Education

58 Results

 

Diagnosing the ‘Flutie Effect’ on College Marketing

Doug J. Chung

Boston College, after one of the most dramatic plays in collegiate football history, benefitted with a dramatic upswing in applications. Other colleges have experienced similar upswings from sports success. In a new study, Doug J. Chung demonstrates the reality behind the "Flutie Effect," named after BC quarterback Doug Flutie. Open for comment; 8 Comments posted.

HBS Cases: Women MBAs at Harvard Business School

Professor Boris Groysberg discusses his new case, "Women MBAs at Harvard Business School: 1962-2012," which delves into the experiences of the School's alumnae over the past 50 years. Open for comment; 3 Comments posted.

Fostering Translational Research: Using Public-Private Partnerships to Improve Firm Survival, Employment Growth, and Innovative Performance

Sen Chai and Willy C. Shih

The authors demonstrate that a unique Danish mediated public-private partnership model for fostering the translation of basic science into commercial applications help firms significantly decrease the likelihood of bankruptcy while substantially increasing the average level of employment. Funded firms in the study were granted significantly more patents and published more peer-reviewed papers, and the impact of these publications was significantly higher. In addition, the mediated partnership model improved the knowledge produced as well as the collaborative behavior of scientists with a significantly higher level of citations and more cross-institutional coauthored publications. Read More

What Health Care Managers Need to Know--and How to Teach Them

Health care business managers are under tremendous pressure to become more innovative, more productive, more accountable. The question, asks Regina Herzlinger, is who is going to teach them these skills? Open for comment; 6 Comments posted.

The Unexpected Link Between Cadavers and Careers

Illustrating the strange socializing power of our occupational pursuits, a new study by professor Michel Anteby and colleagues finds a strong association between jobs and corpse donations. Open for comment; 2 Comments posted.

Penn State Lesson: Today’s Cover-Up was Yesterday’s Opportunity

While leaders may rationalize that a cover-up protects the interests of their organizations, the inevitable damage harms their institutions far more than acknowledging a mistake, says professor Bill George. Open for comment; 15 Comments posted.

Teaching Leadership: What We Know

The field of leadership education has reached a critical stage. After several decades of experimentation, "The Handbook for Teaching Leadership," Scott A. Snook, Rakesh Khurana, and Nitin Nohria, is intended to be a foundational reference for educators facing this increasingly important challenge. Open for comment; 13 Comments posted.

Big BRICs, Weak Foundations: The Beginning of Public Elementary Education in Brazil, Russia, India, and China

Latika Chaudhary, Aldo Musacchio, Steven Nafziger, and Se Yan

Economists have argued that the "Great Divergence" between the developed and underdeveloped world in the nineteenth century was reinforced—if not caused—by rapid improvements in schooling that occurred in the advanced economies. Explaining differences in economic development today may hinge on understanding why most societies failed to develop adequate primary education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study sheds new light on the comparative experiences of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) during the formative years of their primary education systems. Read More

When Researchers Cheat (Just a Little)

Although cases of clear scientific misconduct have received significant media attention recently, less flagrant transgressions of research norms may be more prevalent and, in the long run, more damaging to the academic enterprise, reports Assistant Professor Leslie K. John. Open for comment; 13 Comments posted.

Leadership Program for Women Targets Subtle Promotion Biases

Despite more women in the corporate work force, they still are underrepresented in executive officer positions. Professor Robin Ely and colleagues propose a new way to think about developing women for leadership. Open for comment; 12 Comments posted.

Measuring the Efficacy of the World’s Managers

Over the past seven years, Harvard Business School's Raffaella Sadun and a team of researchers have interviewed managers at some 10,000 organizations in 20 countries. The goal: to determine how and why management practices differ vastly in style and quality not only across nations, but also across various organizations and industries. Open for comment; 19 Comments posted.

Building a Business in the Context of a Life

Careers rarely run on a track from Point A to Point B—life experiences often change our goals. At Harvard Business School, Senior Lecturer Janet J. Kraus teaches students to take a life plan as seriously as they would a business plan. Open for comment; 13 Comments posted.

Salience in Quality Disclosure: Evidence from the U.S. News College Rankings

Michael Luca and Jonathan Smith

Why are the U.S. News and World Report College Rankings so influential? According to this paper by Michael Luca and Jonathan Smith, it's at least in part because U.S. News makes the information so simple. While earlier college guides had already provided useful information about schools, U.S. News did the work of aggregating the information into an easy-to-use ranking, making it more salient for prospective students. The authors show that these rankings matter in a big way: a one-rank improvement leads to a 0.9 percent increase in applicants. However, students tend to ignore the underlying details even though these details carry more information than the overall rank. Read More

Business Plan Contest: 15 Years of Building Better Entrepreneurs

Since 1997, Hundreds of student-entrepreneurs have tested their ideas at Harvard Business School's annual Business Plan Contest. Here is what they have learned about success, failure, and themselves. From the HBS Alumni Bulletin. Open for comment; 2 Comments posted.

How Disruptive Innovation is Remaking the University

In The Innovative University, authors Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring take Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation to the field of higher education, where new online institutions and learning tools are challenging the future of traditional colleges and universities. Open for comment; 20 Comments posted.

Accounting Scholarship That Advances Professional Knowledge and Practice

Robert S. Kaplan

Accounting scholars generally do a fine job of analyzing how we process accounting data, but they ought to spend more time looking at how that data is produced, says Harvard Business School professor Robert S. Kaplan. In this paper—in response to a newly minted professor who sought his advice—Kaplan reminds young scholars that accounting is more of a professional discipline than an academic subject. To that end, he advises them not just to teach their students the common body of accounting knowledge, but also to advance that body of knowledge by bridging the gap between scholarship and practice. Read More

From Social Control to Financial Economics: The Linked Ecologies of Economics and Business in Twentieth Century America

Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana

No transformation looks more consequential for the history of American higher education than the extraordinary rise of business schools and business degrees in the twentieth century. Marion Fourcade (UC Berkeley) and Rakesh Khurana (HBS) analyze the changing place of economics in American business education as reflected in the teaching of three elite business schools over the course of the twentieth century: the Wharton School (1900-1930), the Carnegie Tech Graduate School of Industrial Administration (post World War II), and the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago (1960s-present). Read More

How Foundations Think: The Ford Foundation as a Dominating Institution in the Field of American Business Schools

Rakesh Khurana, Kenneth Kimura, and Marion Fourcad

What causes institutions to change? This paper adds organizational and exogenous perspective to existing theories by looking at the idea of "dominating institutions"—a class of formal organizations purposively designed to change other institutions. HBS professor Rakesh Khurana and colleagues look at the Ford Foundation and its work reshaping America's graduate schools of management between 1952 and 1965 through funding of "centers of excellence" at a number of schools, including Harvard Business School. Read More

Creating the Founders’ Dilemmas Course

In HBS professor Noam Wasserman's second-year MBA course, Founders' Dilemmas, students study the quandaries that virtually all entrepreneurs will face when trying to realize the dream of launching a start-up—from deciding when to start the company to learning how to make a graceful exit. Guest speakers discussing their experiences include All-Star pitcher-turned-entrepreneur Curt Schilling and Tom & Tom, the Nantucket Nectars guys. Open for comment; 12 Comments posted.

New Dean Sets Five Priorities for HBS

Harvard Business School's new Dean Nitin Nohria outlines five priorities that will shape the agenda for the School during his tenure: curriculum innovation, intellectual ambition, internationalization, inclusion, and closer ties to the University. Read More

How to Fix a Broken Marketplace

Alvin E. Roth was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science this week for his Harvard Business School research into market design and matching theory. This article explores his research. Open for comment; 5 Comments posted.

Panel on Pedagogical Innovations in MBA Courses

Faculty Research Symposium 2010: Multiple pedagogical innovations are taking place at HBS that are fundamentally changing students' learning experiences. Read More

What Top Scholars Say about Leadership

Rakesh Khurana

As a subject of scholarly inquiry, leadership—and who leaders are, what makes them tick, how they affect others—has been neglected for decades. The Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, edited by Harvard Business School's Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana, brings together some of the best minds on this important subject. Q&A with Khurana, plus book excerpt. Read More

Introductory Reading For Being a Leader and The Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological Model

Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen, Steve Zaffron, and Kari L. Granger

Effective leadership does not come from mere knowledge about what successful leaders do; or from trying to emulate the characteristics or styles of noteworthy leaders; or from trying to remember and follow the steps, tips, or techniques from books or coaching on leadership. And it certainly does not come from merely being in a leadership position or in a position of authority or having decision rights. This paper, the sixth of six pre-course reading assignments for an experimental leadership course developed by HBS professor emeritus Michael C. Jensen and coauthors, accompanies a course specifically designed to provide actionable access to being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership as one's natural self-expression. Read More

What Is the Future of MBA Education?

Srikant M. Datar and David A. Garvin

Why get an MBA degree? Transformations in business and society make this question increasingly urgent for executives, business school deans, students, faculty, and the public. In a new book, Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads, Harvard Business School's Srikant M. Datar, David A. Garvin, and Patrick G. Cullen suggest opportunities for innovation. Q&A with Datar and Garvin plus book excerpt. Read More

The Great Leap Forward: The Political Economy of Education in Brazil, 1889-1930

André Martínez-Fritscher, Aldo Musacchio, and Martina Viarengo

In 1890, with only 15 percent of the population literate, Brazil had the lowest literacy rate among the large economies in the Americas. Yet between 1890 and 1940, Brazil had the most rapid increase in literacy rates in the Americas, catching up with and even surpassing some of its more educated peers such as Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela. This jump in literacy was simultaneously accompanied by a brisk increase in the number of teachers, number of public schools, and enrollment rates. Why were political elites in Brazil willing to finance this expansion of public education for all? André Martínez-Fritscher of Banco de México, Aldo Musacchio of HBS, and Martina Viarengo of the London School of Economics explain how state governments secured funds to pay for education and examine the incentives of politicians to spend on education. They conclude that the progress made in education during these decades had mixed results in the long run. Read More

Investing in Improvement: Strategy and Resource Allocation in Public School Districts

Stacey Childress

The operating environments of public school districts are largely void of the market forces that reward a company's success with more capital and exert pressure on it to eventually abandon unproductive activities. Stacey Childress describes the strategic resource decisions in 3 of the 20 public school districts that she and colleagues have studied through the Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard. The stories in San Francisco, New York City, and Maryland's Montgomery County occurred largely before the districts faced dramatic decreases in revenues, though they show the superintendents facing budget concerns near the end of the narratives. Even so, the situations share common principles that superintendents and their leadership teams can use to make differentiated resource decisions—reducing spending in some areas and increasing it in others with a clear rationale for why these decisions will produce results for students. Read More

HBS Begins Teaching Consumer Finance

Peter Tufano

Last spring HBS became the first top-ranked U.S. business school to offer a course in consumer finance. Professor Peter Tufano talks about the course and his determination to make consumer finance a broadly accepted academic pursuit. From the HBS Alumni Bulletin. Read More

HBS Past and Present

Eight enduring themes have characterized Harvard Business School from its earliest years, and remain as integral as ever to the way the School thinks and operates. Read More

Harvard and HBS: The Next 100 Years

Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust reflected on Harvard Business School's past 100 years and shared her vision of the future, while HBS Dean Jay Light discussed the School's history and highlighted key focus areas for the future. Read More

Business Summit: Business Education in the 21st Century

Business schools are innovating and experimenting to change the MBA experience, and to help business education regain its relevance and value. Along with a changing curricula, programs are attempting to make the learning experience more interactive, engaging, global, and experiential. Read More

Business Summit: The Role of Social Entrepreneurship in Transforming American Public Education

Amid formidable barriers, a set of passionate social entrepreneurs are disrupting the status quo in education with innovative and effective approaches that are producing measurable results. The challenge now is to build support so these solutions can be applied elsewhere. Read More

Demographics, Career Concerns or Social Comparison: Who Games SSRN Download Counts?

Benjamin G. Edelman and Ian I. Larkin

Why do certain individuals commit fraudulent acts—in this case repeatedly downloading their own working papers from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) repository to increase the papers' reported download counts? HBS professors Benjamin G. Edelman and Ian I. Larkin study the relative importance of demographic, economic, and psychological factors leading individuals to commit this kind of gaming. Authors engage in deceptive self-downloading to improve a paper's visibility on SSRN, to obtain more favorable assessments of paper quality, and to obtain possible benefits for promotion and tenure decisions at those schools that consider download counts in tenure decisions. Data indicates that authors are more likely to inflate their papers' download counts when a higher count greatly improves the visibility of a paper on the SSRN network. Authors are also more likely to inflate their papers' download counts when their peers recently had successful papers—suggesting an "envy" effect in download gaming. Download inflations are also affected somewhat by career concerns (e.g. just before changing jobs) and by demographic factors, though these effects are smaller. On the whole, analysis suggests a heightened risk of fraudulent acts not only where economic returns are high, but also where prestige, status, or reputation are important. Read More

Smart Money: The Effect of Education, Cognitive Ability, and Financial Literacy on Financial Market Participation

Shawn Cole and Gauri Kartini Shastry

(Previously titled "If You Are So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich? The Effects of Education, Financial Literacy and Cognitive Ability on Financial Market Participation.") Individuals face an increasingly complex menu of financial product choices. The shift from defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans, and the growing importance of private retirement accounts, require individuals to choose the amount they save, as well as the mix of assets in which they invest. Yet, participation in financial markets is far from universal in the United States. Moreover, researchers have only a limited understanding of what factors cause participation. Cole and Shastry use a very large dataset new to the literature in order to study the important determinants of financial market participation. They find that higher levels of education and cognitive ability cause increased participation—however, financial literacy education does not. Read More

‘Ted Levitt Changed My Life’

Many students say legendary Harvard Business School marketing professor Ted Levitt changed their lives inside his classroom and out. "Ted Levitt was the most influential and imaginative professor in marketing history," HBS professor and senior associate dean John Quelch eulogized on the occasion of Levitt's death in 2006. Colleagues and students remember a life and times. From HBS Alumni Bulletin. Read More

Harvard Business School Discusses Future of the MBA

The MBA industry is in turmoil. Many business schools are revisiting their offerings to see if they still have relevance in the 21st century. And HBS is using its centennial year to convene worldwide experts on business education and plot its directions for the next 100 years. From HBS Alumni Bulletin. Read More

Secrets of the Academy: The Drivers of University Endowment Success

Josh Lerner, Antoinette Schoar, and Jialan Wang

University endowments are important and interesting institutions both in the investing community and society at large. They play a role in maintaining the academic excellence of many universities that rely heavily on income from their endowments. In contrast, poor finances can undermine a school's ability to provide academic services altogether. Endowments have also received much attention recently for their superior investment returns compared with other institutional investors. In this study, the authors document the trends in college and university endowment returns and investments in the United States between 1992 and 2005. Read More

Is Case Method Instruction Due for an Overhaul?

Online forum now closed. The case method of teaching business management has come under criticism on a number of fronts as educators rethink how to incorporate new teaching tools and methods made available by technology. Responses to Professor Jim Heskett's recent column, however, suggest that the case method might even be gaining relevance over time. Closed for comment; 111 Comments posted.

How Disruptive Innovation Changes Education

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson

HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen, who developed the theory of disruptive innovation, joins colleagues Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson to advocate for ways in which ideas around innovation can spur much-needed improvements in public education. A Q&A with the authors of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Read More

HBS Cases: Reforming New Orleans Schools After Katrina

Stacey M. Childress

The New Orleans public school system, ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, is now getting a boost from charter schools—today about half of the city's 80 schools are charter schools, says HBS lecturer and senior researcher Stacey M. Childress. She explains what New Orleans represents for entrepreneurial opportunities in U.S. public education. Read More

The Intellectual History of Harvard Business School

This colloquium held at HBS in April looked at key developments in the areas of entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, accounting, and strategy, among others. HBS professor Richard S. Tedlow describes the highlights. Read More

Chris Christensen: Legend of the Classroom

Professor C. Roland ("Chris") Christensen was the maestro of Harvard Business School's case method of teaching. Over a career spanning half a century, Christensen made his colleagues better teachers, and his students better leaders. From the HBS Alumni Bulletin. Read More

Incompatible Assumptions: Barriers to Producing Multidisciplinary Knowledge in Communities of Scholarship

Corinne Bendersky and Kathleen L. McGinn

Just as flows of knowledge within and across communities of practice improve the quality of new products, knowledge sharing among knowledge workers within interdisciplinary communities may be critical for new discoveries and for a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of phenomena. In spite of this, biologists tend to talk to biologists, economists tend to talk to economists, and lawyers tend to talk to lawyers. This paper argues that producing and disseminating knowledge within a multidisciplinary community of practice is enhanced when knowledge workers hold compatible assumptions, even when the form and content of knowledge generation across those workers varies. Read More

Teaching The Moral Leader

Sandra J. Sucher

In The Moral Leader course at Harvard Business School, students exchange their business management case studies to discuss some of the great protagonists in literature. Professor Sandra Sucher discusses how we all can find our own definition of moral leadership. Read More

Management Education’s Unanswered Questions

Rakesh Khurana

Managers want the status of professionals, but not all managers want the constraints that go along with professions. Why? For more than 100 years, business education at the top universities has been searching for its soul. HBS professor Rakesh Khurana, author of a new book, says business school education is at a turning point. Read More

Learning to Make the Move to CEO

Even experienced managers need to learn more if they hope to ascend to the C-Suite. In a program created by Harvard Business School Executive Education, participants learn new techniques and perspectives not only from faculty but from their cohorts as well. Read More

Rediscovering Schumpeter: The Power of Capitalism

Thomas K. McCraw

Economist Joseph Schumpeter was perhaps the most powerful thinker ever on innovation, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. He was also one of the most unusual personalities of the 20th century, as Harvard Business School professor emeritus Thomas K. McCraw shows in a new biography. Read our interview and book excerpt. Read More

Making the Move to General Manager

Managers face a critical transition when they rise from functional expert to general manager. It's an exciting shift but it's also fraught with pitfalls. A new executive education program at Harvard Business School aims to smooth and accelerate this transition, as professor and program chair Benjamin C. Esty explains. Read More

“UpTick” Brings Wall Street Pressure to Students

Money managers work in a stressful, competitive pressure cooker that's hard to appreciate from the safety of a business management classroom. That's why HBS professors Joshua Coval and Erik Stafford invented upTick—a market simulation program that has students sweating and strategizing as they recreate classic market scenarios. Read More

New at the Helm: A Talk with HBS Dean Light

Jay O. Light

As Harvard Business School's ninth Dean, Jay Light takes control at a critical point in time. Light discusses the opportunities brought by globalism, challenges in recruiting and developing faculty, and program innovation needed to meet the needs of 21st-century business leaders. Read More

Mixing Students and Scientists in the Classroom

In his course on commercializing science and technology, Lee Fleming combines students from business, engineering, law, science, and medicine. The result: Ideas for products from scale-eating bacteria to quantum dot cancer treatments. Read More

Meeting China’s Need for Management Education

On a recent trip to China, Steven C. Wheelwright noted an increasing interest in entrepreneurship, globalization, and competitiveness. Most of all, the Chinese have an increasing thirst for management education. Read More

Developing a Strategy for Digital Convergence

Technology was getting dull earlier this decade, says David Yoffie. But the sudden arrival of digital convergence has turned the tech world upside down. What are the right bets to place? Read More

Writing the Case for Public School Reform

Professor David Thomas discusses his case studies on how the School District of Philadelphia is recruiting and retaining teachers and improving its human resources department. From HBS Alumni Bulletin. Read More

Should More Transparency Extend to Education for Management?

The pros and cons of grade disclosure is a hot topic at business schools these days, including Harvard Business School. Should students have to disclose their grades to recruiters? And how does this issue connect to the need for greater transparency in business generally? Closed for comment; 35 Comments posted.

Public Education Goes to School

Stacey M. Childress and Allen S. Grossman

Harvard's schools of Business and Education are bringing management skills to nine school districts across the country—and positive results are starting to show. Read More

Promoting a Management Revolution in Public Education

Stacey M. Childress, Richard Elmore, and Allen S. Grossman

Public school districts are difficult to lead and manage, and the idea of applying business principles to school reform is popular. But is it practical? This paper describes the work of Harvard's Public Education Leadership Program as it helps school districts grapple with performance challenges, including student achievement that compares unfavorably with other countries, and a significant performance gap between white and minority students. Complicating the picture: The concept of managing for accountability is new in education. The authors studied the effects of improved management on public school student performance by comparing fifteen large urban school districts with similar peer districts. Read More

Education, Technology, and Business: What’s the Catch?

In a panel discussion on current and future business opportunities in the American education market, four entrepreneurs hashed out the pros and cons of entering this tricky sector. There are opportunities—for the daring and undaunted. HBS professor Alan MacCormack moderated this panel at the Conference on Social Enterprise held recently at Harvard Business School. Read More