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- April 18, 2023
- Article
The Rebirth of Software as a Service
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Jacco van der Kooij
Traditional sales models focus on customer acquisition and the “funnel” or “pipeline” metrics that dominate talk about sales. But this approach falls short when applied to a recurring revenue business, where the customer life cycle looks more like a bowtie, not a...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Using GPT for Market Research
By: James Brand, Ayelet Israeli and Donald Ngwe
Large language models (LLMs) have quickly become popular as labor-augmenting tools for programming, writing, and many other processes that benefit from quick text generation. In this paper we explore the uses and benefits of LLMs for researchers and practitioners who...
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- March 9, 2023
- Article
Linking Growth and the Frontline
By: Frank V. Cespedes, Jay Galeota and Michael Wong
Most strategies are about growing the business. But about one quarter of companies do not grow at all and, even before the pandemic, only one in eight achieved more than 10% revenue growth annually, according to data from S&P Global regulatory filings. One reason is a...
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- March 13, 2023
- Article
Sales Teams Need to Stop Focusing on the Customer Funnel
Understanding where customers are, how they navigate streams in your market, and how to interact with them in a given stream is now central to crafting a good customer experience, and that has implications. Among other things, companies need to shift from thinking...
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- February 2023 (Revised May 2023)
- Case
Accelerating the Accelerator: Raja Al Mazrouei at DIFC Fintech Hive
By: Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards and Lydia Begag
In January 2023, Raja Al Mazrouei became the Managing Director and Acting CEO of Etihad Credit Insurance (ECI) in Dubai, UAE. In her previous role as the Executive Vice President of the DIFC Fintech Hive, she successfully built and led an accelerator program for...
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Keywords:
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Organizational Culture;
Organizational Design;
Organizational Structure;
Management;
Strategy;
Technology Adoption;
Information Infrastructure;
Financial Management;
Financial Strategy;
Technological Innovation;
Digital Marketing;
Digital Strategy;
Digital Transformation;
Global Strategy;
Globalized Markets and Industries;
Banks and Banking;
Corporate Finance;
Leadership;
Leadership Development;
Leadership Style;
Financial Services Industry;
Technology Industry;
Banking Industry;
Middle East;
Singapore;
London;
United Arab Emirates;
Dubai
- January 2023
- Case
Natura: Weathering the Pandemic at Brazil's Cosmetic Giant
By: Brian Trelstad, Pedro Levindo and Carla Larangeira
Brazil's Natura, a multi-brand cosmetics group, has taken several measures to safeguard the livelihoods of its thousands of employees and millions of sales representatives during the COVID-19 health and economic crisis. The company has also made strides in its efforts...
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Keywords:
COVID-19 Pandemic;
ESG Reporting;
Acquisition;
Customer Focus and Relationships;
Decision Making;
Social Entrepreneurship;
Environmental Sustainability;
Environmental Management;
Climate Change;
Ethics;
Moral Sensibility;
Values and Beliefs;
Global Strategy;
Corporate Governance;
Health Pandemics;
Human Resources;
Human Capital;
Crisis Management;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Marketing;
Distribution Channels;
Supply Chain;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Mission and Purpose;
Organizational Culture;
Customer Ownership;
Relationships;
Business and Community Relations;
Business and Stakeholder Relations;
Networks;
Partners and Partnerships;
Science-Based Business;
Reputation;
Human Needs;
Social Issues;
Strategy;
Equality and Inequality;
Beauty and Cosmetics Industry;
Brazil;
Latin America
- January 2023
- Teaching Note
Duolingo: Teaching Languages to the Masses
By: Youngme Moon
Teaching Note for HBS Case 323-016. At the time the case is written, Duolingo is the most popular language learning service in the world. The company has more than 40 million monthly active users, and the company’s total annual revenue has reached $250 million a year....
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- January 2023
- Supplement
Apple: Privacy vs. Safety (B)
By: Henry McGee, Nien-hê Hsieh and Christian Godwin
In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, Apple and Google partnered to develop a contact tracing application that would collect information about users infected with the disease and notify those who they had been in contact with. While Apple/Google’s...
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Keywords:
Iphone;
Encryption;
Data Privacy;
Customers;
Customer Focus and Relationships;
Decision Making;
Ethics;
Values and Beliefs;
Globalized Firms and Management;
Government and Politics;
Health;
Health Pandemics;
Leadership;
Markets;
Safety;
Social Issues;
Information Technology;
Telecommunications Industry;
Technology Industry;
Consumer Products Industry;
Electronics Industry;
Health Industry;
United States;
Europe
- 2023
- Working Paper
Summarizing the Mental Customer Journey
By: Julian De Freitas, Ahmet Uğuralp, Zeliha Uğuralp, Pechthida Kim and Tomer Ullman
How do consumers summarize and act on their experiences, as when deciding whether an interaction with a firm was satisfying and whether to buy from it? Previous work on the summary of continuous experiences has tended to focus on a handful of experience patterns and...
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- January 2023 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Belden and Digital Transformation: From Product Sales to Solutions Sales
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Amy Klopfenstein
This case provides an overview of a sales transformation in the industrial automation division at Belden, a hardware manufacturer. While Belden historically sold products such as cables, wires, and other networking devices, EVP of Industrial Automation Ashish Chand...
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- December 2022
- Case
To Feed the Planet: Juan Luciano at ADM
By: Joshua D. Margolis, David E. Bell, Damien McLoughlin, Stacy Straaberg and James Weber
In December 2022, Juan Luciano, Chairman and CEO of agribusiness and nutrition giant ADM, considered the next phase of the historic company’s future. Beginning in 2011 when he joined as COO and moving into his tenure as CEO in 2015, Luciano led a transformation of ADM...
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Keywords:
Agriculture;
Leadership;
Agribusiness;
Acquisition;
Business Units;
Customer Focus and Relationships;
Customer Value and Value Chain;
Forecasting and Prediction;
Capital;
Cash;
Cost of Capital;
Cost Management;
Profit;
Food;
Global Range;
Innovation Strategy;
Leadership Development;
Leadership Style;
Leading Change;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Risk Management;
Organizational Culture;
Organizational Structure;
Strategic Planning;
Risk and Uncertainty;
Adaptation;
Business Strategy;
Corporate Strategy;
Vertical Integration;
Value Creation;
Transformation;
Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry;
Energy Industry;
United States;
Chicago
- November 10, 2022
- Article
5 Ways Startups Can Prepare for a Recession
By: Lou Shipley
Startups face unique challenges during economic downturns. They typically aren’t yet profitable and so are reliant on outside funding—and therefore are especially exposed when macroeconomic conditions change. To make it through a recession, startup CEOs should hit the...
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- 2023
- Working Paper
Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response,
which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment
effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to...
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- October 2022
- Case
Lyra Health: Transforming Mental Health
By: Rembrand Koning and Nicole Keller
In January 2022, Lyra Health was deciding between several different alternatives to grow the business. Founded in 2015, Lyra Health, was a digital mental health platform that combined technology with human therapists and coaches to deliver high quality mental health...
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- October 2022
- Case
Podimetrics: Next Steps for Diabetes Cases
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Ben Creo
Podimetrics, a virtual care management company treating adults with acute diabetes, sat at the intersection of medical device technology, data, and health services. Their leadership team considered the best next step for the company to take—would it be expanding the...
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Keywords:
Health Care;
Health Care Delivery;
Health Care Entrepreneurship;
Health Care Outcomes;
Diabetes;
Chronic Disease;
Chronic Illness;
Health Care and Treatment;
Health Disorders;
Medical Specialties;
Technological Innovation;
Innovation Strategy;
Product Development;
Business Model;
Customer Focus and Relationships;
Medical Devices and Supplies Industry;
Health Industry
- October 2022
- Article
A Structural Model of Organizational Buying for Business-to-Business Markets: Innovation Adoption with Share-of-Wallet Contracts
By: Navid Mojir and K. Sudhir
The paper develops the first structural model of organizational buying to study innovation diffusion in a B2B market. Our model is particularly applicable for routinized exchange relationships, whereby centralized buyers periodically evaluate and choose contracts,...
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- September 2022
- Background Note
On CUE: The Quest for Optimal Customer Unit Economics
By: Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller
Startups are often evaluated by how well they perform on unit economics, defined as the ratio of a customer’s lifetime value (LTV) to acquisition costs (CAC). A common target for unit economics, advocated by many VCs and analysts, is 3:1 (i.e., LTV/CAC=3). While there...
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- September 2022
- Case
Proactive for Her
By: Rembrand Koning and Kairavi Dey
Proactive for Her began amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in August 2020 as a digital platform to provide accessible, evidence-based, primary, preventive non-judgmental healthcare services for Indian women, who were often dissuaded from seeking help as premarital sex and...
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- September 2022
- Case
AllSpice: GitHub for Hardware Engineers
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Mel Martin
AllSpice, a software-as-a-service company that built a GitHub-like revision control tool for hardware engineers, was in the midst of preparing for rapid scale when the 2022 market downturn left them with big decisions to make. Cofounder and CEO Valentina Ratner had to...
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- August 2022 (Revised March 2023)
- Case
Bajaj Finance: Building an Omnipresent Financial Services Firm
By: Das Narayandas and Rachna Tahilyani
Bajaj Finance, India’s largest consumer finance firm with $20.9 billion of assets across 50.5 million customers, is on a journey to transform itself from a traditional firm that sells loans and other financial products through brick-and-mortar outlets to an omnipresent...
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