Research - Global Initiative - Harvard Business School

September 2020
Case

Hitachi Rail Limited (A)

By: David J. Collis, Akiko Kanno and Nobuo Sato

Hitachi must decide whether to make a British executive, who has successfully built its European rail business from scratch, head of its global rail division even though the bulk of revenues for the unit still come from Japan. The case describes, the history of Hitachi...

September 2020
Teaching Material

Hitachi Rail Limited (B)

By: David J. Collis, Akiko Kanno and Nobuo Sato

Describes the strategy and organisation changes made by British executive, Alistair Domer, 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 its greenfield...

September 2020
Case

China's Management of COVID-19 (B): Victory?

By: Meg Rithmire and Courtney Han

September 2020
Article
Studies in Comparative International Development

The Rise of the Investor State: State Capital in the Chinese Economy

By: Meg Rithmire and Hao Chen

The nature and extent of the role of the Chinese state in the economy is fundamental to many empirical and theoretical debates about that country’s political economy. We document and explain the rise of a novel form of intervention on the part of the Chinese state: the...

September–October 2020
Article
Harvard Business Review

Social-Impact Efforts That Create Real Value

By: George Serafeim

Until the mid-2010s few investors paid attention to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data—information about companies’ carbon footprints, labor policies, board makeup, and so forth. Today the data is widely used by investors. How can organizations create...

September 2020
Teaching Material

Uber: Competing Globally

By: Alexander J. MacKay

This case describes Uber’s global market entry strategy and responses by regulators and local competitors. It details Uber’s entry into New York City (United States), Bogotá (Colombia), Delhi (India), Shanghai (China), Accra (Ghana), and London (United Kingdom). In...

August 2020
Case

Sheena Gupta (B)

By: Leslie Perlow and Matthew Preble

Sheena Gupta (B) provides a brief update to how Gupta is thinking about crafting her life in context of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

August 2020
Case

Gogoro: From Electric Scooter to Energy Platform

By: Tarun Khanna and Billy Chan

The founder of Gogoro had always wanted to revolutionize the energy market from day one since he started the electric scooter business that featured an innovative battery swapping technology. Over the course of five years, he had developed a premium line of electric...

August 2020
Case

Luckin Coffee (A): Caffeine-fueled Growth?

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman

This case describes the founding of Chinese coffee chain Luckin Coffee in 2017 and its path to surpassing Starbucks as the largest coffee chain in China (by number of stores) in 2019. Unlike Starbucks stores, which were designed to be welcoming “third places” for...

August 2020
Teaching Material

Luckin Coffee (B): Revelations of Fraud

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman

This case describes revelations of fraud at Luckin Coffee, beginning with an anonymous report in January 2020 and continuing with the company’s admission in April 2020 that it had inflated its revenues by 2.2 billion RMB ($310 million), almost half its reported...

July 2020
Case

The Shuanghui-Smithfield Acquisition (A)

By: Dante Roscini and Stacy Tan

July 2020
Teaching Material

The Shuanghui-Smithfield Acquisition (B)

By: Dante Roscini and Stacy Tan

July 2020
Teaching Material

Digital Natives Growing Without a Sales Force

By: Das Narayandas, Michael Norris and Amram Migdal

This brief case describes the rise of so-called digital natives (also called born-in-digital) in the 2000s and 2010s that successfully grew without a sales force. The case highlights the emergence of business-to-business Internet and cloud-based companies and their...

July 2020
Article
Hafo shang ye ping lun [Harvard Business Review, Chinese edition]

Yiqing xia zhongguo qiye de duice xuanze [Lessons from Chinese Companies' Response to COVID-19]

By: Das Narayandas, Vinay Hebar and Liangliang Li

China was weeks ahead of the rest of the world in dealing with the pandemic and its fallout. To understand what's next, the authors conducted a series of 20 in-depth, in-person interviews, as well as a large-scale survey of more than 350 senior executives to ascertain...

June 2020
Teaching Material

Shiseido Acquires Drunk Elephant

By: Jill Avery

On October 7, 2019, the Shiseido Group announced that it would acquire clean skincare brand Drunk Elephant for $845 million, a valuation of 8.5 times sales. Did Shiseido pay too much or too little for this brand asset? How much was the Drunk Elephant brand worth and...

June 2020 (Revised July 2020)
Case

TraceTogether

By: Mitchell B. Weiss and Sarah Mehta

By April 7, 2020, over 1.4 million people worldwide had contracted the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Governments raced to curb the spread of COVID-19 by scaling up testing, quarantining those infected, and tracing their possible contacts. It had taken Singapore’s...

June 2020
Case

What Went Wrong with Boeing's 737 Max?

By: William W. George and Amram Migdal

This case describes the development of the Boeing 737 Max airplane model and the events leading up to two tragic plane crashes, in which a total of 346 people died: the crash of Lion Air flight 610 on October 29, 2018, in Indonesia, and the crash of Ethiopian Airlines...

June 2020
Case

What IKEA Do We Want?

By: Cynthia A. Montgomery, Juan Alcacer, Emilie Billaud and Vincent Marie Dessain

In 2018, Swedish furniture maker IKEA was undergoing a significant transformation. Challenged by the rise of online shopping and changing consumer behavior, and mourning the death of its founder, the Company's top executives knew they had to step out of their comfort...

June 2020
Teaching Material

Global Brand Management of Anheuser Busch InBev's Budweiser

By: Jill Avery

Brian Perkins, chief architect of the $6 billion Budweiser brand, was excited about 2018, in which the company would launch Budweiser into several new markets in Africa and Latin America. He was feeling the pressure to finalize a global brand strategy that would define...

June 2020 (Revised March 2020)
Case

Social Salary Setting at Spiber

By: Ashley Whillans and John Beshears

Can a “set your own salary” system boost employee happiness and motivation? Spiber made synthetic silk built from proteins mimicking the proteins found in spider silk, the world’s toughest known material by weight. Kazuhide Sekiyama and Junichi Sugahara established...