Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke discusses how past experience and intuition can be misleading when attempting to launch an innovative new product, service, business model, or process. Instead, Booking.com and other innovative firms embrace a culture where testing, experimentation, and even failure are at the heart of what they do.
Oliver Hart, Nobel-winning Harvard economist, and Kate Vitasek, faculty at the University of Tennessee, argue that many business contracts are imperfect, no matter how bulletproof you try to make them. Especially in complicated relationships such as outsourcing, one side ends up feeling like they’re getting a bad deal, and it can spiral into a tit for tat battle. Hart and Vitasek argue that companies should instead adopt so-called relational contracts. Their research shows that creating a general playbook built around principles like fairness and reciprocity offers greater benefits to both businesses. Hart and Vitasek, with the Swedish attorney David Frydlinger, cowrote the HBR article “A New Approach to Contracts.”
Female entrepreneurs are less likely to give up on their business than men, according to a new academic study. Male company owners are 14 per cent more likely to quit the firm they set up, found researchers who studied data on 1,523 UK businesses.
For Penn State Berks alumnus Joe Sinclair, buying his first 3D printer nearly 10 years ago was a life-changing moment. Sinclair, 25, whom you could easily call ‘Mr.3D Printer,’ just launched his third business—Verde Mantis, LLC, the first local company focused on bringing 3D printing or additive …
