The Future of Social Enterprise

This paper considers the confluence of forces that is shaping the field of social enterprise, changing the way that funders, practitioners, scholars, and organizations measure performance. The authors trace a growing pool of potential funding sources to solve social problems, much of it stemming from an intergenerational transfer of wealth and new wealth from financial and high-tech entrepreneurs. They further examine how these organizations can best access the untapped resources by demonstrating mission performance, and then propose three potential scenarios, outlined below, for how this sector might evolve.

Click to read more ...

Allocating Marketing Resources

Deciding how to allocate marketing resources is particularly difficult because decisions need to be made at many different levels—across countries, products, marketing mix elements, and different vehicles within elements of the mix (e.g., television versus the Internet for advertising). With the increasing availability of data and sophistication in methods, it is now possible to more judiciously allocate marketing resources. In this paper, HBS professors Gupta and Steenburgh discuss a two-stage process where a model of demand is estimated in stage-one and its estimates are used as inputs in an optimization model in stage-two.

Click to read more ...

How Female Stars Succeed in New Jobs

If a successful analyst is hired by another organization, chances are both his work performance and the market value of his new company will not reap the expected benefits; they might even lose altitude. So discovered HBS professor Boris Groysberg and colleagues Ashish Nanda and Nitin Nohria, who detailed their results four years ago in the Harvard Business Review article, "The Risky Business of Hiring Stars." Since launching his research into the war for talent, however, Groysberg has started to notice something quite different about the career paths of successful analysts who were female. Star women, he found, maintained their shine even after switching companies. Unlike their male peers, they thrived in new work environments. Why the difference?

Click to read more ...

Connecting with Consumers Using Deep Metaphors

Think of famous brands you know: Hallmark cards and Coca-Cola soft drinks, for example. What do these products have in common for consumers? An emotional meaning that taps into thoughts and feelings related to the positive aspects of transformation, according to Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman

Click to read more ...