Tag: Harvard Business School

  • Campus & Community

    HBS’s Teresa Amabile ‘tracks creativity in the wild’

    If you were paid more money, would you produce more creative work? If that report languishing on your desk for months were suddenly due by the end of the week, would it be better, crisper, more innovative? What if your job depended on it? Teresa Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at…

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  • Health

    Faking happiness for fun and profit

    Laura Morgan Roberts of Harvard Business School and Stéphane Côté of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Canada, studied 103 working college students. “We found that presenting yourself to be happier than you really are has positive benefits not just for those around you but for yourself,” says Roberts. “Suppressing negative…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    When problem-solving is a problem

    If an ill-timed delivery left them short of linens, nurses observed by Harvard Business School doctoral student Anita Tucker found a way to borrow from another unit. Such initiative taking by empowered frontline workers is a good thing, right? Well, yes. And no. The bad news, said Tucker, is that the root causes of the…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    For billion-dollar deals, risk allocation is key

    Not too long ago, when dot-com fever was at its peak, observers of the business world oohed and aahed over venture capital transactions involving millions of dollars. From researcher Benjamin Esty’s perspective, however, these deals seemed like small change. His research, after all, focuses on projects much bigger than the latest e-commerce enterprise. “Most of…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Business professor works to unlock the mysteries of television viewing habits

    Media consultants have spent years studying what convinces viewers to watch certain programs. While there are no purely empirical answers why certain programs are more popular than others, a new study led by a researcher at the Harvard Business School (HBS) provides some strong clues — and a surprising conclusion. “What we found is that…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Professor’s survey method opens ‘windows of consciousness’

    Bringing together theories and tools from disciplines ranging from psychology to neuroscience, the Mind of the Market Laboratory at Harvard Business School attempts to define and qualify consumers’ and managers’ thoughts and feelings about an array of ideas, from “loyalty” to “privacy” to “chocolate.” The work is spearheaded by the lab’s co-director, Gerald Zaltman, whose…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Digital communications will reshape the way businesses market goods

    In a chapter of the forthcoming book Digital Marketing, Harvard Business School Professor John A. Deighton and coauthor Patrick Barwise of the London Business School identify three qualities that distinguish the Web from other mass media. First, the Web fragments its audience’s attention. Where television brings people together and lets advertisers build giant brands and…

    1–2 minutes
  • Science & Tech

    Computers that are more than the sum of their parts

    In the 1960s, a potentially serious drawback threatened further progress toward the computer age. As Harvard Business School Dean Kim Clark and his colleague, Professor Carliss Baldwin, wrote in their book, Design Rules: The Power of Modularity, Volume I (The MIT Press), “The support of older applications and systems was becoming a problem of nightmarish…

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