Publications
Publications
Show Results For
-
All HBS Web
(674)
- Faculty Publications (84)
Page 1 of
84
Results
→
- 2022
- Working Paper
Laboratory Safety and Research Productivity
By: Alberto Galasso, Hong Luo and Brooklynn Zhu
Are laboratory safety practices a tax on scientific productivity? We examine this question by exploiting the substantial increase in safety regulations at the University of California following the shocking accidental death of a research assistant in 2008....
View Details
- May 2022
- Case
Timnit Gebru: 'SILENCED No More' on AI Bias and The Harms of Large Language Models
By: Tsedal Neeley and Stefani Ruper
Dr. Timnit Gebru—a leading artificial intelligence (AI) computer scientist and co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team—was messaging with one of her colleagues when she saw the words: “Did you resign?? Megan sent an email saying that she accepted your resignation.” Heart...
View Details
- Article
Megastudies Improve the Impact of Applied Behavioural Science
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Dena Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Pepi Pandiloski, Yeji Park, Aneesh Rai, Max Bazerman, John Beshears, Lauri Bonacorsi, Colin Camerer, Edward Chang, Gretchen Chapman, Robert Cialdini, Hengchen Dai, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach, James J. Gross, Samantha Horn, Alexa Hubbard, Steven J. Jones, Dean Karlan, Tim Kautz, Erika Kirgios, Joowon Klusowski, Ariella Kristal, Rahul Ladhania, Jens Ludwig, George Loewenstein, Barbara Mellers, Sendhil Mullainathan, Silvia Saccardo, Jann Spiess, Gaurav Suri, Joachim H. Talloen, Jamie Taxer, Yaacov Trope, Lyle Ungar, Kevin G. Volpp, Ashley Whillans, Jonathan Zinman and Angela L. Duckworth
Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time...
View Details
- November 2021 (Revised May 2022)
- Case
QuantumScape's Mission to Revolutionize Energy Storage for a Sustainable Future
By: William A. Sahlman, Allison M. Ciechanover and Jeff Huizinga
QuantumScape CEO Jagdeep Singh juggles the many activities required to lead the next-generation battery pioneer. Founded in 2010, QuantumScape’s mission was to develop new “solid-state” car batteries that would improve upon traditional lithium-ion batteries in key...
View Details
- Article
Potentially Long-Lasting Effects of the Pandemic on Scientists
By: Jian Gao, Yian Yin, Kyle R. Myers, Karim R. Lakhani and Dashun Wang
Two surveys of principal investigators conducted between April 2020 and January 2021 reveal that while the COVID-19 pandemic’s initial impacts on scientists’ research time seem alleviated, there has been a decline in the rate of initiating new projects. This dimension...
View Details
- June 2021
- Case
uBiome
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Olivia Graham
uBiome provided clinical tests that sequenced the DNA of human microbiome samples, providing data on health conditions directly to consumers or to prescribing physicians. Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based startup raised $105 million from top-tier venture capital...
View Details
- June 2021
- Article
Engineering Serendipity: When Does Knowledge Sharing Lead to Knowledge Production?
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
We investigate how knowledge similarity between two individuals is systematically related to the likelihood that a serendipitous encounter results in knowledge production. We conduct a natural field experiment at a medical research symposium, where we exogenously...
View Details
- Article
GitLab: Work Where You Want, When You Want
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Kevin Crowston, Linus Dahlander, Marco S. Minervini and Sumita Raghuram
GitLab is a software company that works “all remote” at the scale of more than 1,000 employees located in more than 60 countries. GitLab has no physical office and its employees can work from anywhere they choose. Any step of the organizational life of a GitLab...
View Details
- October 2020
- Article
The Elasticity of Science
By: Kyle Myers
This paper identifies the degree to which scientists are willing to change the direction of their work in exchange for resources. Data from the National Institutes of Health are used to estimate how scientists respond to targeted funding opportunities. Inducing a...
View Details
- September 2020
- Article
Unequal Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Scientists
By: Kyle Myers, Wei Yang Tham, Yian Yin, Nina Cohodes, Marie Thursby, Jerry Thursby, Peter Schiffer, Joseph Walsh, Karim R. Lakhani and Dashun Wang
COVID-19 has not affected all scientists equally. A survey of principal investigators indicates that female scientists, those in the ‘bench sciences’ and, especially, scientists with young children experienced a substantial decline in time devoted to research. This...
View Details
- Article
The Importance of Being Causal
By: Iavor I Bojinov, Albert Chen and Min Liu
Causal inference is the study of how actions, interventions, or treatments affect outcomes of interest. The methods that have received the lion’s share of attention in the data science literature for establishing causation are variations of randomized experiments....
View Details
- March 21, 2020
- Editorial
When We're Wrong, It's Our Responsibility as Scientists to Say So
By: Ariella S. Kristal, A.V. Whillans, Max Bazerman, Francesca Gino, Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely
We tried to reproduce our 2012 paper on how to make people report their income more honestly—and we ended up refuting it.
View Details
- March 2020
- Article
Do Managers Matter? A Natural Experiment from 42 R&D Labs in India
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Christos A. Makridis
We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the staggered entry of new managers into India’s 42 public R&D labs between 1994 and 2006 to study how alignment between the CEO and middle-level managers affect research productivity. We show that the introduction of new lab...
View Details
- January 2020
- Case
The Origins of Bell Labs
By: Tom Nicholas and John Masko
In 1947, scientists at Bell Labs invented the transistor—a tiny signal amplifier that would go on to become the fundamental building block of the digital age. But, confounding most traditional economic assumptions, it was not a vigorous startup that made this momentous...
View Details
- November 2019
- Case
The Genesis Lab at Novartis
By: Amy C. Edmondson, Ranjay Gulati, Patrick J. Healy and Kerry Herman
Novartis' Genesis Labs program, launched in 2016 as part of Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR), hosted pitch competitions where teams of NIBR scientists proposed ideas to explore that aimed to revolutionize drug discovery. The goal was to break down...
View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Engineering Serendipity: When Does Knowledge Sharing Lead to Knowledge Production?
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaule, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
We investigate how knowledge similarity between two individuals is systematically related to the likelihood that a serendipitous encounter results in knowledge production. We conduct a natural field experiment at a medical research symposium, where we exogenously...
View Details
- 2019
- Report
Prime Minister's Scientist Return to India (SRI) Program: Proposal
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tarun Khanna
A Summary of a set of policies proposed to the Indian Government regarding return migration.
View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
Who Do We Invent for? Patents by Women Focus More on Women's Health, but Few Women Get to Invent
By: Rembrand Koning, Sampsa Samila and John-Paul Ferguson
Has the increase in female medical researchers led to more medical advances for women? In this paper, we investigate if the gender of inventors shapes their types of inventions. Using data on the universe of U.S. biomedical patents, we find that patents with women...
View Details
Keywords:
Innovation;
Biomedical Research;
Innovation and Invention;
Diversity;
Gender;
Research;
Health;
United States
- March 2019
- Case
Wattpad
By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld
How to run a platform to match four million writers of stories to 75 million readers? Use data science. Make money by doing deals with television and filmmakers and book publishers. The case describes the challenges of matching readers to stories and of helping writers...
View Details
Keywords:
Platform Businesses;
Creative Industries;
Publishing;
Data Science;
Machine Learning;
Collaborative Filtering;
Women And Leadership;
Managing Data Scientists;
Big Data;
Recommender Systems;
Digital Platforms;
Information Technology;
Intellectual Property;
Publishing Industry;
Entertainment and Recreation Industry;
Canada;
United States;
Philippines;
Viet Nam;
Turkey;
Indonesia;
Brazil
- 2019
- Book
Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt
By: Arthur C. Brooks
To get ahead today, you have to be a jerk, right?
Divisive politicians. Screaming heads on television. Angry campus activists. Twitter trolls. Today in America, there is an “outrage industrial complex” that prospers by setting American against... View Details
Divisive politicians. Screaming heads on television. Angry campus activists. Twitter trolls. Today in America, there is an “outrage industrial complex” that prospers by setting American against... View Details