Flying into the Future: HondaJet

Gary P. Pisano; Jesse  Shulman

Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2018

Flying into the Future: HondaJet

by Gary P. Pisano and Jesse Shulman

Abstract

This cases examine Honda’s diversification into the light jet market. In 1985, Honda initiated a secret program to develop a small jet. Over the years, the program had many ups and downs (it was almost canceled several times). Then, a breakthrough in the configuration of the engines lead Honda to believe it could successfully introduce a very light jet to the market (the “Civic” of the private jet market). In 2015, the company’s HondaJet received FAA certification. The HondaJet is now the number one selling jet in the very light jet segment of the market, and the CEO of Honda Aircraft Corporation, Michimasa Fujino (who started with the program in 1985) must now decide on ways to grow the business.

Keywords: Diversification; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Innovation and Management; Air Transportation Industry;

Language: English

Format: Print

17 pages

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Citation:

Pisano, Gary P., and Jesse Shulman. "Flying into the Future: HondaJet." Harvard Business School Case 618-012, January 2018.

Working Paper | 2019

Long-Term Firm Growth: An Empirical Analysis of US Manufacturers 1959-2015

Giovanni Dosi, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella, Gary P. Pisano and Federico Tamagni

Firm growth is an essential feature of market economies, shaping together macroeconomic performance and the evolution of industry structures. As a po-tential indicator of organizational “ﬁtness” within a competitive environment, ﬁrm growth is also a central concern to both the practice and theory of business strategy. Despite both its theoretical and practical importance, though, growth remains a poorly understood property of ﬁrms. While previous studies have documented the highly skewed nature of ﬁrm growth rates, we know far less about the persistence of growth rates over long-periods of time. For instance, do “fast growers” tend to maintain their relative growth rates advantages over long-periods or is superior growth a transitory phenomenon? Is, as predicted by evolutionary and capability based theories of the ﬁrm, the process of ﬁrm growth path-dependent or is it more akin to a random walk? The answers to these questions are central to building a robust theory of ﬁrm growth. This paper attempts to address this gap in our empirical knowledge of ﬁrm growth using a dataset that spans 50 years, which al-lows the abandonment of the assumption, common to all incumbent studies, that the stochastic paths of all ﬁrms stem from the same generating process. These exploratory results indicate that growth rate persistence is there and my be even substantial for some ﬁrms, but it is rare. We also study the links between the micro-properties of ﬁrm growth within sectors and the patterns of aggregate growth of these same sectors. Indeed, we ﬁnd circumstantial but widespread evidence that heterogeneity across ﬁrms correlates with industry dynamism.

Citation:

Dosi, Giovanni, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella, Gary P. Pisano, and Federico Tamagni. "Long-Term Firm Growth: An Empirical Analysis of US Manufacturers 1959-2015." Working Paper, May 2019. View Details

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Flying into the Future: HondaJet

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