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- July 2021
- Article
Multinationality and Capital Structure Dynamics: A Corporate Governance Explanation
By: Daniel Gyimah, Nana Abena Kwansa, Anthony K. Kyiu and Anywhere Sikochi
This paper examines the impact of corporate governance on capital structure dynamics. Using ordinary least squares regressions on 17,496 firm-year observations for 2,294 U.S. multinational companies (MNCs) over the period 1990–2018, we find that MNCs with strong...
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- July–August 2021
- Article
SPACs: What You Need to Know
By: Max Bazerman and Paresh Patel
Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have been around in various forms for decades, but during the past two years they’ve taken off in the United States. In 2019, 59 were created, with $13 billion invested; in 2020, 247 were created, with $80 billion...
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- May–June 2021
- Article
Getting Up to Speed in Your Sales Efforts
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Zoran Latinovic
In a study before the pandemic, Pricewaterhouse Coopers found that companies had made little progress in the previous decade in speeding up their cash-conversion cycle, as the cash crunch generated by the pandemic painfully demonstrated. In most firms, sales velocity...
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- March 2021
- Article
Increasing the Level of Abstraction as a Strategy for Accelerating the Adoption of Complex Technologies
By: Willy C. Shih
Many new technologies are complex and embody high levels of technical sophistication, and applying them should require significant knowledge and experience. Yet, the rapid adoption and incorporation of these technologies into other innovations seems inconsistent with...
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- January–February 2021
- Article
Food and Drug Administration Guidance Documents and New Medical Devices: The Case of Breast Prostheses
By: Rachel E. Weitzman, Ariel Dora Stern and Daniel B. Kramer
As pressure mounts on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to speed its review process for novel devices, and budgetary pressures further strain its resources, the critical role of guidance documents in assuring consistent, rigorous, and scientifically grounded...
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- November–December 2020
- Article
Rethinking the On-Demand Workforce
By: Joseph B. Fuller, Manjari Raman, Allison Bailey and Nithya Vaduganathan
As companies struggle with chronic skills shortages and changing labor demographics, a new generation of talent platforms, offering on-demand access to highly trained workers, has begun to help. These platforms include marketplaces for premium expertise (such as Toptal...
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- October 2020
- Teaching Plan
Merck: COVID-19 Vaccines
By: Willy C. Shih
COVID-19 infections were still climbing across the U.S. and many other parts of the world in September 2020, and it seemed that every time Ken Frazier, the CEO of Merck & Co. consented to an interview in recent months he always seemed to hear the same question,...
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- September 2020
- Case
Merck: COVID-19 Vaccines
By: Willy C. Shih
COVID-19 infections were still climbing across the U.S. and many other parts of the world in September 2020, and it seemed that every time Ken Frazier, the CEO of Merck & Co. consented to an interview in recent months he always seemed to hear the same question,...
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- September 2020 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
Moderna (A)
By: Marco Iansiti, Karim R. Lakhani, Hannah Mayer and Kerry Herman
In summer 2020, Stephane Bancel, CEO of biotech firm Moderna, faces several challenges as his company races to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. The case explores how a company builds a digital organization, and leverages artificial intelligence and other digital...
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- September 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Supplement
Hitachi Rail Limited (B)
By: David J. Collis, Akiko Kanno and Nobuo Sato
This supplement describes the strategy and organisation changes made by British executive, Alistair Dormer, after he is made head of Hitachi Rail's global business. The company acquires an Italian company, continues to win contracts in the UK, but struggles to bring...
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- August 2020 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
Migros Turkey: Scaling Online Operations (A)
By: Antonio Moreno and Gamze Yucaoglu
The case opens in November 2019 as Ozgur Tort and Mustafa Bartin, CEO and chief large-format and online retail officer of Migros Ticaret A.S. (Migros), Turkey’s oldest and one of its largest supermarket chains, are contemplating what the best fulfillment format and...
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- Article
Believe in Vaccine Bets Like Bill Gates's
Commitment of public or private funds upfront speeds development, production, and distribution.
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- April 2020 (Revised October 2020)
- Case
Unilever's Response to the Future of Work
By: William R. Kerr, Emilie Billaud and Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej
In February 2020, Nick Dalton, executive vice president HR business transformation at Unilever, reflected on the changing nature of work marked by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation. Launched in 2016, Unilever’s Future of Work...
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- March 2020
- Case
SRS and the Defense Innovation Unit: Rethinking Procurement
By: Paul A. Gompers and David Lane
SRS and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) follows the process by which SRS, a lean maker of remotely-operated submersible vehicles, navigates the DIU’s acquisition process. Set up in 2015 to speed the U.S. military’s access to promising commercial technologies, the DIU...
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- February 28, 2020
- Article
How Tesla Sets Itself Apart
By: Lou Shipley
Tesla and its flamboyant, and sometimes erratic, innovator Elon Musk have turned the more than a century old industry upside down in a mere 16 years. Traditional automakers are ill prepared to compete in today’s software-centered world. Unlike nimble Tesla, they are...
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- January 2020
- Case
Sunset Limited or Full Speed Ahead? Amtrak Talks to Congress
By: John D. Macomber
Richard Anderson took the helm of Amtrak in 2017 after leading a successful turnaround at Delta Airlines. Amtrak is a US state owned enterprise with about $3.5 bn in annual revenue (and a large operating loss) that is responsible for substantial segments of passenger...
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- December 2019
- Article
It Helps to Ask: The Cumulative Benefits of Asking Follow-up Questions
By: Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Karen Huang, Julia A. Minson and Francesca Gino
In a recent article published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP; Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson, & Gino, 2017), we reported the results of 2 experiments involving “getting acquainted” conversations among strangers and an observational field...
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- 2019
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 16 Capturing Value by Controlling Bottlenecks in Open Platform Systems
The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the means by which firms capture value in open platform systems. I begin by arguing that the surplus value created by complementarities within a technical system will be split among the owners of the unique and essential...
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- September 2019 (Revised September 2020)
- Case
SOFWERX: Innovation at U.S. Special Operations Command (Abridged)
By: Herman Leonard, Mitch Weiss, Jin Hyun Paik and Kerry Herman
James "Hondo" Geurts, the Acquisition Executive for U.S. Special Operations Command was in the middle of his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. Overseeing acquisitions in one of the...
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- August 2019
- Case
Baroo (A): Pet Concierge
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Susie L. Ma
Baroo CEO Lindsay Hyde was facing unrest from the board of her pet services startup in August 2017. One board member (and lead investor) was alarmed that Baroo’s growth was slowing while its appetite for funding was accelerating. Hyde wanted to hit the gas and continue...
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