Research
Research
- May 2021
- Teaching Material
Hello Alfred: Come Home Happy — Operating the Business Model Exercise, Instructor Version
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Christopher Payton
| On a mission to "automate the on-demand economy," Harvard Business School classmates Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck launched Hello Alfred in 2013 to provide subscribers with an "Alfred" to complete various chores for a monthly fee. In early 2016, the company has built...
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- May 2021
- Review of Financial Studies
Mutual Funds as Venture Capitalists? Evidence from Unicorns
By: Josh Lerner, Sergey Chernenko and Yao Zeng
| The past decade saw the rise of both “founder-friendly” venture financings and non-traditional investors, frequently with liquidity constraints. Using detailed contract data, we study open-end mutual funds investing in private venture-backed firms. We posit an...
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- April 2021
- Teaching Material
Exercise for Revlon: Surviving Covid-19
By: Kristin Mugford and Sarah Gulick
| Exercise for Revlon: Surviving Covid-19
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- April 2021
- Case
IBM: Design Thinking
By: Srikant M. Datar, Amram Migdal and Paul Hamilton
| This case describes the 2012-2020 effort at IBM to implement design thinking throughout the company and hire thousands of designers to serve on every product team alongside technical engineers and developers and product managers. IBM’s design transformation is told...
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- April 2021
- Teaching Material
Thingtesting: Launching a Brand Discovery and Testing Digital Community
By: Ayelet Israeli and Jill Avery
| Teaching note for the "Thingtesting: Launching a Brand Discovery and Testing Digital Community" case (HBS 520-086)
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- April 2021
- Teaching Material
Nehemiah Mfg. Co.: Providing a Second Chance
By: Brian Trelstad and John Masko
| In 2009, Dan Meyer and Richard Palmer, two veterans of the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, founded Nehemiah Manufacturing to build FMCG brands while providing jobs to Cincinnati, Ohio’s beleaguered urban core. Two years later, the pair made their first...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
MLS as a Sports Product—The Prominence of the World's Game in the U.S.
By: Stephen A. Greyser and Kenneth Cortsen
| The purpose of this Working Paper is to analyze how soccer at the professional level in the U.S., with Major League Soccer as a focal point, has developed over the span of a quarter of a century. It is worthwhile to examine the growth of Major League Soccer (MLS) from...
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- April 2021
- Teaching Material
Drinkworks: Home Bar by Keurig
By: Sunil Gupta and Jonathan Levav
| Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 521-010. In the summer of 2018, Drinkworks CEO Nathaniel Davis needed to make a number of go-to-market decisions ahead of his company’s upcoming product launch. Formed through a joint venture between Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch...
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- April–May 2021
- Journal of Accounting & Economics
Labor Mobility and Antitakeover Provisions
By: Aiyesha Dey and Joshua White
| How do firms protect their human capital? We test whether firms facing an increased threat of being acquired strengthen their antitakeover provisions (ATPs) in order to bond with their employees. We use the adoption of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by U.S....
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- April 2021
- Review of Financial Studies
Evaluating Firm-Level Expected-Return Proxies: Implications for Estimating Treatment Effects
By: Charles M.C. Lee, Eric C. So and Charles C.Y. Wang
| We introduce a parsimonious framework for choosing among alternative expected-return proxies (ERPs) when estimating treatment effects. By comparing ERPs’ measurement-error variances in the cross section and in time series, we provide new evidence on the relative...
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- March 2021
- Case
Chime Solutions
| Just two years after launching their 10k by 2020 initiative to hire 10,000 employees by 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Chief Executive Officer Mark Wilson to send nearly all of his staff at Chime Solutions (Chime) to work from home. Chime was a customer contact...
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- March 2021
- Case
Astralis Group: Determining a Brand Strategy
By: Benjamin C. Esty, Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej and Emilie Billaud
| After launching a Danish esports company in July 2019, and going public in December 2019 with multiple brands associated with different games, the Astralis leadership team was contemplating a shift to a single, corporate brand. While the original arguments for...
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- March 2021
- Teaching Material
Making Impact Investing Markets: IFC (B)
By: Shawn A. Cole, John Masko and T. Robert Zochowski
| In 2018, Thailand’s Bank of Ayudhya (known as Krungsri), was considering whether to participate in the first issue of a new financial instrument from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), known as a gender bond. Building on the success of the Green Bond program...
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- March 2021 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Making Impact Investing Markets: IFC (A)
By: Shawn A. Cole, John Masko and T. Robert Zochowski
| In 2017, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) faced the first big investment decision in its new Scaling Solar project. Founded in 1956, IFC was an international investment body with national governments as shareholders, whose mission was to promote economic...
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- March 2021
- Case
Scale and Scope at Drake Real Estate Partners
By: Christina R. Wing and David Lane
| Realizing in early 2021 that their pending real estate investment fund would likely be oversubscribed, Drake Real Estate Partners co-founders Nicolás Ibáñez and David Cotterman were considering how best to continue to diversify their investor base and how to optimize...
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