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- January 2023 (Revised March 2023)
- Case
OhmConnect: Energizing the Future
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller
Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households...
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Keywords:
App Development;
Renewable Energy;
Electricity Usage;
Regulations;
VC;
Technology;
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC);
Scalability;
Applications and Software;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Business Model;
Venture Capital;
Energy Industry;
United States;
California;
Texas;
Europe
- December 2021 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Collaboration Wars: Slack vs. Microsoft Teams
By: David B. Yoffie, Kriti Gupta, Mehek Punatar, Poonam Sacheti and Poorvi Vijay
In 2021, Slack was acquired by Salesforce. While widely viewed as the best corporate collaboration and messaging software, Slack was being challenged by Microsoft, which was giving away its competitive product, Microsoft Teams, for free with a subscription to...
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- September 2, 2021
- Article
The Digital Economy Runs on Open Source. Here's How to Protect It.
By: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf and Frank Nagle
Free and open source software (FOSS) is essential to much of the tech we use every day—from cars to phones to planes to the cloud. While traditionally, it was developed by an army of volunteer developers and given away for free, companies are increasingly taking a more...
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- March 2021 (Revised August 2022)
- 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;
Digital Platforms;
Internet and the Web;
Technology Industry;
United States
- February 2021
- Tutorial
Getting Started in RStudio Cloud
By: Chiara Farronato and Caleb Kwon
This video provides an introduction to the free programming language R using an online cloud version of RStudio, which is the most popular editor and interface for writing and executing R code. The video begins by providing a brief background of R and RStudio and...
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- Winter 2021
- Article
Dealmaking Disrupted: The Unexplored Power of Social Media in Negotiation
By: James K. Sebenius, Ben Cook, David A. Lax, Isaac Silberberg and Paul Levy
While social media has had profound effects in many realms, the theory and practice of negotiation have remained relatively untouched by this potent phenomenon. In this article, we survey existing research in this area and develop a broader framework for understanding...
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- January–February 2020
- Article
Competing in the Age of AI
By: Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani
Today’s markets are being reshaped by a new kind of firm—one in which artificial intelligence (AI) runs the show. This cohort includes giants like Google, Facebook, and Alibaba, and growing businesses such as Wayfair and Ocado. Every time we use their services, the...
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- November 2019 (Revised November 2019)
- Supplement
eSig: Growth Analysis
By: Mark N. Roberge and Thomas R. Eisenmann
eSig, an early-stage startup, offers an electronic signature application as a "freemium" product, i.e., users can upgrade from a free basic version to a premium version by paying a subscription fee. Using 9 months of data from 50,000 user activations, available as a...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Government Technology Policy, Social Value, and National Competitiveness
By: Frank Nagle
This study seeks to better understand the impact that government technology procurement regulations have on social value and national competitiveness. To do this, it examines the impact of a change in France’s technology procurement policy that required government...
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- March 2018 (Revised March 2019)
- Case
Gender and Free Speech at Google (A)
By: Nien-hê Hsieh, Martha J. Crawford and Sarah Mehta
In August 2017, Google fired James Damore, a 28-year-old software engineer who had been employed by the company since 2013. The move came after Damore penned an internal company memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” which posited that innate biological...
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- January 2018 (Revised January 2019)
- Case
ZappRx
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Olivia Hull
In October 2015, ZappRx founder Zoe Barry is deciding between two business models for her health technology start-up. Her product, a software application that aims to expedite the prescription fulfillment process for patients with rare diseases, has attracted interest...
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- September 19, 2017
- Article
After Equifax Breach, Companies Advised to Review Open-Source Software Code
By: Ben DiPietro and Lou Shipley
It doesn’t make much sense: At a time when high-powered automated trading systems can execute stock sales in real time, some companies that rely on open-source software to help to run their businesses track their open-source use on spread sheets on paper.
Lou... View Details
Lou... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Exploring the Relationship between Architecture Coupling and Software Vulnerabilities: A Google Chrome Case
By: Robert Lagerstrom, Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Dan Sturtevant and Lee Doolan
Employing software metrics, such as size and complexity, for predicting defects has been given a lot of attention over the years and has proven very useful. However, the few studies looking at software architecture and vulnerabilities are limited in scope and findings....
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- August 2016 (Revised November 2019)
- Case
eSig: Growth Analysis
By: Mark Roberge and Tom Eisenmann
eSig, an early-stage startup, offers an electronic signature application as a "freemium" product, i.e., users can upgrade from a free basic version to a premium version by paying a subscription fee. Using 9 months of data from 50,000 user activations (available as a...
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- January 2016 (Revised January 2017)
- Case
Rumie: Bringing Digital Education to the Underserved
By: John J-H Kim and Amram Migdal
In fall of 2015, the Toronto, Canada–based education technology nonprofit Rumie had distributed thousands of computer tablets preloaded with collections of thousands of pieces of curated educational content to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in some of the most...
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- October 2014 (Revised June 2015)
- Case
Quiet Logistics (A)
By: Robert Simons and Natalie Kindred
This two-part case focuses on how to identify and manage strategic uncertainties in an innovative, entrepreneurial start-up company. In the (A) case, students learn about Quiet Logistics, an e-commerce fulfillment company working with high-end apparel retailers such as...
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Keywords:
Strategy Execution;
Strategic Uncertainty;
Disruptive Change;
Managing Growth;
Robotics;
Disruptive Technology;
Managing Start-ups;
Management Control Systems;
Performance Measurement;
Business Growth and Maturation;
Disruption;
Entrepreneurship;
Disruptive Innovation;
Crisis Management;
Risk Management;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Business Strategy;
Competitive Strategy;
E-commerce;
Distribution Industry;
Technology Industry;
United States
- October 2014
- Supplement
Quiet Logistics (B)
By: Robert Simons and Natalie Kindred
This two-part case focuses on how to identify and manage strategic uncertainties in an innovative, entrepreneurial start-up company. In the (A) case, students learn about Quiet Logistics, an e-commerce fulfillment company working with high-end apparel retailers such as...
View Details
Keywords:
Strategy Execution;
Strategic Uncertainties;
Managing Growth;
Disruptive Change;
Robotics;
Disruptive Technologies;
Managing Start-ups;
Management Control Systems;
Performance Measurement;
Business Growth and Maturation;
Disruption;
Entrepreneurship;
Disruptive Innovation;
Crisis Management;
Risk Management;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Business Strategy;
Competitive Strategy;
E-commerce;
Distribution Industry;
Technology Industry;
United States
- August 2014
- Case
Opening the Valve: From Software to Hardware (A)
By: Ethan Bernstein, Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats
Valve, one of the world's top video game software companies, has also become an iconic example of an organization with virtually no hierarchy. A 400-person organization, Valve's unique organizational form (described in detail in the case and accompanying employee...
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Keywords:
Valve;
Self-Managed Organizations;
Organization Design;
Strategy;
Flat Organization;
Video Games;
Organization Alignment;
Family Business;
Steam;
Steam Machine;
Design;
Games, Gaming, and Gambling;
Human Resources;
Collaborative Innovation and Invention;
Technological Innovation;
Leadership Style;
Management Practices and Processes;
Organizational Design;
Organizational Structure;
Organizational Culture;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Groups and Teams;
Alignment;
Software;
Hardware;
Video Game Industry;
Seattle
- August 2014 (Revised August 2015)
- Supplement
Opening the Valve: From Software to Hardware (B)
By: Ethan Bernstein, Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats
Valve, one of the world's top video game software companies, has also become an iconic example of an organization with virtually no hierarchy. A 400-person organization, Valve's unique organizational form (described in detail in the case and accompanying employee...
View Details
Keywords:
Valve;
Self-Managed Organizations;
Organization Design;
Strategy;
Flat Organization;
Video Games;
Organization Alignment;
Family Business;
Steam;
Steam Machine;
Design;
Games, Gaming, and Gambling;
Human Resources;
Collaborative Innovation and Invention;
Technological Innovation;
Leadership Style;
Management Practices and Processes;
Organizational Design;
Organizational Structure;
Organizational Culture;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Groups and Teams;
Alignment;
Software;
Hardware;
Video Game Industry;
Seattle
- July 2014 (Revised August 2015)
- Case
Qihoo
By: Feng Zhu
Qihoo, one of the largest Internet companies in China today, was founded in 2005. The company started its business by offering a security software product, and quickly dominated the market in China after its unusual move of giving its product away for free in 2009....
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