Franz Humer, CEO of the Roche Group, must decide whether to mount a hostile tender offer for the publicly-owned shares of Roche's biotechnology subsidiary, Genentech. The case provides opportunities to analyze Roche's strategy with respect to Genentech, the pros and cons of merging the two...

Systems of distributed innovation – so-called business ecosystems – have become increasingly prevalent in many industries. These entities generally encompass numerous corporations, individuals, and communities that might be individually autonomous but related through their connection with an...

As equity consideration has become more popular in acquisitions, so has the use of the "pricing-protection" mechanisms, such as floors, caps and collars. These contractual devices provide insurance to the shareholders of the target, and may protect the buyer as well. The purpose of this note is...

Our goal in this paper is to explain the location of transactions (and contracts) in a larger system of production. We first characterize the system as a network of tasks and transfers. While transfers between agents are necessary and ubiquitous, the mundane transaction costos of standardizing,...

In this paper we model the pathways commonly traversed as user innovations are transformed into commercial products. First, one or more users recognize a new set of design possibilities and begin to innovate. They then join into communities, motivated by the increased efficiency of collective...

Our goal in this paper is to explain the location of transactions (and contracts) in a system of production. Systems of production are engineered systems, and where to place quot;transactionsquot; is one of the basic engineering problems that the designers of such systems face. We begin by...

When the design of an artifact is quot;modularized,quot; the elements of the design are split up and assigned to modules according to a formal architecture or plan. Some of the modules are quot;hidden,quot; meaning that design decisions in those modules do not affect decisions in other modules;...

In quot;Managing in the Age of Modularity,quot; which was written in June 1997 and appeared in the Harvard Business Review, we proposed that a new technological phenomenon, the modular design of complex computer systems, caused the emergence of a large modular cluster of firms and markets in the...

This paper seeks to explain the technological forces that led to the rise of vertically integrated corporations in the late 19th Century and the opposing forces that led to a vertical-to-horizontal transition in the computer industry one hundred years later. I first model the technology of step...