Technology

Shaping the Future of Solar Power: Climate Change, Industrial Policy and Free Trade

Publication Date: May 16, 2013

When Solyndra, a California-based solar panel maker, filed for bankruptcy in 2011, the US government was left with more than half a million dollars in unpaid debt. The bankruptcy was a major embarrassment for the Obama administration which had...

Innovation Clusters in the Global Economy: The Welfare Technology Region in Denmark

Publication Date: November 07, 2012

In February 2012, Lars Kolind, chairman of Welfare Tech Region, a cluster organization in Southern Denmark that promotes the use of technology to assist people with daily living activities, considered the challenges that the cluster...

Google.org: For-Profit Philanthropy

Publication Date: April 16, 2012

The Google.org: For-Profit Philanthropy case introduces a distinct social enterprise structure, a combination of a philanthropic division of a for-profit corporation and a nonprofit foundation. The case provides an up-to-date, in-depth...

Regulating Broadband in Chile: The Debate Over Open Access

Publication Date: January 09, 2012

In 2011, Chile's Undersecretary of Telecommunications, Jorge Atton, was considering adopting a different policy toward regulating competition in Internet services than previously applied to voice telephony. Atton headed Chile's...

Knowledge Management at the World Bank

Publication Date: April 05, 2011

This case traces the history and evolution of Knowledge Management at the World Bank. While primarily a financial institution offering customized loans and grants across a wide range of sectors in some 100 countries, the World Bank has...

Inciting a Computer Revolution in Health Care: Weighing the Merits of the Health Information Technology Act

Publication Date: April 04, 2011

This case poses the question: given what was known at the time of its adoption, in February 2009, was the federal Health information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act good public policy? The HITECH Act, included in President Barack...

Inciting a Computer Revolution in Health Care: Implementing the Health Information Technology Act

Publication Date: April 04, 2011

This case poses the question: given the ambitious goals of the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and the hurdles to its successful implementation, how should incoming National Coordinator for Health...

A Different Kind of Partnership: the UK's Ministry of Defence and EDS develop the Joint Personnel Administration Program (JPA)

Publication Date: January 08, 2009

When, in 1997, the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) decided to consolidate the Human Resources systems used by its three military services (Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force) into a small number of tri-service ones, it saw the challenge as...

Rural Electrification in Nicaragua (Abridged)

Publication Date: August 18, 2008

In the fall of 2001, officials of the National Energy Commission of Nicaragua were reviewing a pilot study of the options for electrification in three rural communities. Rural electrification was an important issue in Nicaragua since 40 percent...

The Eli Lilly MDR-TB Partnership: Creating Private and Public Value

Publication Date: October 05, 2007

In 2003, pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly created the MDR-TB Partnership to fight MDR-TB, a form of tuberculosis. An estimated 450,000 new cases of this disease were reported each year, primarily in China, India, and Russia. The...

Scale without Growth: INFONAVIT's Expansion in the Mexican Mortgage Market

Publication Date: April 24, 2007

According to a World Bank report written in 2001, "in a modern, globally integrated Mexican economy, it is hard to argue for the continued existence of an institution such as INFONAVIT." The report went on to argue that the first-best option was...

Defragmenting e-Government in New Zealand

Publication Date: April 3, 2007

Late in 2006, New Zealand's State Services Commission (SSC) confronted the challenge of dramatically improving online citizen access to government services and information. Implementing such an upgraded "e-government" service was far from a...