Research - Global Initiative - Harvard Business School

April 2021
Case

The Mahindra Group: Leading with Purpose

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’ in...

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
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...

March–April 2021
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

Auditor Independence and Outsourcing: Aligning Incentives to Mitigate Shilling and Shirking

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

Multinational corporations (MNCs) hire auditors to assess their 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...

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 January 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 (Royal Economic Society)

'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...

2021
Working Paper

Bollywood, Skin Color and Sexism: The Role of the Film Industry in Emboldening and Contesting Stereotypes in India after Independence

By: Sudev Sheth, Geoffrey Jones and Morgan Spencer

This working paper examines the social impact of the film industry in India during the first four decades after Indian Independence in 1947. It shows that Bollywood, the mainstream cinema in India and the counterpart in scale to Hollywood in the United States, shared...

2021
Working Paper

Institutional Spillovers: Evidence from Behavioral Interventions in Handwashing

By: Reshmaan Hussam and Dayea Oh

We study the process of behavioral change across institutions in the context of handwashing in rural Bangladesh. We randomize an education treatment in classrooms to trace school-to-home learning and randomize the proportion of students who receive handwashing...

December 2020
Case

Urban Company

By: Krishna G. Palepu

Urban Company is an India-based market platform that helps customers book home services and at home beauty services. The company differentiated itself by investing heavily in building customer trust. Rather than merely positioning itself as a lead generating platform,...

2020
Working Paper

India's Food Supply Chain During the Pandemic

By: Matt Lowe, V G Nadhanael and Benjamin N. Roth

We document the impact of India’s COVID-19 lockdown on the food supply chain. Food arrivals in wholesale markets dropped by 62% in the three weeks following the lockdown and wholesale prices rose by 8%. Six weeks after the lockdown began, volumes and prices had fully...

November 2020
Case

BRAC in 2020

By: Tarun Khanna and Shreya Ramachandran

In 2020, the largest non-governmental organization in the world, BRAC, headquartered in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has some big problems to tackle. Its founder, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, has left behind a challenge: take the 1981-founded organization from Bangladesh to every...

November 2020
Case

Axis My India

By: Ananth Raman, Ann Winslow and Kairavi Dey

"Pradeep Gupta founded Axis My India (AMI) as a printing and publishing company in 1998. In 2013, AMI expanded into consumer research and election forecasting. Although a relatively unknown entity, AMI predicted several election results accurately. Gupta describes...

November 2020 (Revised March 2021)
Case

KhataBook

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Allison H. Mnookin and James Barnett

In January 2020, India-based KhataBook, a digital ledger app for small businesses, is led by CEO Ravish Naresh, as his team faces a series of dilemmas regarding where to focus next.

October 2020
Case

PraDigi Open Learning: Transforming Rural India

By: John J-H Kim and Malini Sen

Pratham is a non-governmental organization, focusing on high-quality, low-cost and replicable interventions to address gaps in the Indian education system. Co-founder Madhav Chavan is interested in using technology for education but differed in the way it is used in...

September 2020
Teaching Material

Comviva: Exploring New Frontiers (B)

By: Dante Roscini, Mahima Rao-Kachroo and Shreya Ramachandran

After articulating its ambitious growth plans, mobile services provider Mahindra Comviva, active in over 90 countries, is thinking about how to titrate and re-plan its growth strategy given the coronavirus pandemic. Its India headquarters considers its people costs,...

September 2020 (Revised January 2021)
Case

Comviva: Exploring New Frontiers (A)

By: Dante Roscini and Mahima Rao-Kachroo

Comviva, a mobile solutions provider active in India and 94 other countries, has had a rich history and been successful across many emerging and complex markets: Latin America, South-East Asia, Africa. What are the lessons learnt from expansion, cultural fits, and...