Entrepreneurial Management

- July–August 2025
- Article
Case Study: Do We Reskill or Replace Our Workforce?

By: William R. Kerr
- July–August 2025
- Article
Case Study: Do We Reskill or Replace Our Workforce?

By: William R. Kerr
- August 2025
- Article
Revenue Collapses and the Consumption of Small Business Owners in the COVID-19 Pandemic

By: Olivia S. Kim, Jonathan A. Parker and Antoinette Schoar

Using financial account data linking small businesses to their owner households, we examine how business owners’ consumption responded to changes in business revenues during the COVID-19 crisis. In the first two months following the National Emergency, business revenues declined by 40 percent, largely driven by national factors rather than local infection rates or policies. However, the pass-through of revenue losses to owner consumption was limited: each dollar of revenue loss resulted in only a 1.6-cent decline in consumption. This muted pass-through persisted through 2021, even after the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines. Our findings suggest that federal subsidies and pandemic-induced reductions in spending opportunities explain the limited impact.
- August 2025
- Article
Revenue Collapses and the Consumption of Small Business Owners in the COVID-19 Pandemic

By: Olivia S. Kim, Jonathan A. Parker and Antoinette Schoar

Using financial account data linking small businesses to their owner households, we examine how business owners’ consumption responded to changes in business revenues during the COVID-19 crisis. In the first two months following the National Emergency, business revenues declined by 40 percent, largely driven by national factors rather than local...
- June 2025
- Case
TagHive: Edtech Pricing and Distributor Decisions

By: Isamar Troncoso, Frank V. Cespedes and Stacy Straaberg

Education technology (edtech) company TagHive, founded in 2017, used a direct sales team and third-party distributors to sell its Class Saathi hardware and software solution to 300 clients, mainly primary and secondary schools in India. The product aimed to improve student engagement and performance, reduce the time it took teachers to develop and grade learning assessments, enable administrators to better track data, and provide parents more insight into their children’s learning. Founder and CEO Pankaj Agarwal initially priced Class Saathi using a one-time fee, or perpetual licensing, model. However, in 2023, the company began piloting a recurring subscription fee model to ensure steadier revenue. To support the new pricing structure, TagHive enhanced its software with artificial intelligence and expanded its customer support team and their responsibilities to subscription fee customers. By December 2024, TagHive was cash flow positive and planning to scale. Pankaj and his leadership team were considering whether to extend the pilot to all customers and what the effects on other parts of the organization might be. For example, the pilot had prompted TagHive to increase the capacity and responsibilities of its customer support team. If all clients were under the subscription fee model, could the company afford to continue expanding the team or should it rely on its distributors to provide post-sale customer support? Distributors were responsible for half of sales, but outsourcing customer engagement and support could put customer satisfaction and TagHive’s reputation at risk.
- June 2025
- Case
TagHive: Edtech Pricing and Distributor Decisions

By: Isamar Troncoso, Frank V. Cespedes and Stacy Straaberg

Education technology (edtech) company TagHive, founded in 2017, used a direct sales team and third-party distributors to sell its Class Saathi hardware and software solution to 300 clients, mainly primary and secondary schools in India. The product aimed to improve student engagement and performance, reduce the time it took teachers to develop and...

About the Unit

The Entrepreneurial Management Unit strives to raise the level of academic work in the field of entrepreneurship, in methodological rigor, conceptual depth, and managerial applicability. We also strive to improve the odds of entrepreneurial success for our students and for practitioners worldwide.

Because it is such a complex phenomenon, entrepreneurship must be studied through multiple lenses. We use three.

The process of entrepreneurship - We seek to understand the processes of entrepreneurial activity in start-ups and established firms by examining the antecedents and consequences of various forms of entrepreneurial opportunity identification and opportunity pursuit for individuals, organizations, and industries. We see experimentation and innovation in products, services, processes, and business models as central to entrepreneurial activity.
The finance of entrepreneurship - We seek to understand the financing of entrepreneurial ventures by studying the antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurial funding decisions both domestically and internationally.
The context of entrepreneurship - We seek to understand the ways in which entrepreneurs both respond to and shape the context in which they operate, by examining the history of entrepreneurship across time and national borders and by analyzing the legal and cultural contexts for managerial action.

Please also visit the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship.

Recent Publications

Case Study: Do We Reskill or Replace Our Workforce?

By: William R. Kerr

July–August 2025 |
Article |
Harvard Business Review

Citation

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Revenue Collapses and the Consumption of Small Business Owners in the COVID-19 Pandemic

By: Olivia S. Kim, Jonathan A. Parker and Antoinette Schoar

August 2025 |
Article |
Journal of Financial Economics

Using financial account data linking small businesses to their owner households, we examine how business owners’ consumption responded to changes in business revenues during the COVID-19 crisis. In the first two months following the National Emergency, business revenues declined by 40 percent, largely driven by national factors rather than local infection rates or policies. However, the pass-through of revenue losses to owner consumption was limited: each dollar of revenue loss resulted in only a 1.6-cent decline in consumption. This muted pass-through persisted through 2021, even after the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines. Our findings suggest that federal subsidies and pandemic-induced reductions in spending opportunities explain the limited impact.

Keywords: Revenue; Small Business; Health Pandemics; Spending; Consumer Behavior

Citation

Read Now

TagHive: Edtech Pricing and Distributor Decisions

By: Isamar Troncoso, Frank V. Cespedes and Stacy Straaberg

June 2025 |
Case |
Faculty Research

Education technology (edtech) company TagHive, founded in 2017, used a direct sales team and third-party distributors to sell its Class Saathi hardware and software solution to 300 clients, mainly primary and secondary schools in India. The product aimed to improve student engagement and performance, reduce the time it took teachers to develop and grade learning assessments, enable administrators to better track data, and provide parents more insight into their children’s learning. Founder and CEO Pankaj Agarwal initially priced Class Saathi using a one-time fee, or perpetual licensing, model. However, in 2023, the company began piloting a recurring subscription fee model to ensure steadier revenue. To support the new pricing structure, TagHive enhanced its software with artificial intelligence and expanded its customer support team and their responsibilities to subscription fee customers. By December 2024, TagHive was cash flow positive and planning to scale. Pankaj and his leadership team were considering whether to extend the pilot to all customers and what the effects on other parts of the organization might be. For example, the pilot had prompted TagHive to increase the capacity and responsibilities of its customer support team. If all clients were under the subscription fee model, could the company afford to continue expanding the team or should it rely on its distributors to provide post-sale customer support? Distributors were responsible for half of sales, but outsourcing customer engagement and support could put customer satisfaction and TagHive’s reputation at risk.

Citation

Educators

Pushing the Envelope: The Effects of Salary Negotiations

By: Zoë B. Cullen, Bobak Pakzad-Hurson and Richardo Perez-Truglia

2025 |
Working Paper |
Faculty Research

Salary negotiations are a widespread phenomenon that can shape key labor market outcomes, such as welfare and inequality. We provide novel empirical and theoretical insights into the causes and consequences of salary negotiations. We conducted two field experiments involving over 3,100 job seekers in the U.S. tech sector, designed to examine two types of information frictions. We find that a light-touch encouragement intervention significantly increased both negotiation attempts and compensation gains. In contrast, providing a substantial discount on negotiation coaching did not significantly affect negotiation attempts. Women responded more strongly to both interventions, helping to narrow gender gaps. We develop a new model of salary negotiations, incorporating risk and information frictions, that can better explain our experimental and non-experimental findings. The model's equilibrium analysis indicates that policies encouraging negotiation can enhance both welfare and equity.

Citation

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Collusion in Brokered Markets

By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery

June 2025 |
Article |
Journal of Finance

High commissions in the U.S. residential real estate agency market present a puzzle for economic theory because brokerage is not a concentrated industry. We model brokered markets as a game in which agents post prices for customers and then choose which other agents to work with. We show there exists an equilibrium in which each agent conditions working with other agents on those agents’ posted prices. Resulting prices can be appreciably higher than the competitive level (for a fixed discount factor), regardless of the number of agents. Thus, brokered markets can remain uncompetitive even with low concentration and easy entry.

Citation

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Gold Rush Vinyl

By: Christina Wallace, DJ DiDonna and Sarah Sasso

May 2025 |
Teaching Note |
Faculty Research

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 824-120.

Citation

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Clay Ridge Capital

By: William R. Kerr and Martin A. Sinozich

May 2025 |
Supplement |
Faculty Research

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Clay Ridge Capital

By: William R. Kerr and Martin A. Sinozich

May 2025 |
Teaching Note |
Faculty Research

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 823-089. Kel Jackson, with the support of his young family, has been searching for a manufacturing business to purchase. After a long process, Kel had submitted a written offer to buy Sheetfab that matched his original conversation with the owner, but a broker whom Kel had never met wrote back with a counter-offer that was less attractive. Kel must decide whether to take the counter-offer, attempt to negotiate it, pursue a smaller deal with Precision Parts, or keep searching.

Keywords: Acquisition; Entrepreneurship; Negotiation Offer; Manufacturing Industry

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