A consortium of technology firms is ploughing nearly $1bn into a clever market mechanismA GROUP OF rich do-gooders tried a bold experiment 15 years ago. The Gates Foundation, a charity, and five countries put $1.5bn into a pilot project aimed at encouraging research and development in a previously neglected area. The “advanced market commitment” (AMC)…
Editor’s note (April 21st 2022): After this article was published, Elon Musk said he has received funding to finance a takeover of Twitter, and that he is exploring whether to launch a tender offer to all Twitter shareholders.IDA TARBELL, author of an exposé of the Standard Oil Company in 1904, described its founder, John D.…
Sharks, dragons and angels: what are you waiting for?GREAT UPHEAVALS always spark innovation. The covid-19 pandemic is no different. The share of new patent applications in America connected to remote-working technologies more than doubled between January and September 2020. Opportunities abound to invest in a host of transformative early-stage ideas. The pitches below are from…
Can it tempt viewers back with advertising?IN JANUARY NETFLIX warned investors that it expected to add only 2.5m subscribers in the quarter ahead, causing a sell-off that knocked nearly 30% off its share price. On April 19th the video-streamer admitted that the reality was worse: Netflix lost 200,000 customers in the period, its first net…
COMPANIES HAVE always had to answer to their investors. But these days shareholders have new questions—lots of them. On April 28th shareholders in three big drug companies, Johnson & Johnson (J&J), Moderna and Pfizer, are set to vote on resolutions filed by Oxfam, a charity, that seek to widen access to covid-19 vaccines. In May…
This M&A boom isn’t like the last oneIT WAS ONCE thought that investment bankers, like sharks, needed to keep on the move to survive. Then pandemic lockdowns put paid to their perpetual motion between headquarters, airports and meetings. Greasing the wheels of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) took a backseat to corporate concerns about survival. Deals…
But activists’ interest has little immediate impact on salesANDRIJ MELNYK, the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, did not hold back. Mocking Ritter Sport’s advertising slogan, he tweeted on March 29th “Quadratisch, Praktisch, Blut” (square, practical, blood), replacing gut (good) in the firm’s slogan. A couple of days later Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, called for a…
The debate turns to escrow accounts and secondary sanctionsPRESIDENT JOE BIDEN has promised to “ratchet up the pain” for Vladimir Putin over Russian atrocities in Ukraine. The EU vows wave after wave of “rolling sanctions”. Momentum is growing in the West to fire the two big economic weapons that have so far been kept largely…
iGaming, or online gaming, is a term used to describe playing games or betting on events via the internet. There are many…
In March and April 2020, when the pandemic headwinds were strong, many predicted that companies would crumble, but we have seen many of these companies pivot, survive, thrive and accelerate growth with the help of a modern CRM. In this latest HBR Video Quick Take, we hear from Poorvi Shrivastav, VP & GM of Service…