Faculty & Research

Facilitating faculty research and case development on an international scale

Our unprecedented network of research centers and regional offices in key areas of the world enable faculty to work with leaders, industry, government, and academia worldwide, and to learn from business challenges and innovations wherever they occur. Through sustained work in the field, faculty are provided the opportunity to immerse themselves in the culture and values – as well as intricacies and nuances – that lead to truly meaningful and insightful global research.

Research Centers & Offices

More than half the faculty are actively involved in international research, developing high-impact cases and course materials on relevant global issues and innovations.

New Research

August 2018
Teaching Material

Conducting a Kaizen

By: Willy Shih

Kaizen, meaning change for the better in Japanese, is a set of activities directed at improving standardized work, equipment, and procedures for carrying out daily production or other business operations. It was poularized by Toyota as an integral part of its Toyota Production System. This note provides describes some of the underlying practices, and a simple outline for conducting a kaizen event.

Teaching Interest

Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies

By: Tarun Khanna

This business and management course takes an inter-disciplinary approach to understanding and solving complex social problems. You will learn about prior attempts to address these problems, identify points of opportunity for smart entrepreneurial efforts, and propose and develop your own creative solutions. The focus of this course is on individual agency—what can you do to address a defined problem? You will learn an awareness of the opportunities for entrepreneurship in fast-growing, emerging markets, an understanding of a conceptual framework for evaluating such opportunities, and an appreciation of the types problems that lend themselves to entrepreneurial solutions.

2018
Working Paper

Homesick or Home Run? Distance from Hometown and Employee Performance: A Natural Experiment from India

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Ohchan Kwon

Companies often assign workers to far-flung locations to fill critical roles and to develop human capital. Yet little is known about how workers perform in assignments to locations far from their hometowns, which may subject them to increased cultural distance, information costs, and effects related to social attachment to hometown/workplace. By exploiting an Indian technology firm’s policy of randomly assigning entry-level employees to eight widely scattered locations, we empirically assess how distance from hometown affects workers’ performance. Our results suggest that distance from hometown has a positive effect on worker performance in the short term and a negative effect over the longer term. We offer evidence on a key mechanism: how employees allocate their time to work-related activities and to visiting distant family. To do so, we use field interviews, sub-sample analyses, and micro-data on the number of optional skill-development courses employees complete and on leave taken during the major Indian festival of Diwali. We find evidence of heterogenous effects based on the location of the production center and on gender.

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Global Colloquium for participant-centered learning

For senior faculty at top business schools in emerging economies who want to be trained in interactive methods of teaching and learning. GloColl comprises a seven-day session held on the HBS campus, followed by a three-day session held in two cities in Asia, Europe, or Latin America each year.

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In the News

- 02 Aug 2018
- World Economic Forum
Our world is changing – but not as rapidly as people think

Re: Geoffrey Jones & Nitin Nohria
- 01 Aug 2018
- Forbes
Study: Immigrants Form 25% of New U.S. Businesses, With Big Regional Variations

Re: William Kerr
- 25 Jul 2018
- Business Standard
Business & patriotism, mutually exclusive?

By: Geoffrey Jones

02 Aug 2018
World Economic Forum

Our world is changing – but not as rapidly as people think

Re: Geoffrey Jones & Nitin Nohria

01 Aug 2018
Forbes

Study: Immigrants Form 25% of New U.S. Businesses, With Big Regional Variations

Re: William Kerr

25 Jul 2018
Business Standard

Business & patriotism, mutually exclusive?

By: Geoffrey Jones

→More News