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Extracting Insights from Vast Stores of Data

Harvard Business Review

Measuring Marketing Insights. In 2005 Amazon launched its Prime service, which offers members free two-day shipping. Better predictive ability from rich customer data has another important benefit: Amazon does not keep most of its products in inventory for very long, significantly reducing its working capital requirement.

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How to Know If a Spin-Off Will Succeed

Harvard Business Review

The first category is exogenous factors over which the business has little control: the growth of the markets into which it sells; the competitive intensity and thus the average profitability of the industry in which it operates; or the fragmentation of its industry and thus the scope for a growth-by-acquisition approach.

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How One CEO Grows Her Business with Feeling

Harvard Business Review

While interning in Mozambique in 2005 for the one-person (!) Because the "unmentionable" subject of menstruation is taboo, the market failure — supplying cheaper pads — had never received the attention it deserved. 11/pad) for the cheapest imported sanitary pad can often be simply unaffordable.