges that uncertainty implies for innovation and how to overcome them. The course emphasizes multiple levels of analysis--from creating and executing development project, to building and balancing portfolios of project, to assessing and selecting future opportunities for development--showing how to align these activities to meet uncertainty and take advantage of the opportunities it presents. Allows students to respond to all the situations they encounter from multiple perspectives, assume different roles--from project manager to CEO--to appreciate how the various organizational roles themselves reflect these perspectives.

Keywords: Curriculum and Courses; Innovation and Management; Projects; Opportunities; Perspective; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Risk and Uncertainty; Problems and Challenges; Managerial Roles;

Format: Print

26 pages

Educators Purchase

Citation:

MacCormack, Alan D. "Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World: Course Overview Note." Harvard Business School Background Note 606-105, March 2006.

This case describes the operations of a fictitious company that processes Cranberries. The case contains data that allows students to calculate the bottleneck stage in production, and to evaluate alternative investment options for increasing cranberry processing capacity.

Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018 (Revised February 2020)

Innovation at Uber: The Launch of Express POOL

Chiara Farronato, Alan MacCormack and Sarah Mehta

Set in March 2018, the case follows ride-sharing company Uber as it develops and launches a new product called Express POOL. This product offers a reduced price to riders willing to carpool, walk a short distance to/from their pick-up and drop-off points, and wait a few minutes before being matched to a driver. Two weeks after the launch of Express POOL in six U.S. cities, Uber’s product managers discover that if riders are made to wait five minutes to be matched to a driver—rather than the standard two minutes—rider cancellation rates increase, but Uber’s costs per ride are reduced. Together with data scientists, engineers, and product operations specialists, the product managers must decide whether to keep rider wait times at two minutes or increase wait times to five minutes in the six newly launched cities. The decision is complicated by the fact that Uber’s data science team normally places a five-week moratorium on changes to any new product, to allow robust data to be collected on its performance. This case is paired with a supplementary dataset from Uber (HBS No. 619-702). In advance of the class discussion, students can analyze the data and draw their own conclusions about the trade-offs of maintaining the standard wait times or increasing them.

Keywords: Innovation and Management; Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Technology; Mobile Technology; Software; Technology Platform; Decision Making; Technology Industry; California; San Francisco;

Citation:

Farronato, Chiara, Alan MacCormack, and Sarah Mehta. "Innovation at Uber: The Launch of Express POOL." Harvard Business School Case 619-003, October 2018. (Revised February 2020.) View Details

Cite View Details Educators Purchase

Faculty & Research

Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World: Course Overview Note

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author