Research - Global Initiative - Harvard Business School

January 2021
Case

Saham Group: It's In the Genes

By: Christina R. Wing and Gamze Yucaoglu

The case opens in August 2020 as Moulay Mhamed Elalamy (Mhamed), CEO of the Saham Group (the Group), a pan-African investment company that operates a variety of businesses out of Morocco, contemplates the Group’s identity, its investment strategy, and how to navigate...

January 2021
Case

Snapp: Scaling Under Sanctions in Iran (A)

By: Meg Rithmire and Gamze Yucaoglu

"The case opens in November 2019 as Eyad Alkassar and Mahmoud Fouz, co-founders of Iran’s first and leading ride-hailing platform, Snapp, find out about Apple’s and Google’s decision to remove all Iranian apps from their respective application stores. The case takes us...

January 2021
Case

Anodot: Autonomous Business Monitoring

By: Antonio Moreno and Danielle Golan

Autonomous business monitoring platform Anodot leveraged machine learning to providing real-time alerts regarding business anomalies. Anodot’s solution was used in various industries in order to primarily monitor business health, such as revenue and payments, product...

January 2021
Case

Arçelik: From a Dealer Network to an Omnichannel Experience

By: Ayelet Israeli and Fares Khrais

Arçelik Turkey, the country’s market leader in household appliances, was at an omnichannel crossroads in January 2020. Arçelik was a B2B player utilizing a dealership network with an umbrella of brands and had one of the largest brick-and-mortar store networks in...

January 2021
Case

Biobot Analytics

By: Raymond Kluender, Joshua Krieger and Mitchell Weiss

In 2017, Newsha Ghaeli and Mariana Matus were deciding whether to leave their labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put other job opportunities aside, and dive full-time into founding a wastewater analysis start-up, Biobot. Ghaeli, an architect, and Matus,...

December 2020
Teaching Material

Forecasting ClimaCell

By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Christopher Stanton and James Barnett

A weather technology startup, ClimaCell considers the R&D trade-offs and financing implications of pursuing a proposed contract with a major automobile maker, rather than continuing its focus on building a scalable, all-purpose weather prediction engine.

November 2020
Teaching Material

DayTwo: Going to Market with Gut Microbiome

By: Ayelet Israeli

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 519-010. DayTwo is a young Israeli startup that applies research on the gut microbiome and machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized nutritional recommendations to its users in order to minimize blood sugar spikes after meals....

October 2020 (Revised December 2020)
Case

AfricInvest: A Pan-African Investment Platform

By: Victoria Ivashina and Youssef Abdel Aal

The case is set in December 2018, when Ziad Oueslati, co-managing director and co-founder of AfricInvest, a leading pan-African private equity firm headquartered in Tunisia, was reflecting on the future direction of his firm. AfricInvest started as a traditional small...

October 2020
Teaching Material

Migros Turkey: Scaling Online Operations During COVID-19 (C)

By: Antonio Moreno and Gamze Yucaoglu

The case opens in August 2020 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 navigating Migros through COVID-19 and the unprecedented...

October 2020
Case

Israelis, Palestinians and the Technology Bridge Between Them: A Work in Progress

By: Elie Ofek and Lia Weiner

In Israel of 2020 the demand for software engineers was endless. Meanwhile just miles away, Palestinian universities were graduating 3,000 engineers a year, and many of them could not find jobs in the still nascent Palestinian tech sector. Could these dots be...

September 2020
Case

Walmart Health: Scaling During a Pandemic

By: Robert S. Huckman, Yoonjin Min and Marissa Thiel

Amidst the onset of COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Marcus Obsborne, Vice President for Health and Wellness Transformation at Walmart was planning to scale its new health care clinic business, Walmart Health, to additional locations in Georgia and beyond....

September 2020 (Revised November 2020)
Teaching Material

Student Success at Georgia State University (B)

By: Michael W. Toffel, Robin Mendelson and Julia Kelley

This is a supplement to the Student Success at Georgia State University (A) case. The (B) case includes the results of a randomized control trial that Georgia State conducted to test education technology start-up AdmitHub’s chatbot solution as a strategy for improving...

September 2020 (Revised November 2020)
Case

Student Success at Georgia State University (A)

By: Michael W. Toffel, Robin Mendelson and Julia Kelley

Georgia State University had developed a reputation for driving student success by nearly doubling its graduation rate for students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. It did so while growing its student body and the proportion of Black/African...

August 2020 (Revised September 2020)
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...

August 2020
Teaching Material

Migros Turkey: Scaling Online Operations (B)

By: Antonio Moreno and Gamze Yucaoglu

The case opens in February 2020 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 looking over the results of the fulfillment pilot the...

July 2020
Teaching Material

Instabeat—Crossing the Finish Line

By: Shikhar Ghosh, Nicole Tempest Keller and Alpana Thapar

Lebanese entrepreneur Hind Hobeika was just 21 years old when she launched her startup, Instabeat, which had developed the first real-time bio-feedback device for swimmers to monitor and improve their performance. It had been an extremely testing 10-year journey to...

July 2020 (Revised September 2020)
Case

Property Finder's Strategy for Online Classifieds in the MENA Region

By: Krishna G. Palepu, Gamze Yucaoglu and Fares Khrais

The case opens in 2020 as Michael Lahyani, founder and CEO of Property Finder, Dubai’s leading online real estate classifieds portal, contemplates the company’s five-year growth strategy. Since its founding in 2005 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Property Finder had...

July 2020 (Revised January 2021)
Case

Mr. Five Percent: Calouste Gulbenkian and the Origins of Global Oil

By: Geoffrey Jones and Yazeed Al-Rashed

This case describes the business career of Calouste Gulbenkian, a skilled intermediary who was able to secure 5 per cent of a vast oil concession covering much of the Middle East that was signed in 1928. Gulbenkian was an ethnic Armenian born in the Ottoman Empire,...

April 7, 2020
Article
Russia in Global Affairs

The Pandemic and the Price of Power

By: Rawi Abdelal

April 2020
Case

The Board's Role in Refocusing Bahrain Development Bank

By: Paul M. Healy and Alpana Thapar

In March 2016, Bahrain Development Bank’s (BDB) existing board term came to an end and Khalid Al Rumaihi was appointed the new chairman. Determining a need for change, he immediately overhauled the board and replaced BDB’s long-standing CEO. The new board quickly...