Research - Global Initiative - Harvard Business School

September 2021
Case

Vignettes on Professional Service Firm Governance

By: David G. Fubini, Suraj Srinivasan and Li-Kuan Ni

The two vignettes within “Vignettes on Professional Service Firm Governance” (HBS No. 122-024) present various issues relating to governance in professional service firms (“PSFs”). In the first, the Managing Director of a U.S. consulting firm contemplates whether to...

Article
NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery

A Cost Comparison of Cataract Surgeries in Three Countries—United States, India, and Nepal

By: Jiayin Xue, John Hinkle, Mary-Grace Reeves, Luo Luo Zheng, Vengadesan Natarajan, Shyam Vyas, Radhika Upreti Oli, Matt Oliva, Robert S. Kaplan, Arnold Milstein, Geoff Tabin, Jeffrey L. Goldberg and Kevin Schulman

U.S.-based cataract surgeries are costly compared with those performed in high-quality Indian and Nepalese eye centers. The authors used time-driven activity-based costing to evaluate phacoemulsification surgery across four sites: a U.S.-based academic hospital...

Article
Business History

Business Investment in Education in Emerging Markets Since the 1960s

By: Valeria Giacomin, Geoffrey Jones and Erica Salvaj

This article examines non-profit investments by business in education in emerging markets between the 1960s and the present day. Using a sample of 110 interviews with business leaders from an oral history database, the study shows that more than three-quarters of such...

August 2021
Case

BYJU’S: EdTech Giant Investing in Brick and Mortar

By: John J-H Kim and Rachna Tahilyani

The founder and CEO of BYJU’S, India’s largest edtech firm and one of the world’s most valuable edtech companies, is considering acquiring Aakash Educational Services (Aakash), one of India’s largest brick-and-mortar test-prep firms, for $1 billion. Is this a good...

July 2021
Case

Fynd

By: Ranjay Gulati, Kairavi Dey and Rachna Tahilyani

Fynd is a fast-growing venture that in 7 years since its founding has become India's largest omnichannel retail company with real-time access to over 9,000 stores' offline inventory. It started as a B2B business supporting retailers who didn’t have an online business,...

Summer 2021
Article
Business History Review

The Cost and Evolution of Quality at Cipla Ltd, 1935–2016

By: Muhammad H. Zaman and Tarun Khanna

This article examines the evolution of Indian pharmaceutical manufacturer Cipla towards producing drugs that met the quality standards of European and U.S. regulators. It employs new research in Cipla’s corporate archives, the Creating Emerging Markets database, and...

June 2021 (Revised October 2021)
Case

Nissan's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

By: Ananth Raman, William Schmidt and Ann Winslow

In January 2020, Ashwani Gupta took over as COO at Nissan Motor Corporation, and several weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Nissan’s Business Continuity Plan (BCP) had been key to the resilience of Nissan’s supply chain. It had enabled Nissan to recover from...

May 2021
Teaching Material

Gera Developments: Leadership at a Crossroads

By: Christina R. Wing and John Masko

Teaching Plan for HBS Case No. 621-018. For decades, Gera Developments (Gera) was a boutique family-owned real estate development firm in Pune, India. But since 2000, managing director Rohit Gera had turned the company into a dynamic innovator in housing solutions for...

April 17, 2021
Article
Lancet

Reimagining India's Health System: A Lancet Citizens' Commission

By: Vikram Patel, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Gagandeep Kang, Pamela Das and Tarun Khanna

This commentary announces the launch of the Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System. The Commission is an ambitious, cross-sectoral effort to develop a citizens’ roadmap to achieving universal health coverage (UHC) in India in the next decade....

April 2021
Case

The Mahindra Group: Leading with Purpose

By: Ranjay Gulati and Rachna Tahilyani

India headquartered Mahindra Group is a multibillion-dollar federation of companies operating across the globe. It is ahead of its time in articulating its purpose and mapping its values, something it had first done at inception and then refreshed yet again as ‘Rise’...

2021
Working Paper

Absenteeism, Productivity, and Relational Contracts Inside the Firm

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Jean-François Gauthier, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

We study relational contracts among managers using a unique dataset that tracks transfers of workers across teams in Indian ready-made garment factories. We focus on how relational contracts help managers cope with worker absenteeism shocks, which are frequent, often...

March 2021
Case

Dasra: From Strategic Philanthropy to Field Building

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Tanya Bijlani

Dasra, a pioneer in the Indian Strategic Philanthropy space founded by a husband and wife team, had grown and evolved with the fast changing philanthropy scene in India. By 2017 it had managed to raise nearly $100 million of new capital for NGOs and Nonprofits in...

March 2021 (Revised August 2021)
Case

Nayana Mawilmada: Transforming Urban Development in Sri Lanka

By: Joshua D. Margolis and Mahima Rao-Kachroo

In February 2018, Nayana Mawilmada (Nayana), investment head for the Sri Lankan government’s ambitious $40 billion Megapolis project, must weigh an attractive job offer to move from the public sector to the private sector. A massive government project aimed at...

Article
Harvard Business Review

Manage the Suppliers That Could Harm Your Brand: Know When to Avoid, Engage, or Drop Them

By: Jodi L Short and Michael W. Toffel

The pandemic has placed a new spotlight on working conditions in factories that supply global companies. To avert problems, firms often impose codes of conduct on their suppliers and perform audits to assess compliance. Do these measures help identify unethical...

January 2021
Case

Aster DM Healthcare: Budgeting for a Crisis

By: V.G. Narayanan and Amy Klopfenstein

In April 2020, Alisha Moopen, Deputy Managing Director of Aster DM Healthcare, a network of clinics, hospitals, and pharmacies in the Middle East and India, must create her company’s budget for the 2021 fiscal year in light of the onset of Covid-19. The pandemic had...

January 2021
Teaching Material

Aster DM Healthcare: Budget Exercise

By: V.G. Narayanan and Amy Klopfenstein

In April 2020, Alisha Moopen, Deputy Managing Director of Aster DM Healthcare, a network of clinics, hospitals, and pharmacies in the Middle East and India, must create her company’s budget for the 2021 fiscal year in light of the onset of Covid-19. The pandemic had...

2021
Working Paper

Sourcing Monitors to Monitor Your Sourcing: Strategies to Manage Shilling and Shirking by Supply Chain Auditors

By: Ashley Palmarozzo, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel

Multinational corporations (MNCs) hire auditors to assess business partners’ compliance with quality, working conditions, and environmental standards. Independent third-party auditors are widely assumed to outperform second-party auditors employed and thus controlled...

January 2021 (Revised February 2021)
Case

TCS: From Physical Offices to Borderless Work

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Malini Sen

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a multinational IT services company headquartered in Mumbai, is a subsidiary of one of India’s most reputed conglomerates, the Tata Group. In 2020, TCS was valued at $144.7 billion, the highest for any company in the IT sector,...

January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
Case

Serum Institute of India (SII): Racing to Save Lives During a Pandemic

By: Rohit Deshpandé, Anjali Raina and Rachna Chawla

The CEO of Serum Institute of India (SII), a $12.8 billion Indian Family business is faced with a risky choice between principles and profit. SII is the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world and Adar Poonawalla, the CEO and son of the founder has to decide how...

January 2021
Article
Economic Journal

'Mobile'izing Agricultural Advice: Technology Adoption, Diffusion and Sustainability

By: Shawn A. Cole and A. Nilesh Fernando

We examine the role of management in agricultural productivity by evaluating a mobile-phone based agricultural advice service provided to farmers in India. Demand for advice is high, and advice changes practices, increasing yields in cumin (28%) and cotton (8.6% for a...