David Larcker, Brian Tayan
2009
Berkshire Hathaway is known to many as the investment vehicle of Warren E. Buffett. To some extent, this reputation is well founded, given the investment success that the company has enjoyed under his leadership. Less attention, however, has been paid…
David Hoyt, Hau Lee, Michael Marks
2009
Zappos was founded in 1999, during the Internet boom, to sell shoes online. The company’s founding premise was to provide the ultimate in selection to its customers—all brands, styles, sizes, and colors. Zappos organized all aspects of its business…
Gili Elkin, Hayagreeva Rao
2008
In 1997, Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley, California, established The Edible Schoolyard program at a local middle school. In this program, children who had never been outside the city prepared their own food, using fresh…
Katherine Bose, Robert Chess, Peter Reiss
2008
The protagonist (“Howard Glass”) is a recent GSB graduate (2007) heading up a biomedical device start-up focused on the gastric bypass market. The case tracks Glass and team from the team formation and idea generation phases through the company’s first 6…
Janel Forde, Macharva Lucas, Myra Strober
2008
This case examines the choices facing a dual career household at a major decision point in their careers. Protagonist Lisa Johnson, a young married career woman, is carefully considering the advantages and disadvantages of uprooting her family, which…
Victoria Chang, William Guttentag, Roderick Kramer
2008
Ron Meyer, 63, is the president and COO of Universal Studios, one of the “Big Six” movie studios. He oversees Universal Pictures, Focus Features (a smaller-budget, indie-type film studio) and Universal Theme Parks & Resorts. Universal Studios’ parent…
David Hoyt, Hayagreeva Rao
2008
In December 2004, Donald Berwick, MD, president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), challenged U.S. hospitals to reduce unnecessary deaths by 100,000 within the following 18 months. By the end of this 18 month period, over 3,100…
Bethany Coates, H. Grousbeck
2008
In April 2007, Kristin Richmond laced up her sneakers and began the four mile run to Kirsten Tobey’s house. It was a Saturday morning, but the two co-founders of Revolution Foods (RevFoods), a provider of healthy meals and nutrition education to schools…
Mark Leslie, Katherine Bose
2008
After significant changes in management, strategic direction and product focus, XenSource, a virtualization software start-up that relies on open source code, faces key decisions regarding the positioning and packaging of its products, a challenge which…
Katherine Bose, Robert Chess, Peter Reiss
2008
The protagonist (“Howard Glass”) is a recent GSB graduate (2007) heading up a biomedical device start-up focused on the gastric bypass market. The case tracks Glass and team from the team formation and idea generation phases through the company’s first 6…
Jeffrey Pfeffer
2008
This note summarizes important ideas in the social networks literature-including brokerage and structural holes and the trade-offs between networking and getting work done and between brokerage relationships and the dense connections required to build…
David Baron
2008
In 2007 the House of Representatives passed legislation that would treat carried interest as ordinary income instead of a long-term gain. The move threatened to increase the tax rate from 15 percent to 35 percent on the income of partners in private…
David Baron
2008
The Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement negotiated in the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations was a major victory for the brand name pharmaceutical companies. Patent life was extended to 20 years in the United States…
David Baron
2008
In 2005, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to market Requip (Ropinirole) for Restless Leg Syndrome. Requip had already been approved for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Prior the FDA’s approval…
Robert Burgelman, Rob Holmes
2008
In December 2007, more than 75 percent of all U.S. Internet users streamed some form of video online, consuming over 10 billion videos in total. While devices such as Apple TV and TiVo allowed users to watch Internet video on their televisions, Internet…
Robert Burgelman, Lyn Denend
2008
Throughout its history, Corning Incorporated had maintained a strong dedication to technology and innovation, committing approximately four to six percent of its annual sales to research, development, and engineering (RD&E) until the late 1990s when this…
Robert Burgelman, Lyn Denend
2008
In November 2005, members of Corning Incorporated’s early-stage opportunity identification and development team were preparing to make a recommendation regarding whether or not the company should move forward with a project to develop mercury abatement…
David Baron
2008
Reacting to the 1973-4 Arab oil embargo, Congress enacted a Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) system in 1975 that required an increase in automobile fuel economy from 14.2 miles per gallon in 1974 to 27.5 mpg in 1984. Since that time, Congress had…
Glenn Carroll, Victoria Chang, David Modest
2008
GlobeOp (http://www.globeop.com), headquartered in New York and London, was an independent financial technology firm focused on providing outsourced middle- and back-office operations capabilities, and fund administration and risk reporting services to…
Robert Burgelman, Philip Meza
2008
This case describes the work of the Innovation Program Office (IPO) within the Personal Systems Group (PSG) at technology company Hewlett-Packard (HP). It shows how this group solicits, qualifies and develops ideas for new products and services.
Nathan Blair, Saumitra Jha
2008
Jet Airways (B) is the follow-up case to Jet Airways (A). The case describes the employee cost reduction strategy undertaken by Jet Airways – the termination of trainee flight attendants – and the resulting media and political backlash that followed….
David Baron, Aneesha Capur
2008
In early 2006 David Barlow, CEO of Molecular Insight Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (MIP), a development stage biopharmaceutical company, faced a set of challenges in bringing its lead product to market and in progressing its second product into the clinical trial…
David Baron
2008
MTN, a very successful South African wireless telephone company, began in 1994 with the founding of the cellular telephone company M-Cell. In May 2008, MTN entered into exclusive discussions with Reliance Communications Ltd., the second largest wireless…
Robert Chess, Lyn Denend, Sara Gaviser Leslie, Stefanos Zenios
2008
This case has been developed to facilitate a negotiation exercise related to the formation of partnership deals in the healthcare industry. It is based on actual information, but reflects a hypothetical situation involving two companies and a product that…