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New research from Harvard Business School faculty on issues including entrepreneurship, new business ventures, and startup financing.
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Black Business Leaders Series: A Remarkable Legacy of Firsts, Maggie Lena Walker

Re: Anthony Mayo

Maggie Lena Walker used her leadership of the Independent Order of St. Luke to form a bank, newspaper, and department store—all in the stronghold of the Confederacy. Tony Mayo discusses his case study about this pioneering African American woman. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Diversity in Innovation

by Paul A. Gompers and Sophie Q. Wang

This study discusses a systematic and persistent lack of female, Hispanic, and African American labor market participation in the innovation sector, through both entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists that fund them.

The Environmental Legacies of The North Face's Doug Tompkins and Patagonia's Yvon Chouinard

by Geoffrey Jones and Ben Gettinger

The contrasting strategies taken by founders of Patagonia and The North Face provide a new lens on current debates about the ability of business to contribute to environmentalism. This paper suggests that the strategies of both founders bring positive environmental benefits but with trade-offs and limitations. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Where Could More Regulation Help Small Businesses? Online Lending.

by Karen Mills and Brayden McCarthy

The regulatory system overseeing the financial technology industry is a tangle of multiple agencies and inconsistent rules. Karen Mills and Brayden McCarthy propose a six-point plan to regulate online lending. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Turning One Thousand Customers into One Million

by Thales S. Teixeira and Michael Blanding

In the second part of a series on growing startups, Thales S. Teixeira explains how Uber, Etsy, and Airbnb climbed from one thousand customers to one million. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Business Solutions That Help Cut Food Waste

by Dina Gerdeman

Up to 40 percent of food grown in the United States for human consumption is wasted. But solutions are starting to come together from retailers, farmers, academics, policy makers, and social service organizations, according to José Alvarez. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Self-Employment Dynamics and the Returns to Entrepreneurship

by Eleanor W. Dillon and Christopher T. Stanton

Why do workers turn to entrepreneurship when many entrepreneurs appear to earn less than what they could earn in paid employment? This is the first paper to characterize how the value of resolving uncertainty about entrepreneurial earnings varies over the lifecycle after adjusting for tax differences between entrepreneurs and paid workers. Findings suggest that helping people learn about their potential earnings in entrepreneurship, either by learning from other's experiences in self-employment or by experimenting themselves, can improve the efficiency of sorting workers across sectors.

Break the Rules of How Business is Done

by Julia B. Austin

Making just small changes to how you do business inside and outside the company can help you attract bright employees and increase innovation, argues Julia B. Austin. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

One Quarter of Entrepreneurs in the United States Are Immigrants

by Michael Blanding

Immigrants are 15 percent of the overall United States population, but they become entrepreneurs at a much higher rate, according to new research by William Kerr and Sari Pekkala Kerr. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Immigrant Entrepreneurship

by Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr

Immigrant entrepreneurship is a topic of key policy interest but one with few facts. The authors construct a data platform using US Census Bureau administrative data to provide new statistics on the patterns of business formation by immigrant entrepreneurs and on the medium-term success of those businesses. Immigrants account for around a quarter of US entrepreneurs, and this share has been increasing since 1995. Immigrant entrepreneurs display a stronger up-or-out dynamic that is typical of young firm growth than natives—they fail more frequently, but immigrant-founded firms that persist experience greater employment growth compared to their native counterparts.

How Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy Attracted Their First 1,000 Customers

by Michael Blanding

Thales Teixeira studies three of the most successful “platform” startups to understand the chicken-and-egg challenge of how companies can attract their first customers. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

These VC Partners May Make Your Firm Less Innovative

by Michael Blanding

Startups that do business with VCs that also fund competitors may find they get the short end of the attention stick and produce fewer new products, concludes research by Rory McDonald and colleagues. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Slack Time and Innovation

by Ajay Agrawal, Christian Catalini, Avi Goldfarb, and Hong Luo

This study combines data about projects posted on Kickstarter with the timing of school breaks of top US colleges to find that slack time can lead to an increase in creative projects, particularly those that are relatively complex and high quality. Managers in corporations that emphasize innovation should consider providing their employees with coordinated slack time particularly to advance development of novel ideas.

Skills and Behaviors that Make Entrepreneurs Successful

by HBS Working Knowledge

Research at Harvard Business School by Lynda Applegate, Janet Kraus, and Timothy Butler takes a unique approach to understanding behaviors and skills associated with successful entrepreneurs. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Who Owns Space?

Re: Matthew C. Weinzierl

Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are tapping into their vast personal wealth to make commercial space travel a reality. In the process, they're revitalizing a listless national space program. Professor Matthew Weinzierl discusses his new case on New Space, and how public-private partnerships are becoming the building blocks for the hottest new startup sector. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

A Three-Box Solution to Managing Innovation

by Michael Blanding

In The Three-Box Solution, Vijay Govindarajan adapts an ancient Hindu philosophy to balance a company's often competing realities of past, present, and future. The more we can plan for opportunity, the better the possibility of creating a successful future. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

The Key to Keeping Resolutions? Betting Against Yourself

Re: Leslie K. John

It’s been a few months since many of us made New Year’s resolutions. Have you stuck with yours? Professor Leslie John studies how to help people change bad habits (and reinforce good ones) by looking at what makes them tick. Here, she discusses stickK, an application that motivates people by forcing them to put skin in the game of self-improvement. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Should Entrepreneurs Pitch Products or Ideas for Products?

by Carmen Nobel

Entrepreneurs with a new product idea must decide whether to pitch the concept or provide an actual prototype. Which works best? Professor Hong Luo finds answers in Hollywood screenplays. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Becoming a Cognitive Referent: Market Creation and Cultural Strategy

by Rory McDonald

Rory McDonald describes the making of a "cognitive referent," which is a firm that customers, the media, analysts, and employees automatically associate with a new market category--think Starbucks and coffee.

The Amazing Life of One of America’s Earliest Black, Female Entrepreneurs

Re: Nancy F. Koehn

Though not everyone may know her name, Madam C.J. Walker helped invent what have become staples of our modern country and economy: entrepreneurship, national sales forces, and corporate social responsibility, says Nancy Koehn. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.