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HBS Case Selections

Innovation at Moog Inc.

• Brian J. Hall
• Ashley V. Whillans
• Davis Heniford
• Dominika Randle
• Caroline Witten

Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (A)

• Linda A. Hill
• Emily Tedards

Juan Valdez: Innovation in Caffeination

• Michael I. Norton
• Jeremy Dann

UGG Steps into the Metaverse

• Shunyuan Zhang
• Sharon Joseph
• Sunil Gupta
• Julia Kelley

Metaverse Wars

• David B. Yoffie
• Matt Higgins

Roblox: Virtual Commerce in the Metaverse

• Ayelet Israeli
• Nicole Tempest Keller

Timnit Gebru: "SILENCED No More" on AI Bias and The Harms of Large Language Models

• Tsedal Neeley
• Stefani Ruper

Hugging Face: Serving AI on a Platform

• Shane Greenstein
• Kerry Herman
• Sarah Gulick

SmartOne: Building an AI Data Business

• Karim R. Lakhani
• Pippa Tubman Armerding
• Gamze Yucaoglu
• Fares Khrais

Honeywell and the Great Recession (A)

• Sandra J. Sucher
• Susan Winterberg

Target: Responding to the Recession

• Ranjay Gulati
• Catherine Ross
• Richard S. Ruback
• Royce Yudkoff

Hometown Foods: Changing Price Amid Inflation

• Julian De Freitas
• Jeremy Yang
• Das Narayandas

Elon Musk's Big Bets

• Eric Baldwin

Elon Musk: Balancing Purpose and Risk

• Shikhar Ghosh
• Sarah Mehta

Tesla's CEO Compensation Plan

• Krishna G. Palepu
• John R. Wells
• Gabriel Ellsworth

China Rapid Finance: The Collapse of China's P2P Lending Industry

• William C. Kirby
• Bonnie Yining Cao
• John P. McHugh

Forbidden City: Launching a Craft Beer in China

• Christopher A. Bartlett
• Carole Carlson

Booking.com

• Stefan Thomke
• Daniela Beyersdorfer

Innovation at Uber: The Launch of Express POOL

• Chiara Farronato
• Alan MacCormack

Racial Discrimination on Airbnb (A)

• Michael Luca
• Scott Stern
• Hyunjin Kim

GitLab and the Future of All-Remote Work (A)

• Prithwiraj Choudhury
• Emma Salomon

TCS: From Physical Offices to Borderless Work

Creating a virtual internship at goldman sachs.

• Iavor Bojinov

Unilever's Response to the Future of Work

• William R. Kerr
• Emilie Billaud
• Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej

AT&T, Retraining, and the Workforce of Tomorrow

• Joseph B. Fuller
• Carl Kreitzberg

Leading Change in Talent at L'Oreal

• Lakshmi Ramarajan
• Vincent Dessain
• Emer Moloney
• William W. George
• Andrew N. McLean

Eve Hall: The African American Investment Fund in Milwaukee

• Steven S. Rogers
• Alterrell Mills

United Housing - Otis Gates

• Mercer Cook

The Home Depot: Leadership in Crisis Management

• Herman B. Leonard
• Marc J. Epstein
• Melissa Tritter

The Great East Japan Earthquake (B): Fast Retailing Group's Response

• Hirotaka Takeuchi
• Kenichi Nonomura
• Dena Neuenschwander
• Meghan Ricci
• Kate Schoch
• Sergey Vartanov

Insurer of Last Resort?: The Federal Financial Response to September 11

• David A. Moss
• Sarah Brennan

Under Armour

• Rory McDonald
• Clayton M. Christensen
• Daniel West
• Jonathan E. Palmer
• Tonia Junker

Hunley, Inc.: Casting for Growth

• John A. Quelch
• James T. Kindley

Bitfury: Blockchain for Government

• Mitchell B. Weiss
• Elena Corsi

Deutsche Bank: Pursuing Blockchain Opportunities (A)

• Lynda M. Applegate
• Christoph Muller-Bloch

Maersk: Betting on Blockchain

• Scott Johnson

Yum! Brands

• Jordan Siegel
• Christopher Poliquin

Bharti Airtel in Africa

• Tanya Bijlani

Li & Fung 2012

• F. Warren McFarlan
• Michael Shih-ta Chen
• Keith Chi-ho Wong

Sony and the JK Wedding Dance

• John Deighton
• Leora Kornfeld

United Breaks Guitars

David dao on united airlines.

• Benjamin Edelman
• Jenny Sanford

Marketing Reading: Digital Marketing

• Joseph Davin

Social Strategy at Nike

• Mikolaj Jan Piskorski
• Ryan Johnson

The Tate's Digital Transformation

Social strategy at american express, mellon financial and the bank of new york.

• Carliss Y. Baldwin
• Ryan D. Taliaferro

The Walt Disney Company and Pixar, Inc.: To Acquire or Not to Acquire?

• Juan Alcacer
• David J. Collis

Dow's Bid for Rohm and Haas

• Benjamin C. Esty

Finance Reading: The Mergers and Acquisitions Process

• John Coates

Apple: Privacy vs. Safety? (A)

• Henry W. McGee
• Nien-he Hsieh
• Sarah McAra

Sidewalk Labs: Privacy in a City Built from the Internet Up

• Leslie K. John

Data Breach at Equifax

• Suraj Srinivasan
• Quinn Pitcher
• Jonah S. Goldberg

Apple's Core

• Noam Wasserman

Design Thinking and Innovation at Apple

• Barbara Feinberg

Apple Inc. in 2012

• Penelope Rossano

Iz-Lynn Chan at Far East Organization (Abridged)

• Anthony J. Mayo
• Dana M. Teppert

Barbara Norris: Leading Change in the General Surgery Unit

• Boris Groysberg
• Nitin Nohria
• Deborah Bell

Adobe Systems: Working Towards a "Suite" Release (A)

• David A. Thomas
• Lauren Barley
• Jan W. Rivkin

Starbucks Coffee Company: Transformation and Renewal

• Nancy F. Koehn
• Kelly McNamara
• Nora N. Khan
• Elizabeth Legris

JCPenney: Back in Business

• K. Shelette Stewart
• Christine Snively

Home Nursing of North Carolina

Castronics, llc, gemini investors, angie's list: ratings pioneer turns 20.

• Robert J. Dolan

Basecamp: Pricing

• Frank V. Cespedes
• Robb Fitzsimmons

J.C. Penney's "Fair and Square" Pricing Strategy

J.c. penney's 'fair and square' strategy (c): back to the future.

• Jose B. Alvarez

Osaro: Picking the best path

• James Palano
• Bastiane Huang

HubSpot and Motion AI: Chatbot-Enabled CRM

• Thomas Steenburgh

GROW: Using Artificial Intelligence to Screen Human Intelligence

• Ethan S. Bernstein
• Paul D. McKinnon
• Paul Yarabe

Arup: Building the Water Cube

• Robert G. Eccles
• Amy C. Edmondson
• Dilyana Karadzhova

(Re)Building a Global Team: Tariq Khan at Tek

Managing a global team: greg james at sun microsystems, inc. (a).

• Thomas J. DeLong

Organizational Behavior Reading: Leading Global Teams

Ron ventura at mitchell memorial hospital.

• Heide Abelli

Anthony Starks at InSiL Therapeutics (A)

• Gary P. Pisano
• Vicki L. Sato

Wolfgang Keller at Konigsbrau-TAK (A)

• John J. Gabarro

The 2010 Chilean Mining Rescue (A)

• Faaiza Rashid

IDEO: Human-Centered Service Design

• Ryan W. Buell
• Andrew Otazo
• Benjamin Jones
• Alexis Brownell

David Neeleman: Flight Path of a Servant Leader (A)

• Matthew D. Breitfelder

Coach Hurley at St. Anthony High School

• Scott A. Snook
• Bradley C. Lawrence

Shapiro Global

• Michael Brookshire
• Monica Haugen
• Michelle Kravetz
• Sarah Sommer

Kathryn McNeil (A)

• Joseph L. Badaracco Jr.
• Jerry Useem

Carol Fishman Cohen: Professional Career Reentry (A)

• Myra M. Hart
• Robin J. Ely
• Susan Wojewoda

Alex Montana at ESH Manufacturing Co.

• Michael Kernish

Michelle Levene (A)

• Tiziana Casciaro
• Victoria W. Winston

John and Andrea Rice: Entrepreneurship and Life

• Howard H. Stevenson
• Janet Kraus
• Shirley M. Spence

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• 17 Apr 2024
• Managing the Future of Work

Western Governors University: Pursuing the network effects of competency based education

WGU President Scott Pulsipher returns to the podcast for an update on the online institution’s mission to extend the reach of skill-oriented instruction. The HBS alum argues that the focus on competency rather than credit hours democratizes college access and economic opportunity.

• 15 Apr 2024

Struggling With a Big Management Decision? Start by Asking What Really Matters

Leaders must face hard choices, from cutting a budget to adopting a strategy to grow. To make the right call, they should start by following their own “true moral compass,” says Joseph Badaracco.

• 11 Apr 2024

Guest Appearance: Joe Fuller on CSU's Spur of the Moment

Managing the Future of Work co-chair Joe Fuller joins Colorado State University's Jocelyn Hittle to discuss his work on the Managing the Future of Work project and the Harvard Project on Workforce and to consider broader workforce trends.

• In Practice

Why Progress on Immigration Might Soften Labor Pains

Long-term labor shortages continue to stoke debates about immigration policy in the United States. We asked Harvard Business School faculty members to discuss what's at stake for companies facing talent needs, and the potential scenarios on the horizon.

• 10 Apr 2024
• Climate Rising

How Insurance Companies are Addressing Climate Risks

This episode in our adaptation series focuses climate change’s implications on the insurance industry. Claudine Blamey, Group Director of Sustainability at Aviva, describes how climate change evokes both transition risks and physical risks for insurance companies, and affects how insurance companies are assessing and pricing risk in their underwriting process, and influences their investment strategy. Claudine also describes innovative insurance products such as parametric and catastrophe insurance that are emerging to address natural disasters that are exacerbated by climate change. For resources and other episodes visit climaterising.org

• 09 Apr 2024
• Research & Ideas

When Climate Goals, Housing Policy, and Corporate R&D Collide, Social Good Can Emerge

Grants designed to improve housing can make homes more energy efficient and save money for low-income families, providing a powerful way to confront climate change, says research by Omar Asensio. What do the findings mean for companies trying to scale innovation?

• Cold Call Podcast

Sustaining a Legacy of Giving in Turkey

Özyeğin Social Investments was founded by Hüsnü Özyeğin, one of Turkey's most successful entrepreneurs, with a focus on education, health, gender equality, rural development, and disaster relief in Turkey. The company and the Özyeğin family have spent decades serving and improving communities in need. Their efforts led to the creation of one of Turkey’s top universities, the establishment of schools and rehabilitation centers, post 2023 earthquake humanitarian shelter and facilities, nationwide campaigns, and an internationally recognized educational training initiative for young children, among other achievements. Harvard Business School senior lecturer Christina Wing and Murat Özyeğin discuss how the company is a model for making a significant impact across multiple sectors of society through giving and how that legacy can be sustained in the future, in the case, “Özyeğin Social Investments: A Legacy of Giving."

Why Work Rituals Bring Teams Together and Create More Meaning

From weekly lunch dates with colleagues to bedtime stories with children, we often rely on rituals to relax and bond with others. While it may feel awkward to introduce teambuilding rituals in the workplace, the truth is, the practices improve performance, says Michael Norton in his book The Ritual Effect.

• 03 Apr 2024

IBM CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux on AI and the culture of skills building

As the digital economy pushes companies to prioritize continuous learning, HR strategies need to emphasize customization, flexibility, and support for diverse work-life needs.

• 02 Apr 2024
• What Do You Think?

What's Enough to Make Us Happy?

Experts say happiness is often derived by a combination of good health, financial wellbeing, and solid relationships with family and friends. But are we forgetting to take stock of whether we have enough of these things? asks James Heskett. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Employees Out Sick? Inside One Company's Creative Approach to Staying Productive

Regular absenteeism can hobble output and even bring down a business. But fostering a collaborative culture that brings managers together can help companies weather surges of sick days and no-shows. Research by Jorge Tamayo shows how.

• 01 Apr 2024

Navigating the Mood of Customers Weary of Price Hikes

Price increases might be tempering after historic surges, but companies continue to wrestle with pinched consumers. Alexander MacKay, Chiara Farronato, and Emily Williams make sense of the economic whiplash of inflation and offer insights for business leaders trying to find equilibrium.

• 27 Mar 2024

Building Climate - Resilient Cities and Infrastructure

This episode in our climate adaptation series features HBS Professor John Macomber. John discusses how companies and governments need to incorporate climate resilience as they develop and finance real estate and infrastructure to address the risks of flooding, wildfire, extreme heat, drought, and sea level rise. John describes “five R” options to address these risks—to reinforce, rebound, retreat, restrict, and rebuild—and highlights best practices from insurance companies and the governments of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Singapore. He also identifies entrepreneurial opportunities to foster adaptation and resilience. Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative Guest: John Macomber, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School. For transcripts and other resources, visit climaterising.org

• 26 Mar 2024

How Do Great Leaders Overcome Adversity?

In the spring of 2021, Raymond Jefferson (MBA 2000) applied for a job in President Joseph Biden’s administration. Ten years earlier, false allegations were used to force him to resign from his prior US government position as assistant secretary of labor for veterans’ employment and training in the Department of Labor. Two employees had accused him of ethical violations in hiring and procurement decisions, including pressuring subordinates into extending contracts to his alleged personal associates. The Deputy Secretary of Labor gave Jefferson four hours to resign or be terminated. Jefferson filed a federal lawsuit against the US government to clear his name, which he pursued for eight years at the expense of his entire life savings. Why, after such a traumatic and debilitating experience, would Jefferson want to pursue a career in government again? Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Anthony Mayo explores Jefferson’s personal and professional journey from upstate New York to West Point to the Obama administration, how he faced adversity at several junctures in his life, and how resilience and vulnerability shaped his leadership style in the case, "Raymond Jefferson: Trial by Fire."

How Humans Outshine AI in Adapting to Change

Could artificial intelligence systems eventually perform surgeries or fly planes? First, AI will have to learn to navigate shifting conditions as well as people do. Julian De Freitas and colleagues pit humans against machines in a video game to study AI's current limits and mine insights for the real world.

• 22 Mar 2024

Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor: How AI can raise the investment IQ

AI's potential is tempered by the need for reliability and consistency in financial intelligence. How is Morningstar adopting the technology, upskilling its 10,000-strong global workforce, and competing for talent? Also, factoring sustainability and workforce strategy in ratings and risk analysis.

Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted

Many companies build their businesses on open source software, code that would cost firms $8.8 trillion to create from scratch if it weren't freely available. Research by Frank Nagle and colleagues puts a value on an economic necessity that will require investment to meet demand.

• 18 Mar 2024
• Deep Purpose

Helena Foulkes: The Power of Asking “What Could Go Right?”

Research has repeatedly shown that we are hard-wired to worry. Whether we worry about our own survival, our family and friends, or our future, it can seem like we spend much of our lives fixated on what could go wrong. In this episode, Helena Foulkes discusses how taking courage can be as simple as asking what could go right – a philosophy that has taken her from the helm of CVS Pharmacy and Hudson’s Bay Company to the campaign trail for governorship of Rhode Island.

When It Comes to Climate Regulation, Energy Companies Take a More Nuanced View

Many assume that major oil and gas companies adamantly oppose climate-friendly regulation, but that's not true. A study of 30 years of corporate advocacy by Jonas Meckling finds that energy companies have backed clean-energy efforts when it aligns with their business interests.

• 15 Mar 2024

Let's Talk: Why It's Time to Stop Avoiding Taboo Topics at Work

Few people enjoy talking about succession plans, performance problems, and pay, but sometimes you must. Christina Wing offers five rules for navigating thorny conversations in the workplace, and makes the case for tackling even sensitive topics, like age, health, and politics.

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Due to licensing restrictions, Harvard Business School Case Studies are limited to classroom use by individual students. The BU Libraries (including Pardee Library) cannot purchase cases for the library’s collections, or obtain cases through Interlibrary Loan. Individuals may purchase copies of cases for their own personal use directly from Harvard Business Publishing .

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A small number of case studies can be found in Harvard Business Review via our Business Source Complete subscription (1922-present) or in print at Pardee Library (1990-present). To limit your search results in Business Source Complete to case studies, select "Case Study" for the Document Type. Another source for business cases is Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (2007-present). You should also select "Case Study" for the Document Type to limit search results to case studies.

In August 2013, HBR designated 500 of their most popular articles as "read-only" and restricted the ability to print or download those articles in Business Source Complete. While it may change over time, the original list of articles is available here: HBR 500 . If you need an article that is part of the HBR 500, you may be able to access it through our Harvard Business Review print subscription at Pardee Library.

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How the Case Method Works

• Read and analyze the case. Each case is a 10-20 page document written from the viewpoint of a real person leading a real organization. In addition to background information on the situation, each case ends in a key decision to be made. Your job is to sift through the information, incomplete by design, and decide what you would do.
• Discuss the case. Each morning, you’ll bring your ideas to a small team of classmates from diverse professional backgrounds, your discussion group, to share your findings and listen to theirs. Together, you begin to see the case from different perspectives, better preparing you for class.
• Engage in class. Be prepared to change the way you think as you debate with classmates the best path forward for this organization. The highly engaged conversation is facilitated by the faculty member, but it’s driven by your classmates’ comments and experiences. HBS brings together amazingly talented people from diverse backgrounds and puts that experience front and center. Students do the majority of the talking (and lots of active listening), and your job is to better understand the decision at hand, what you would do in the case protagonist’s shoes, and why. You will not leave a class thinking about the case the same way you thought about it coming in! In addition to learning more about many businesses, in the case method you will develop communication, listening, analysis, and leadership skills. It is a truly dynamic and immersive learning environment.
• Reflect. The case method prepares you to be in leadership positions where you will face time-sensitive decisions with limited information. Reflecting on each class discussion will prepare you to face these situations in your future roles.

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FAQ: How do I cite a Harvard Business Review case study in APA Style?

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Last Updated: Jun 22, 2023 Views: 73839

When citing case studies in APA style you'll want to include the typical citation elements and apply general formatting guidelines. The following are examples of how case studies could be cited in APA style, but be sure to check with your professor about how they'd like you to cite case studies in your work.

In-Text Citations

Kotter (1990) explains the steps British Airways took to reverse a horrible customer service atmosphere and financial crisis.

… as the case study concluded (Bisell & Tram, 2007) .

Groysberg and Connolly (2015) concluded in their case study that….

Reference List

Example (don't forget to indent the second and subsequent lines):

Author(s). (Year). Title of case study . HBS No. number of case study. Publisher.

Example, one author:

Kotter, J. (1990). Changing the culture at British Airways . HBS No. 491-009. Harvard Business School Publishing.

Example, two authors:

Groysberg, B., & Connolly, K. (2015). BlackRock: Diversity as a driver for success . HBS No. 415-047. Harvard Business School Publishing.

More Information

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Further Help

This information is intended to be a guideline, not expert advice. Please be sure to speak to your professor about the appropriate way to cite sources in your class assignments and projects.

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3-1 Discussion Precision Performance and Box Case Studies

Pakistan’s ‘Nazuk Mor’ is a Harvard Business School case study

You know your country has serious issues when it becomes a case study for potential future leaders and managers. In Pakistan’s case, its situation is being taught at the Harvard Business School.

The case study titled ‘Pakistan at 75: When Will the “Nazuk Mor” End?’ is for use in Professor Alberto Cavallo’s the Business, Government, and the International Economy - Spring 2024 at Harvard Business School, and currently making the rounds in WhatsApp groups.

The school’s MBA programme was ranked 11th in FT Rankings for 2024.

Case studies are a common method of teaching in business schools and used by professors to present students a real-life example, followed by discussions on how to resolve issues facing the entity.

This case study makes the reference to ‘Nazuk Mor’ in its title, a phrase rather repeatedly used during political sloganeering and to convey Pakistan’s persistent problems with political instability, interference in running government affairs, corruption, and constant boom-and-bust economic cycles.

The reference to 75 comes from Pakistan, which earned independence in 1947, facing the same issues even in 2023 – not much changed in 2024 either – with bailouts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), loss-making state-owned entities, and high inflation continuing to dominate headlines. While elections did take place in February 2024, the new government has been formed with reluctant partners, and analysts believe that decision-making would again be problematic.

Business Recorder reached out to the Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) Special Permissions Team to reproduce excerpts of the case study or republish it in full. The request was denied by its team in an emailed response.

The case study was prepared by Harvard Business School Professor Meg Rithmire, Salaar A. Shaikh (MBA Class of 2023), and Hong Zhang (Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School).

World Bank, Pakistan agree on need for 10-year rolling country framework plan: Finance Division

Us urges pakistan to prioritise, expand economic reforms, rupee again sees marginal decline against us dollar, sindh high court orders pakistan government to restore x in one week: lawyer, equity trading: secp files criminal complaint against 2 individuals on charges of front-running, letter to finance minister: aptma calls for ‘export-centric’ policies, qatar says gaza ceasefire talks at ‘delicate phase’, gold continues to shine, reaches rs251,900 per tola in pakistan, ali rathore set to take charge as ceo engro fertilizers limited, dhaka-based bank asia looks to acquire bank alfalah bangladesh, kse-100 ends lower as investors book profits, read more stories.

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The hard lessons of Harvard’s failed geoengineering experiment

Some observers argue the end of SCoPEx should mark the end of such proposals. Others say any future experiments should proceed in markedly different ways.

• James Temple archive page

In late March of 2017, at a small summit in Washington, DC, two Harvard professors, David Keith and Frank Keutsch, laid out plans to conduct what would have been the first solar geoengineering experiment in the stratosphere.

Instead, it became the focal point of a fierce public debate over whether it’s okay to research such a controversial topic at all.

The basic concept behind solar geoengineering is that by spraying certain particles high above the planet, humans could reflect some amount of sunlight back into space as a means of counteracting climate change. 

The Harvard researchers hoped to launch a high-altitude balloon, tethered to a gondola equipped with propellers and sensors, from a site in Tucson, Arizona, as early as the following year. After initial equipment tests, the plan was to use the aircraft to spray a few kilograms of material about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) above Earth and then fly back through the plume to measure how reflective the particles were, how readily they dispersed, and other variables. 

But the initial launch didn’t happen the following year, nor the next, the next, or the next—not in Tucson, nor at a subsequently announced site in Sweden. Complications with balloon vendors, the onset of the covid pandemic, and challenges in finalizing decisions between the team, its advisory committee, and other parties at Harvard kept delaying the project—and then fervent critiques from environmental groups, a Northern European Indigenous organization, and other opponents finally scuttled the team’s plans.

Critics, including some climate scientists , have argued that an intervention that could tweak the entire planet’s climate system is too dangerous to study in the real world, because it’s too dangerous to ever use. They fear that deploying such a powerful tool would inevitably cause unpredictable and dangerous side effects, and that the world’s countries could never work together to use it in a safe, equitable, and responsible way.

These opponents believe that even discussing and researching the possibility of such climate interventions eases pressures to rapidly cut greenhouse-gas emissions and increases the likelihood that a rogue actor or solitary nation will one day begin spraying materials into the stratosphere without any broader consensus. Unilateral use of the tool, with its potentially calamitous consequences for some regions, could set nations on a collision course toward violent conflicts .

Harvard’s single, small balloon experiment, known as the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx, came to represent all of these fears—and, in the end, it was more than the researchers were prepared to take on. Last month, a decade after the project was first proposed in a research paper , Harvard officially announced the project’s termination, as first reported by MIT Technology Review .

“The experiment became this proxy for a kind of debate about whether solar geoengineering research should move forward,” Keith says. “And that’s, I think, the ultimate reason why Frank and I decided to pull the plug. There’s no way, given that weight that SCoPEx had come to hold, it made sense to move forward.”

I’ve been writing about solar geoengineering for more than a decade . I reported on the conference in 2017, and I continued to cover the team’s evolving plans over the following years. So the cancellation of the project left me puzzling over why it failed, and what that failure says about the latitude that researchers have to explore such a controversial subject.

In recent days, I asked a handful of people who were involved in the project or followed it closely for their insights and thoughts on what unfolded, what lessons can be drawn from the episode—and what it means for geoengineering research moving forward.

Few of the people I spoke with believe it spells the end of outdoor experiments in solar geoengineering, but some argue that it should—and others believe any future proposals should proceed in a very different way if researchers hope to avoid the same fate.

A short history of SCoPEx

Nature offered the inspiration for solar geoengineering: massive volcanic eruptions in the past have cooled global temperatures by emitting vast amounts of sulfur dioxide, which eventually form sulfuric acid aerosols that reflect away solar radiation. 

The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, for instance, blasted nearly 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, cooling global surface temperatures by around 0.5 °C for months.

But one concern about relying on the gas for geoengineering is that sulfuric acid also depletes the ozone layer, which shields life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet light. So some researchers, including Keith, have used computer models to explore whether we could reduce or even reverse that side effect by replacing sulfur dioxide with other substances, including diamond dust, alumina , or calcium carbonate . 

The SCoPEx researchers discussed the possibility of releasing several materials over a series of flights, including sulfuric acid, but they mainly emphasized calcium carbonate.

They hoped that the data from the launches could refine the accuracy of geoengineering simulations and improve our understanding of the technology’s potential benefits and risks.

“You have to go measure things in the real world, because nature surprises you,” Keith said at that conference in 2017.

He has continually stressed that the amount of material involved would represent a small fraction of the particulate pollution already emitted by planes, and that doing the same experiment for any other scientific purpose wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

But theirs became a lightning rod. In their effort to be upfront and transparent about their plans, Keith believes, they set off a self-reinforcing cycle of overheated press coverage and fierce attacks from critics, all of which inflated public concerns about what he contends was an ordinary experiment with negligible environmental impact. 

The team’s initial hopes for launching a balloon in Arizona in 2018 never came to fruition because the balloon vendor they were working with, World View, stopped launching payloads of the necessary weight, Keith says. (The company didn’t respond to an inquiry before press time.)

But the researchers continued to develop the equipment and aircraft in the labs at Harvard, and the university set up an oversight panel that began reviewing the team’s plans and developing guidelines for engaging with the public.

Eventually, the researchers shifted their focus to Sweden, where they began planning a launch to test the aircraft’s equipment, working with the Swedish Space Corporation. The balloon was set to lift off from the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna in the summer of 2021.

The aircraft would not have released any materials during that launch. But anti-geoengineering groups, environmental organizations, Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, the Saami Council (which represents the Indigenous Saami peoples of Northern Europe), and the board of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences all criticized the plan, putting pressure on the aerospace company, the research team, and the advisors to halt the launch. 

Solar geoengineering "is a technology that entails risks of catastrophic consequences, including the impact of uncontrolled termination, and irreversible sociopolitical effects that could compromise the world’s necessary efforts to achieve zero-carbon societies,” the Saami Council wrote in a letter to the advisory committee. “There are therefore no acceptable reasons for allowing the SCoPEx project to be conducted either in Sweden or elsewhere.”

In response, the advisory committee recommended that the researchers delay their plans until they had conducted conversations about the project with the public and concerned parties. In late March of 2021, the team and the company agreed to stand down.

The project never regained traction from there.

Last spring, Keith moved to the University of Chicago, where he now leads the Climate Systems Engineering initiative, a multidisciplinary research effort dedicated to improving understanding of solar geoengineering, carbon removal, and other interventions that could counteract the effects of climate change.

A few months later, the research team informed the advisory committee that it had “suspended work” on the experiment. Then, last month, Keutsch officially confirmed he’s no longer pursuing the project.

“I felt that it was time to focus on other innovative research avenues in the incredibly important field of [solar radiation modification] that promise impactful results,” he said in an email.

Too dangerous to study

Plenty of observers are pleased with the outcome. 

Hundreds of researchers from a variety of disciplines have signed an open letter calling for an “International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering,” stating that governments should commit to “ban outdoor experiments of solar geoengineering.”

Jennie Stephens, a professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern University, was one of the letter’s signatories. She argues that the SCoPEx experiment was particularly dangerous, because the funding, attention, and prestige of Harvard conferred legitimacy on planet-scale interventions that, to her mind, can never be safely governed or controlled.

She argues that even if the researchers have the best of intentions, solar geoengineering would ultimately be deployed by people or nations with money and power in ways that most benefit their interests, even if it meant disastrous consequences for other areas. Some research, for instance, suggests that solar geoengineering could significantly reduce rainfall in certain areas and might reduce the yields of some staple crops. While one block of nations might decide to use geoengineering to ease heat waves, what if that reduced the summer monsoons and the food supplies across parts of India or West Africa ?

“There’s no way to even imagine deploying it on a global scale so that everybody would benefit,” she says. “Some people would be screwed, and some people may have reduced suffering. So it’s creating one more mechanism by which to interfere with the Earth systems and then privilege some and disadvantage others.”

But many believe it’s essential to learn more about the role that solar geoengineering could play in easing global warming, and whether the side effects could be moderated. There’s a simple reason: if it does work well, it could save many lives and ease suffering as climate change accelerates. 

For these observers, then, the question is: What lessons can be drawn to ensure that other experiments can go forward? And perhaps of equal importance: What lessons shouldn’t be drawn from SCoPEx?

Some researchers in the field fear that the broader takeaway from the termination of the project will be that the Harvard team chose to be too open about its intentions.

The “organized opposition to even the concept of outdoor experiments” makes it difficult for other research groups to pursue similar work and “may increase the probability of rogue actors,” says Michael Gerrard, faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, who served on the advisory committee. He notes that such activities are largely unregulated.

Immediately following the news that Harvard was no longer pursuing the project, several figures in the cleantech industry took to social media to say that people could , or should , release particles into the stratosphere on their own.

While the Harvard team’s public plans were going nowhere, several other individuals claimed to have simply started launching stratosphere-bound balloons without any announcements in advance. They include the CEO of Make Sunsets , a venture-backed geoengineering startup, as well as Andrew Lockley , an independent researcher in the UK. 

Meanwhile, earlier this week, a University of Washington-led research group conducted a small experiment in marine cloud brightening, another form of solar geoengineering, on a decommissioned aircraft carrier anchored off the coast of Alameda, California, according to the New York Times . The team “kept the details tightly held, concerned that critics would try to stop them,” the newspaper reported.

Keith himself is “strongly opposed” to doing anything “rogue,” in the sense of illegal, or to conducting any such research in this field outside of the normal scientific process. And he says that “not being open at all” isn’t the right strategy.  

But he is wrestling with how up-front researchers should be. The level of early notice and transparency they strived for “maybe really doesn’t work in a conflictual environment,” he observes. “So maybe we should have been significantly less open and had a few limited sets of checks.”

Sikina Jinnah, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who joined the project’s advisory committee after the Sweden decision, draws the opposite lesson about transparency and engagement. 

She says that the Harvard team never got to the point of engaging with the public about its plans in any formal way in Sweden, and she stresses that such conversations should begin much earlier in the process. (This was also one of the main conclusions in the committees’ final report on the experiment, which was released last month.)

“Early engagement, I think, is one of the big take-home lessons,” she says. “And not just sort of cursory ‘giving a public talk’ kind of engagement, but really moving to iterative engagement with communities about their concerns, about questions they may be interested in, and really starting to reframe that kind of engagement process as one that’s not detrimental to the research effort but can actually enhance research and enrich it in ways that are socially beneficial.”

Scientific merit

Other observers believe there was a more basic problem with SCoPEx.

“Most of the scientists in the field didn’t feel like it was a particularly essential experiment,” said Douglas MacMartin, an associate professor at Cornell University who focuses on solar geoengineering, in an email.

As a result, there wasn’t a rush to defend it, he added.

MacMartin explained that the project was more focused on studying alternative aerosols, mainly calcium carbonate, rather than addressing unknowns concerning the substance that most people think would be used: sulfur dioxide. 

That’s because scientists know much more about its overall effects and can model them more accurately, since volcanoes already add the gas to the stratosphere naturally. Climate models also suggest that the impact on ozone would be minimal “and thus not worrisome enough to justify turning to a less-well-understood material,” he said.

Alan Robock, a climate scientist at Rutgers who has highlighted the potential risks of geoengineering, echoed this concern. 

“I don’t think this project ever had a good science question,” he says. “I think it was more driven by wanting to build something, the engineering.”

MacMartin says the crucial starting questions for experiments in this field are what gaps in our understanding such research could fill and whether that information would help to inform decisions about geoengineering. And it’s the pursuit of those answers that should be communicated as the rationale to the public.

But, he says, too often the SCoPEx researchers articulated their case for the work along the lines of, “Hey, this is small—you should let us do it because we want to.”

In an email, Keutsch noted that one of the things they hoped to better understand through the experiment was how plumes of injected particles spread out and mix in the stratosphere. In addition, Keith noted that they did discuss releasing and studying sulfuric acid as well, though they tended to talk more about calcium carbonate.

Broader scientific program

Another concern about the project from early on was that it was a one-off, privately funded experiment, moving ahead outside of any broader, government-backed research program. (Funding came from grants that Harvard provided the researchers as new professors and through the university’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, which has raised money from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Pritzker Innovation Fund, and other groups and individuals.) For less touchy subjects, such an experiment might be funded and overseen through a federal scientific body like the US National Science Foundation. 

That meant the university had to set up an advisory board if the institution wanted standard scientific oversight—and it meant that that committee had to craft its own rules for how such experiments should proceed, even as the researchers were taking steps toward an initial launch to test out their hardware.

Given the sensitivity of the topic, some observers believe that outdoor solar geoengineering experiments should only proceed through broader, public research programs involving scientific bodies with established practices for evaluating scientific merit, ethics, and environmental impact. Ideally, such programs would include “society-wide engagement,” tapping a variety of experts to impartially inform significant portions of the public about such interventions, explore their areas of concern, and, crucially, use that input to inform the design of the research program, says Holly Buck, an environmental social scientist at the University at Buffalo and author of After Geoengineering .

“Unless government is convening a serious engagement process where they are going to incorporate what they hear into policy in this area, I would expect any sort of outdoor experiment to meet a similar kind of resistance,” she said in an email.

Several nations have set up small-scale research efforts in the field, including the US and China . But a comprehensive program of this sort would require far more funding than has been allocated to date. A 2021 National Academies report recommended that the US government establish a cross-agency research program in solar geoengineering, backed by $100 million to $200 million over a five-year period. 

Future experiments 

Keith himself owns up to several mistakes in the research effort, including failing to anticipate that opponents would raise concerns over the basic hardware test in Sweden. He also says the team was wrong to move ahead without having a public engagement plan in place. The public failure of SCoPEx, he believes, will probably make it more difficult for other experiments in the stratosphere to go forward.

“Which is really sad,” he says. “And I apologize, and it’s a failure.”

But he also says there is still room for other groups to pursue outdoor experiments, and he believes the odds are strong that someone will. Indeed, there are numerous indicators of growing interest in researching this field and providing funding for it. As noted, the US government is developing a research program. The Environmental Defense Fund is considering supporting scientists in the area and recently held a meeting to discuss guardrails that should govern such work. And a number of major philanthropies that haven’t supported the field in the past are in advanced discussions to provide funding to research groups, sources tell MIT Technology Review .

Meanwhile, under Keith, the University of Chicago is working to hire 10 faculty researchers in this area.

He says he wouldn’t look to lead an outdoor experiment himself at this point, but he does hope that people working with him at the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative would, if it could offer insights into the scientific questions they’re exploring. 

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