Recent Publications

• RECENT PUBLICATION: Case

  Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018

  Arlan Hamilton and Backstage Capital

  Laura Huang and Sarah Mehta

  Frustrated by an inability to convince existing venture capital firms to invest in companies led by women, people of color, and LGBT founders, Arlan Hamilton started her own firm, Backstage Capital, in 2015. Hamilton understood the untapped potential of companies run by underrepresented founders, a group historically excluded from venture capital funding, and was eager to demonstrate the significant returns on investment in such companies. This case explores Hamilton’s nontraditional VC background, and her mission to fund startups where at least one founder of the company identifies as a woman, person of color, or LGBT. Now, three years after its founding, Hamilton is considering launching both an accelerator and a fund that will invest exclusively in Black women.

  Keywords: venture capital; entrepreneurship; diversity; gender; race; black leadership; LGBTQ; women; people of color; Cultural Entrepreneurship; Mission and Purpose; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Identity; Personal Characteristics; Prejudice and Bias; Social Issues; Diversity; Gender; Race;

  Citation:

  Huang, Laura, and Sarah Mehta. "Arlan Hamilton and Backstage Capital." Harvard Business School Case 419-029, October 2018.  View Details

  CiteView DetailsEducators

  Related

• RECENT PUBLICATION: Article

  Article | Harvard Business Review (website) | September 21, 2018

  Innovation Should Be a Top Priority for Boards. So Why Isn't It?

  J. Yo-Jud Cheng and Boris Groysberg

  Corporate directors and executives alike recognize that today’s pace of change continues to accelerate and that firms need to innovate to stay ahead. But are boards doing enough to support innovation, as they should? We conducted a survey of over 5,000 board members from around the world to find out. We found that, overall, innovation does not rank as a top strategic challenge for the majority of boards. Although directors in certain industries are more cognizant of the threat of disruption, the widespread lack of board-level engagement in innovation processes could be a major blind spot and a potential liability. Fewer than one-third (30%) of respondents see innovation as one of the top three challenges their company faces in achieving its strategic objectives, and just 21% think that technology trends are a major strategic challenge. Innovation ranks fifth, after more conventional concerns such as attracting and retaining top talent and the regulatory environment. Boards’ abilities to foster innovation clearly fall short when compared with their other activities.

  Keywords: corporate governance; board of directors; innovation; technology; Innovation and Invention; Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Business Strategy;

  Citation:

  Cheng, J. Yo-Jud, and Boris Groysberg. "Innovation Should Be a Top Priority for Boards. So Why Isn't It?" Harvard Business Review (website) (September 21, 2018).  View Details

  CiteView Details Register to Read

  Related

• RECENT PUBLICATION: Article

  Article | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | August 28, 2018

  How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence

  Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer

  People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a reduction in individual exploration for novel answers) relative to independent problem solving. In contrast to prior work, which has focused on how the presence and network structure of social influence affect performance, here we investigate the effects of time. We show that when social influence is intermittent it provides the benefits of constant social influence without the costs. Human subjects solved the canonical traveling salesperson problem in groups of three, randomized into treatments with constant social influence, intermittent social influence, or no social influence. Groups in the intermittent social-influence treatment found the optimum solution frequently (like groups without influence) but had a high mean performance (like groups with constant influence); they learned from each other, while maintaining a high level of exploration. Solutions improved most on rounds with social influence after a period of separation. We also show that storing subjects’ best solutions so that they could be reloaded and possibly modified in subsequent rounds—a ubiquitous feature of personal productivity software—is similar to constant social influence: it increases mean performance but decreases exploration.

  Keywords: transparency; social influence; Collective Intelligence; Interaction; problem solving; collaboration; intermittant; Breaks; always on; communication technologies; communication; Communication; Design; Information; Management; Leadership; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Performance; Social and Collaborative Networks; Information Technology;

  Citation:

  Bernstein, Ethan, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer. "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115, no. 35 (August 28, 2018).  View Details

  CiteView Details Read Now

  Related

Search all Organizational Behavior unit publications »