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Which sales candidate is a startup’s ideal first hire? What marketing channels are best to invest in? How aggressively should an executive team align...
Amara Kaggwa leads the small but rapidly expanding sales team at ZenRecruit, a recruiting software application used by small businesses. Armed with...
- July 2021
- Case
Mary Kay Inc.: Enriching Women’s Lives while Embracing Change
By: Elie Ofek, K. Shelette Stewart and Julia Kelley
In December 2020, Mary Kay Inc. Chief Marketing Officer Sheryl Adkins-Green considered several strategic dilemmas. Founded in 1963 by Mary Kay Ash, Mary Kay was a direct sales company whose Independent Beauty Consultants purchased its beauty and cosmetics products at...
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Keywords:
Advertising Campaigns;
Demographics;
Marketing;
Brands and Branding;
Marketing Channels;
Marketing Communications;
Marketing Strategy;
Product Marketing;
Product Positioning;
Social Marketing;
Salesforce Management;
Organizations;
Mission and Purpose;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Innovation and Invention;
Innovation Strategy;
Competition;
Competitive Strategy;
Competitive Advantage;
Beauty and Cosmetics Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
Europe;
Asia;
Texas
- 2021
- Working Paper
Risk Sensitivity or Social Signaling? Unmasking Behaviors with Video Analytics
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kaiquan Xu and Kannan Srinivasan
In 2020, as the novel coronavirus spread globally, face masks were recommended in public settings to protect against and slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Why did people comply, or not, while shopping in 2020? Do these motivations relate to their shopping...
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- June, 2021
- Article
Biosimilars and Follow-On Products in the United States: Adoption, Prices, and Users
By: Ariel Dora Stern, Jacqueline L. Chen, Melissa Ouellet, Mark R. Trusheim, Zeid El-Kilani, Amber Jessup and Ernst R. Berndt
Biologic drugs account for a disproportionate share of the increase in pharmaceutical spending in the U.S. and worldwide. Against this backdrop, many look to the expanding market for biosimilars—follow-on products to biologic drugs—as a vehicle for controlling...
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- May 2021
- Case
Endeavor Kenya: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Shikhar Ghosh and Christian Godwin
In 2016, Fiona Mungai became Endeavor Kenya’s first managing director. In this role, she helped the organization build its inaugural board and select its first Endeavor entrepreneur, a fintech company called Cellulant. Throughout this process, Mungai observed the power...
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Keywords:
Business Ventures;
Entrepreneurship;
Human Resources;
Leadership;
Leading Change;
Management;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Negotiation;
Economy;
Markets;
Emerging Markets;
Network Effects;
Relationships;
Strategy;
Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry;
Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry;
Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry;
Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry;
Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry;
Africa;
Kenya
- May–June 2021
- Article
Why Start-ups Fail
If you’re launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Public Entrepreneurial Finance around the Globe
By: Jessica Bai, Shai Bernstein, Abhishek Dev and Josh Lerner
This paper examines how government funding programs geared towards early-stage companies interact with private capital markets. Using hand-collected data on 755 government programs worldwide, we find that governments’ allocations to such funding programs have been...
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- April 2021
- Case
Distinct Software
By: Das Narayandas, Arijit Sengupta and Jonathan Wray
Distinct Software (disguised name), a global enterprise software company, is at an important point in its growth trajectory where the luster of its mantra of “grow and win at any cost” has dimmed with increasing competition and margin pressures. To help navigate its...
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- April 2021 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Borusan CAT: Monetizing Prediction in the Age of AI (A)
By: Navid Mojir and Gamze Yucaoglu
Borusan Cat is an international distributor of Caterpillar heavy machines. Esra Durgun (Director of Strategy, Digitization, and Innovation) and Ozgur Gunaydin (CEO) seem to have bet their careers on developing Muneccim, a new predictive technology that is designed to...
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- March 17, 2021
- Other Article
Beyond Pajamas: Sizing Up the Pandemic Shopper
By: Ayelet Israeli, Eva Ascarza and Laura Castrillo
A first look at how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted e-commerce apparel shopping in the US and the UK. Extensive analysis and interactive graphics utilizing millions of transactions.
While the pandemic is still playing out, our preliminary investigations... View Details
While the pandemic is still playing out, our preliminary investigations... View Details
Keywords:
Retail;
Retail Analytics;
Consumer;
Pandemic;
COVID;
COVID-19;
Apparel;
Ecommerce;
E-commerce;
Online Shopping;
Online Apparel;
Online Sales;
Returns;
CRM;
Customer Retention;
Customer Experience;
Customer Value;
Digital;
Customer Focus and Relationships;
Customers;
Health Pandemics;
Consumer Behavior;
Customer Relationship Management;
Online Technology;
Behavior;
Apparel and Accessories Industry;
Apparel and Accessories Industry;
Apparel and Accessories Industry;
United States;
United Kingdom
- March 2021
- Case
Seeding and Selling Asana
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie Ma and Amram Migdal
In December 2019, Oliver Jay, Asana’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), was reconsidering his go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Asana was cloud-based work management software that enabled users to break up projects into discrete tasks that could be assigned, scheduled, and...
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Keywords:
SaaS;
Customer Journey;
Business Model;
Business Organization;
Change Management;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Growth Management;
Marketing Channels;
Marketing Strategy;
Product Marketing;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Organizational Design;
Organizational Structure;
Technology Platform;
Online Technology;
Technology Industry;
United States
- March 2021 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
Resident
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Thomas O. Jones
Launched in 2016, Resident was a leading player in the direct-to-consumer bed-in-a-box mattress market, where it was one of at least 175 venture-backed companies competing in the space. By late 2020, it had realized over $500 million in revenue, profitability in the...
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- March 2021 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
M-KOPA: Empowering Lives
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Wale Lawal and Pippa Tubman Armerding
The Pay As You Go solar power company in East Africa had sales of $71 million in 2019. It wished to grow to $300 million by 2025. M-KOPA, founded by three entrepreneurs in 2011, had grown nicely in Kenya and Uganda to reach nearly 750,000 households with an...
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- March 2021
- Article
Assortment Rotation and the Value of Concealment
By: Kris J. Ferreira and Joel Goh
Assortment rotation—the retailing practice of changing the assortment of products offered to customers—has recently been used as a competitive advantage for both brick-and-mortar and online retailers. We focus on product categories where consumers may purchase multiple...
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- March–April 2021
- Article
Selling After the Crisis
Like perishable goods in grocery stores, sales models have a sell-by date. As product standards evolve and new entrants emerge, buyers have more choices and demand more in terms of quality and performance across vendors. Firms that fail to adjust to changing customer...
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- February 2021
- Case
Threadless: The Renewal of an Online Community
By: Shane Greenstein, Karim Lakhani and Christian Godwin
Threadless, an online apparel company and artist community which Jake Nickell founded in 2000, continued to maintain its status as a top company in the online apparel industry during its second decade. From 2010 to 2020, Threadless continued to operate its...
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Keywords:
Business Model;
Decision Making;
Entrepreneurship;
Innovation and Invention;
Leading Change;
Management;
Marketing;
Product Launch;
Operations;
Supply Chain;
Distribution;
Networks;
Sales;
Strategy;
Adaptation;
Technology;
Software;
Technology Platform;
Apparel and Accessories Industry;
Apparel and Accessories Industry;
North America
- February 2021
- Case
Sarah Breedlove: Changing the World
By: Robert L. Simons and Max Saffer
This case describes the rise of Sarah Breedlove, who later called herself Madam C.J. Walker, from the cotton fields of Louisiana to the head of a successful, nationwide beauty company providing opportunity and hair care products to Black women. The case describes how...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
From Online Content to Offline Results: Effects of a Best Practices Initiative on an Enterprise Social Network
By: Shelley Xin Li and Tatiana Sandino
We examine the effects of a best practices initiative on an enterprise social network (ESN) with a natural field experiment in a large grocery store chain. Our results do not show an immediate improvement in sales, but do show 3.67-percent higher sales for the...
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- February 2021
- Article
How Transparency into Internal and External Responsibility Initiatives Influences Consumer Choice
By: Ryan W. Buell and Basak Kalkanci
Amid growing calls for transparency and social and environmental responsibility, companies are employing different strategies to improve consumer perceptions of their brands. Some pursue internal initiatives that reduce their negative social or environmental impacts...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Entrepreneurial Learning and Strategic Foresight
By: Aticus Peterson and Andy Wu
We study how learning by experience across projects affects an entrepreneur's strategic foresight. In a quantitative study of 314 entrepreneurs across 722 crowdfunded projects supplemented with a program of qualitative interviews, we counterintuitively find that...
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- January 2021
- Case
Anodot: Autonomous Business Monitoring
By: Antonio Moreno and Danielle Golan
Autonomous business monitoring platform Anodot leveraged machine learning to provide real-time alerts regarding business anomalies. Anodot’s solution was used in various industries in order to primarily monitor business health, such as revenue and payments, product...
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