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Consider two organizations with the same noble purpose: to solve the problem of poor eyesight in developing countries. The first, the Centre for...
- March–April 2019
- Article
The Dual-Purpose Playbook
By: Julie Battilana, Anne-Claire Pache, Metin Sengul and Marissa Kimsey
Corporations are being pushed to dial down their single-minded pursuit of financial gain and pay closer attention to their impact on employees, customers, communities, and the environment. But changing an organization’s DNA may require upending the existing business...
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- December 2018 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
Husk Power: Scaling the Venture
In January 2018, Husk Power had just raised $20 million to scale operations for a second time. From 2007 through 2013, Husk built 80 biomass waste (primarily rice husk from rice mills) plants that provided electricity to 250,000 villagers and shop owners spread across...
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Keywords:
Scaling;
Energy;
Entrepreneurship;
Emerging Markets;
Growth And Development;
Energy Industry;
India
- 2018
- Article
Cracking the Organizational Challenge of Pursuing Joint Social and Financial Goals: Social Enterprise as a Laboratory to Understand Hybrid Organizing
By: Julie Battilana
While in recent decades the social and business sectors have evolved on fairly separate tracks, today companies are increasingly expected to generate social value in addition to profit. As a result, they also increasingly face the distinct challenge of pursuing social...
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- 2018
- Chapter
New Prospects for Organizational Democracy?: How the Joint Pursuit of Social and Financial Goals Challenges Traditional Organizational Designs
By: Julie Battilana, Michael Fuerstein and Michael Lee
For an extended period during the first half of the 20th century, industrial democracy was a vibrant movement, with ideological and organizational ties to a thriving unionism. In 2015, however, things look different. While there are instances of democracy in the...
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- January–February 2018
- Article
Some Customers Would Rather Leave Without Saying Goodbye
By: Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer and Bruce G.S. Hardie
We investigate the increasingly common business setting in which companies face the possibility of both observed and unobserved customer attrition (i.e., “overt” and “silent” churn) in the same pool of customers. This is the case for many online-based services where...
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- 2017
- Chapter
On Hybrids and Hybrid Organizing: A Review and Roadmap for Future Research
By: Julie Battilana, Marya Besharov and Bjoern Mitzinneck
The purpose of this chapter is to advance research on hybrids by bringing together work from these multiple perspectives; identifying common themes in the antecedents, challenges, opportunities, and management strategies associated with hybridity and highlighting...
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- September–October 2017
- Article
Blurring the Boundaries: The Interplay of Gender and Local Communities in the Commercialization of Social Ventures
By: Stefan Dimitriadis, Matthew Lee, Lakshmi Ramarajan and Julie Battilana
This paper examines the critical role of gender in the commercialization of social ventures. We argue that cultural beliefs about what is perceived to be appropriate work for each gender influence how founders of social ventures incorporate commercial activity into...
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Keywords:
Community;
Cultural Beliefs;
Social Enterprise;
Gender;
Local Range;
Commercialization;
Culture
- Article
Build It, Buy It, or Both? Rethinking the Sourcing of Advertising Services
By: Alvin J. Silk and Marta M. Stiglin
This paper provides an update on the current state of in-house agencies. Whereas traditional consideration of internalizing advertising services was framed as a binary choice of build or buy, today's advertisers frequently pursue hybrid policies of build and buy to...
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- January 2016 (Revised July 2018)
- Case
Cyberdyne: A Leap to the Future
By: Doug J. Chung and Mayuka Yamazaki
Cyberdyne Inc. was a Japanese technology venture that wanted to commercialize a hybrid assistive limb (HAL). HAL was a robotic exoskeleton system for people who had difficulty walking due to nervous system disabilities resulting from stroke, spinal cord injury (SCI),...
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- December 2015
- Article
Harnessing Productive Tensions in Hybrid Organizations: The Case of Work Integration Social Enterprises
By: Julie Battilana, Metin Sengul, Anne-Claire Pache and Jacob Model
We examine the factors that influence the social performance of hybrid organizations that pursue a social mission, and sustain their operations through commercial activities, by studying work integration social enterprises (WISEs). We argue that social imprinting and...
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- 2015
- Working Paper
Build It, Buy It or Both? Rethinking the Sourcing of Advertising Services
By: Alvin J. Silk and Marta M. Stiglin
This paper provides an update on the current state of in-house agencies. Whereas traditional consideration of internalizing advertising services was framed as a binary choice of build or buy, today's advertisers frequently pursue hybrid policies of build and buy to...
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- Article
Advancing Research on Hybrid Organizing—Insights from the Study of Social Enterprises
By: Julie Battilana and Matthew Lee
Hybrid organizations that combine multiple organizational forms deviate from socially legitimate templates for organizing and thus experience unique organizing challenges. In this paper, we introduce and develop the concept of hybrid organizing, which we define as the...
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- 2014
- Article
The Governance of Social Enterprises: Mission Drift and Accountability Challenges in Hybrid Organizations
By: Alnoor Ebrahim, Julie Battilana and Johanna Mair
We examine the challenges of governance facing organizations that pursue a social mission through the use of market mechanisms. These hybrid organizations, often referred to as social enterprises, combine aspects of both charity and business at their core. In this...
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- 2013
- Working Paper
How the Zebra Got Its Stripes: Imprinting of Individuals and Hybrid Social Ventures
By: Matthew Lee and Julie Battilana
Hybrid organizations that combine multiple, existing organizational forms are frequently proposed as a source of organizational innovation, yet little is known about the origins of such organizations. We propose that individual founders of hybrid organizations acquire...
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- September 2012 (Revised March 2013)
- Case
Entrepreneurial Finance in Finland?
By: William R. Kerr, Ramana Nanda and Alexis Brownell
This case describes a new venture attempting to bring early-stage entrepreneurial financing to Finland and other Nordic countries. Entrepreneurship is taking off in Finland, an area that historically has had little venture capital or high-growth start-up activity, but...
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- Article
In Search of the Hybrid Ideal
By: Julie Battilana, Matthew Lee, John Walker and Cheryl Dorsey
In the first large-scale, quantitative study of nascent social entrepreneurs, researchers from Harvard Business School and Echoing Green examine the rise of hybrid organizations that combine aspects of nonprofits and for-profits and the challenges hybrids face as they...
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- December 2010
- Article
Building Sustainable Hybrid Organizations: The Case of Commercial Microfinance Organizations
By: Julie Battilana and Silvia Dorado
We explore how new types of hybrid organizations (organizations that combine institutional logics in unprecedented ways) can develop and maintain their hybrid nature in the absence of a "ready-to-wear" model for handling the tensions between the logics they combine....
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- June 2007 (Revised June 2008)
- Case
GE's Imagination Breakthroughs: The Evo Project
By: Christopher A. Bartlett, Brian J. Hall and Nicole Bennett
In September 2003, Jeff Immelt challenged the business leaders at GE to come up with "Imagination Breakthroughs," innovative new projects that would serve as the centerpiece of GE's organic growth initiative. Follows the company as these changes are driven through the...
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- May 1992 (Revised May 2002)
- Case
NIKE in Transition (B): Phil Knight Returns
After returning to the CEO/COO job, Phil Knight makes changes to Nike's strategy, organization, and management between 1983 and 1987 aimed at making Nike more responsive to the market place. He takes cost-cutting measures, and experiments with several management and...
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- Teaching Interest
Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Combining the tools of philanthropy, business and advocacy (or mission, margin and mandate), social entrepreneurs have tackled long-standing societal issues like teacher training, college access, global public health, renewable energy and sanitation. Social...
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