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- December 2022
- Article
Shaping Nascent Industries: Innovation Strategy and Regulatory Uncertainty in Personal Genomics
By: Cheng Gao and Rory McDonald
In nascent industries—whose new technologies are often poorly understood
by regulators—contending with regulatory uncertainty can be crucial to organizational survival and growth. Prior research on nonmarket strategy has largely
focused on established firms in mature...
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- October 2022
- Article
How Leaders with Divergent Visions Generate Novel Strategy: Navigating the Paradox of Preservation and Modernization in Swiss Watchmaking
By: Ryan Raffaelli, Rich DeJordy and Rory M. McDonald
How do leaders with divergent visions for their organization come together to create a novel strategy? This paper employs paradox as a lens to investigate how leader-dyads can integrate opposing strategies to produce a new, generative approach. Drawing on a qualitative...
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- September 2022
- Article
A Spanner in the Works: Category-Spanning Entrants and Audience Valuation of Incumbents
By: Rory M. McDonald and Ryan T. Allen
Previous work has examined how audiences evaluate category-spanning organizations, but little is known about how their entrance affects evaluations of other, proximate organizations. We posit that the emergence of category-spanning entrants signals the advent of an...
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- Article
Mastering Innovation's Toughest Trade-Offs
By: Christopher B. Bingham and Rory M. McDonald
Leaders must answer eight key questions to address the hidden tensions underlying innovation strategies.
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- June 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Disrupting Defense at Anduril Industries
By: Rory McDonald, Timothy Buehn, Aditi Ghai and James Heffelfinger
- 2022
- Book
Productive Tensions: How Every Leader Can Tackle Innovation's Toughest Trade-Offs
By: Chris Bingham and Rory McDonald
Why is leading innovation in nascent business environments so distressingly hit-or-miss? More than 90% of high-potential ventures don’t reach their projected targets. Surveys show that 80% of executives consider innovation crucial to their growth strategy, but only 6%...
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- April 2022
- Article
The Past Is Prologue? Venture-Capital Syndicates' Collaborative Experience and Start-Up Exits
By: Dan Wang, Emily Cox Pahnke and Rory M. McDonald
Past research has produced contradictory insights into how prior collaboration between organizations—their relational embeddedness—impacts collective collaborative performance. We theorize that the effect of relational embeddedness on collaborative success is...
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- March 2022
- Case
Managing Innovation at Atrium Health: 'Never Let a Good Crisis Go To Waste'
By: Derek van Bever, Rory McDonald and Anibha Singh
- March 2022
- Module Note
Navigating Nascent Industries and Product Categories
By: Rory McDonald
This Note introduces a module of cases used at Harvard Business School to teach fundamental concepts about navigating nascent industries and product categories. It elaborates a set of ‘innovation tensions’ that managers must address in these domains. In connecting the...
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- August 2021 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
Roku: Swimming Upstream Amidst Industry Giants
By: Rory McDonald, Eric Westphal and Shengjie Zhu
- Winter 2021
- Article
How Would-Be Category Kings Become Commoners
By: Rory McDonald and Keith Krach
Category creation is the holy grail in business, but more often than not, the very companies that establish lucrative new markets don’t end up being the category kings. Why? Many executives undermine their own ventures’ standing by misinterpreting and misfiring on...
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- September 2020
- Case
Apple Bets on Augmented Reality
By: Rory McDonald, David Lane and Mel Martin
In 2020, augmented reality (AR) was still a nascent technology with blockbuster potential, one which Apple was actively developing as its iPhone franchise waned. But the emergence of AR was uneven, including the disappointing Google Glass and the unexpected viral...
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- September–October 2020
- Article
When It's Time to Pivot, What's Your Story?: How to Sell Stakeholders on a New Strategy
By: Rory McDonald and Robert Bremner
To succeed, a new company must rally investors, staff, customers, and the media around a good story. But often that narrative turns out to be wrong, and entrepreneurs realize they need to change direction. How that shift is communicated can have a huge impact on a...
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- July 2020 (Revised October 2020)
- Teaching Note
Parrot: Navigating the Nascent Drone Industry
By: Rory McDonald, Anibha Singh and Matt Higgins
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 619-085
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- June 2020
- Article
Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and the Effective Design of a Business Model
By: Rory McDonald and Kathleen Eisenhardt
Prior research advances several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in the same nascent market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how...
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- May–June 2020
- Article
The New-Market Conundrum
By: Rory McDonald and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
Brand-new markets are like the wormholes of science fiction, where the usual rules of time and space do not apply. When a market has just been born, the forces of competition there are constantly in flux, it’s unclear who your customers really are, and conventional...
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Keywords:
New Markets;
Markets;
Business Model;
Strategy;
Framework;
Innovation and Invention;
Value Creation
- February 2020 (Revised November 2020)
- Teaching Note
Marcus by Goldman Sachs
By: Rory McDonald, Anibha Singh and Matt A. Higgins
- December 2019 (Revised April 2021)
- Teaching Note
Under Armour
By: Rory McDonald and Matt Higgins
Teaching Note for HBS No. 618-020.
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- November 2019 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
Marcus by Goldman Sachs
By: Rory McDonald, Samir Junnarkar and David Lane
Five years on from the 2008 financial crisis, Goldman Sachs remained wounded. Revenues at the global investment bank had stagnated below pre-crisis levels, and the firm had yet to rebound from a substantial decline in securities-trading revenues. Marcus by Goldman...
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