Harvard Business Research Articles

Asymmetric Naïveté: Beliefs About Self-Control

Do individuals anticipate time inconsistency in others? This paper jointly investigates beliefs about one’s own and others’ present bias. In an online laboratory experiment, participants engaged in a real-effort task display little awareness of their own present bias but anticipate present bias in others. Structurally, I estimate a present bias parameter [Formula: see text] of 0.82. Participants perceive others’ [Formula: see text] to be 0.87, indicating substantial sophistication, contrasted with 1.03 for themselves, indicating full naïveté. At the individual level, asymmetric naïveté correlates with overoptimism regarding one’s own versus others’ task enjoyment and time availability. The wedge in beliefs about present bias can inform equilibrium outcomes in a number of collaborative, competitive, and hierarchical settings, including teams in the workplace, management practices such as deadlines and tournament incentive schemes, and household consumption decisions. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Financial support from the Laboratory for Economic Applications and Policy (Harvard University); Pershing Square Venture Fund for Research on the Foundations of Human Behavior (Harvard University); Harvard Business School (PhD Research Budget); and the Russell Sage Foundation (Small Research Grant) is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.01780 .

Reputation Burning: Analyzing the Impact of Brand Sponsorship on Social Influencers

The growth of the influencer marketing industry warrants an empirical examination of the effect of posting sponsored videos on influencers’ reputations. We collected a novel data set of user-generated YouTube videos created by prominent English-speaking influencers in the beauty and style category. We extracted a rich set of theory-driven video features and used DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux reweighting to construct comparable treatment and control groups matched at the influencer-video level. The empirical analysis of the matched sample revealed a reputation-burning effect; that is, posting a sponsored video, compared with posting an equivalent organic video, cost the influencers 0.19% of their reputation (operationalized as the number of subscribers). The reputation-burning effect was stronger among the influencers with larger audiences. An analysis of likes, comments, and comment texts revealed a larger gap in audience response between sponsored and organic videos among the influencers with larger (versus smaller) audiences. The reputation-burning effect was mitigated when a high fit existed between the sponsored content and the influencer’s “usual” content and when the promoted brand was less well known. Our study empirically tested the assumption of several theoretical works. Moreover, it contributes to the literature on influencer marketing and celebrity endorsements and provides managerial implications for influencers, brands, and social media platforms. This paper was accepted by D. J. Wu, information systems. Funding: This research was supported by funding provided by Harvard Business School. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00193 .

Why and how systemic change overcomes ineffectiveness

Why and how systemic change overcomes ineffectiveness Michael Beer, from Harvard Business School, provides insight into why and how systemic change overcomes ineffectiveness in organizations. According to leading academics and consultants, seventy percent of corporate transformations are failures. The organization is stuck in neutral, ineffective, and unable to make systemic change in order to perform better. Strategy changes follow changes in the competitive environment. The system of organizing, managing, and leading must then be realigned with the new strategy or friction and conflict between groups that must coordinate for the organization to survive will arise. A decline in effectiveness and performance will begin. Firing people or creating new programs to re-educate them doesn’t work. Edward Deming, the quality guru who taught the Japanese how to compete on quality, found that “94% of problems in business are system driven and only 6% are people driven.” When confronted with strategic inflection points, 7 silent capabilities must be confronted through honest conversations. Most managers do not, however, know why or how.

The Crowdless Future? Generative AI and Creative Problem-Solving

The rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) open up attractive opportunities for creative problem-solving through human-guided AI partnerships. To explore this potential, we initiated a crowdsourcing challenge focused on sustainable, circular economy business ideas generated by the human crowd (HC) and collaborative human-AI efforts using two alternative forms of solution search. The challenge attracted 125 global solvers from various industries, and we used strategic prompt engineering to generate the human-AI solutions. We recruited 300 external human evaluators to judge a randomized selection of 13 out of 234 solutions, totaling 3,900 evaluator-solution pairs. Our results indicate that while human crowd solutions exhibited higher novelty—both on average and for highly novel outcomes—human-AI solutions demonstrated superior strategic viability, financial and environmental value, and overall quality. Notably, human-AI solutions cocreated through differentiated search, where human-guided prompts instructed the large language model to sequentially generate outputs distinct from previous iterations, outperformed solutions generated through independent search. By incorporating “AI in the loop” into human-centered creative problem-solving, our study demonstrates a scalable, cost-effective approach to augment the early innovation phases and lays the groundwork for investigating how integrating human-AI solution search processes can drive more impactful innovations. Funding: This work was supported by Harvard Business School (Division of Research and Faculty Development) and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) at the Digital Data and Design (D3) Institute at Harvard. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18430 .

The Value of Competitor Information: Evidence from a Field Experiment

To what extent do firms know available information on key competitor decisions, and how does competitor information change their own strategic choices? These questions are fundamental to understanding how firms compete and make strategic decisions, yet systematic evidence on them remains limited. I designed a field experiment across 3,218 differentiated firms in the personal care industry, where firms randomly assigned to treatment received easily accessible information on competitor prices. At baseline, nearly half of treatment firms appeared to lack knowledge of competitor prices. Once treatment firms received competitor information, they were more likely to change their own decisions, aligning them with competitors rather than differentiating. These changes were driven by firms that were more misaligned in their price and quality decisions, and appear to have been performance enhancing. If competitor information was both easily accessible and decision relevant, why did firms not use this information on their own? Results from a follow-up experiment suggest that this lack of knowledge may have been driven by managerial inattention. These findings highlight that limited information processing is a key problem for firms and a central issue in strategy, and raise the possibility that growing availability of competitor data may lead firms to align their decisions more with their competitors. This paper was accepted by Alfonso Gambardella, business strategy. Funding: H. Kim is grateful for the support of Harvard Business School, the Foundations of Human Behavior, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Yelp. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.04062 .

The "Silent Killers" of business success

The "Silent Killers" of business success Dr. Michael (Mike) Beer, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, explains the “silent killers” of business success that top management are unaware of. For the past forty years, I and my colleagues at TruePoint, a management consulting firm I co-founded, have worked with courageous leaders willing to enable truth to speak to power - them and their top team - about barriers to their organization’s effectiveness and performance. Hundreds of organizations across the globe, in many different industries, in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, have reported the same syndrome of seven highly interdependent barriers. We have called these barriers the “silent killers” of learning and change because, like hypertension and cholesterol in the human body, they are hidden barriers to organizational health and effectiveness.

Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency

Through a large-scale field experiment with 393,036 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run engagement. Although we find tradeoff transparency to have an insignificant effect on acquisition rates, customers who were shown each offering’s tradeoffs selected different products than those who were not. Moreover, prospective customers who experienced transparency and subsequently chose to open an account went on to exhibit higher-quality service relationships over time. Monthly spending was 9.9% higher and cancellation rates were 20.5% lower among those who experienced transparency into each offering’s tradeoffs. Increased product use and retention accrued disproportionately to customers with prior category experience: more-experienced customers who were provided transparency spent 19.2% more on a monthly basis and were 33.7% less likely to defect after nine months. Importantly, we find that these gains in engagement and retention do not come at the expense of customers’ financial well-being: the probability of making late payments was reduced among customers who experienced transparency. We further find that the positive effects of tradeoff transparency on engagement and retention were attenuated in the presence of a promotion that provided financial incentives to choose particular offerings. Taken together, these results suggest that providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs may be an effective strategy for informing customer choices, leading to better outcomes for customers and firms alike. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management. Funding: Funding for this research, apart from the costs Commonwealth Bank of Australia internally incurred to support the experiment, was provided by Harvard Business School. R. W. Buell has received compensation from Commonwealth Bank of Australia in the past for executive education teaching. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.4985 .

MAKE IT SAFE TO BE DIFFERENT—BUT DON’T STOP THERE

AbstractFrances Frei is a professor at Harvard Business School, and was also Uber’s first Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy. Anne Morriss is the founder of the Leadership Consortium, which she describes as “a first‐of‐its‐kind leadership accelerator that works to help emerging leaders thrive.” They write about the many nuances of how employees feel safe (or otherwise) in the workplace. They include information about how inclusion is impacted by safety, partly with the use of what they call the Inclusion Dial. They write that their colleague “Tina Opie, a management professor at Babson College, challenges us in her own scholarship, it’s our collective and individual responsibility—and opportunity—to be great allies and partners to our teammates with different experiences of safety, and we must bring grace, humility, and urgency to the task.” They also cite their Harvard Business School colleague Amy Edmondson, and her groundbreaking work on psychological safety. Frei and Morriss write that “an organization that celebrates uniqueness assumes that difference is a source of creativity, innovation, and strength. It is not just something to watch out for as it may get in the way of some people’s contribution.”

From Allston to Ahmedabad: American hegemony in management education reexamined

Purpose This paper aims to study the origin story of Harvard Business School’s involvement with the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad to study the reasons for the spread of American management education. It introduces both the explicit influence of Cold War politics and Indian development imaginaries to the export of American management thought in the early 1960s. Design/methodology/approach This paper relies on archival research for its primary source material, drawing upon rich archives of documents found at the Baker Library of Harvard Business School. Findings Harvard’s role in Ahmedabad was explicitly influenced by the Cold War anti-communist foreign policy of the USA, but did so opportunistically and contrary to the Ford Foundation’s (FF) original plans. Vikram Sarabhai, who was a key player in the Indian national imaginary of development, invited Harvard on his own initiative and forced the foundation to follow his interests rather than being a mere “subaltern.” Research limitations/implications This paper could additionally add to the historical debate about the scope and periodization of the Cold War and the role of non-state actors. Originality/value This paper covers new ground in exploring the early connection between the Indian development imaginary and business education. It concludes that the export of hegemonic US management education was not successful during Cold War, and the FF was not as dominant as it was made out to be.

A proposed digital transformation model for implementation by digital leaders

PurposeThe purpose of this study was threefold: to trace the extent to which digital transformation strategies are being implemented in organizations; to statistically measure, validate, predict and examine how digital leaders perceive a synthesized digital transformation model (DTM); and to explore whether leaders with different demographic characteristics perceive the DTM similarly.Design/methodology/approachThe study authors surveyed 778 leaders/managers from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to assess the synthetized DTM consisting of four dimensions and nine perception constructs that represent how leaders manage employees in a digital environment. The survey questions were adapted from the 2014 Westerman leading digital book published in Harvard business press.FindingsThe general findings revealed that UAE organizations that were already in the digital transformation stage before COVID-19 reacted and responded extremely quickly to speed up the implementation of their respective digital transformation strategies. We concluded that our proposed and synthetized DTM is valid and predictable, and can be adapted to trace the stages of digital transformation by leaders. A positive relationship was found between the DTM’s four dimensions and their related constructs as perceived by the leaders, regardless of differences in their demographic characteristics.Originality/valueThe synthesized digital transformation model is unique in that the authors believe there is no other research that purports to synthesize, validate and correlate using the digital transformation campus dimensions and its related constructs, reflecting leaders' perceptions toward adopting this campus. As well, this is the first UAE study to explore and compare the perspectives of leaders on their digital practices after COVID-19 in a country that has an established IT infrastructure.

Governing at a distance to change corporate social responsibility discourse: Navigating through institutions and actors

AbstractIn this paper, we demonstrate what influences the evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) debates. Using the idea of ‘governing at a distance’ (Rose & Miller, 1992) from the Foucauldian governmentality perspective, we identify the mechanisms behind CSR's context‐based evolution. Examining 72 academic texts on CSR from the 1940s to the 2000s, we find that spatial political contexts and power interests shape CSR. We argue that CSR discourse is linked to governing systems and was part of a post‐WWII restructuring to support capitalism against communism in the global order. Our study reveals that academic journals and scholars introduced American CSR concepts to Turkish academia through strong ties to institutions like Harvard Business School and the Ford Foundation, influencing the emergence and change of CSR over time. Changes in CSR discourse are contextually embedded and politically laden with its emergence having a strong governmentality dimension for which academics (through their texts, academic acumen, and affiliated institutions) play a key role as intermediaries governing at a distance. While the critical perspective emphasizes the issues of coercion and contestations, our paper suggests the importance of cooperation and concerted efforts in shaping the global construction of CSR. We have demonstrated the nuanced interplay between the local and global governance of business and academic associations, challenging the perceived rigidity of their boundaries.

Proximate (Co-)Working: Knowledge Spillovers and Social Interactions

We examine the influence of physical proximity on between-start-up knowledge spillovers at one of the largest technology coworking hubs in the United States. Relying on the exogenous assignment of office space to the hub’s 251 start-ups, we find that proximity positively influences knowledge spillovers as proxied by the likelihood of adopting an upstream web technology already used by a peer start-up. This effect is largest for start-ups within close proximity of each other and quickly decays; start-ups more than 20 meters apart on the same floor are indistinguishable from start-ups on different floors. The main driver of the effect appears to be social interactions. Although start-ups in close proximity are most likely to participate in social coworking space events together, knowledge spillovers are greatest between start-ups that socialize but are dissimilar. Ultimately, start-ups that are embedded in environments that have neither too much nor too little diversity perform better but only if they socialize. This paper was accepted by Toby Stuart, entrepreneurship and innovation. Funding: The authors acknowledge funding from the Kauffman Junior Faculty Fellowship and from the Harvard Business School Division of Research and Faculty Development. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.03555 .

THE ECONOMIC PAMPHLETEER: Perspectives on the past and future of agriculture

First paragraphs: The Harvard Business School defines trans­formational changes as “changes that are typically much grander in scope than incremental, adaptive changes. Very often, transformational change refers to a dramatic evolution of some basic structure of the business itself—its strategy, culture, organization, physical structure, supply chain, or processes” (Harvard Business School Online, 2020, “Transformational Change,” para. 1). I have lived and worked through a period of transforma­tional change in American agriculture. I was born in 1939 and raised on a small family farm in southwest Missouri. The only farm ma­chin­ery in our community during the early 1940s was a steam engine that powered a threshing ma­chine that moved from farm to farm at harvest time. Everything on the farm was done with horse power or human power. We milked cows by hand, picked corn by hand, and plowed fields and culti­vated crops with horse-drawn equipment. Like most farmers in the U.S. at the time, most farmers in our community milked a few cows, raised a few hogs and chickens, and grew at least enough feed grains and forages for their livestock. They used crop rotations and livestock manure to manage pests and maintain soil fertility. Neighboring farmers shared their horsepower and human power at harvest times—as a matter of necessity. I recall silo-filling crews of up to 40 farmers. Our commu­nity may have been a few years behind some other areas, but this was pretty much the state of agricul­ture in the U.S. in the late 1940s. . . .

Кластеры как драйверы регионального экономического развития: практика США

Clusters are becoming one of the drivers of regional and national economic growth. Accumulating around themselves a number of advantages of territorial concentration of economic activity, clusters contribute to innovative development, improving the quality of labor resources, promoting companies to world markets, increasing their competitiveness. The purpose of the article is to define the cluster as a driver of regional economic development based on the analysis of US practice. To do this, the definition of clusters is given and their types are highlighted, the key subjects and the benefits created are identified, the direction of influence on the economy of the regions is formulated, the analysis of US clusters is carried out and modern development trends are identified. It is certain that the cluster in the region has an impact on economic development, forming the sectoral structure of the economy, creating political incentives, increasing competitiveness and productivity, attracting new companies and in other ways. It is shown that clusters can be divided into two groups: oriented to the external market (traded) and internal (local). This classification is important because clusters of the two groups manifest themselves differently in the regions. “External” clusters are interconnected by common technologies and highly skilled workers, they are concentrated in several regions, form the “core” of the regional economy and create a block of service industries. The development of this cluster group is well explained by the theories of exporting regions. The analysis of economic clusters according to the Institute of Strategy and Competitiveness of Harvard Business School showed that the average number of industries in clusters of this group is higher, there is close connectivity between clusters, there is growth in innovative, creative, educational and environmental clusters. The clusters of the group are oriented to the external market, and therefore they are distinguished by a high number of patents received. The construction of the model showed that the growth of the cluster depends on the initial number of employees, the level of wages and the number of patents received. Clusters focused on the domestic market are larger in the number of industries, differ in low wages and require little patenting. The analysis of the distribution of clusters by the number of employees according to Zipf’s law (the “rank-size” rule) showed the validity of such a division of clusters into groups. In conclusion, some current trends in the development of clusters were formulated.

Sampling Bias in Entrepreneurial Experiments

Using data from a prominent online platform for launching new digital products, we document that “sampling bias”—defined as the difference between a startup’s target customer base and the actual sample on which early “beta tests” are conducted—has a systematic and persistent impact on the venture’s success. Specifically, we show that products with a female-focused target market launching on a typical day, when nine in 10 users on this platform are men, experience 45% less growth a year after launch than those for whom the target market is more male-focused. By isolating exogenous variation in the composition of beta testers unrelated to the characteristics of launched products on that day, we find that on days when there are unexpectedly more women beta testers on the platform—reducing the amount of sampling bias for female-focused products—the gender performance gap shrinks toward zero. Our results highlight how sampling bias can lead to fewer successfully commercialized innovations for consumers who are underrepresented among early users. This paper was accepted by Alfonso Gambardella, business strategy. Funding: This work was supported by the Harvard Business School, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation [Grant 201708-2801]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.01740 .

JERUSALEM, A HOLY AND CREATIVE CITY: Advisory Practices and the Grounding of Urban Mobilities within the Context of Ethnic Conflict

AbstractThis article assesses how the agency of international advisors can provide policy recommendations that, instead of introducing urban policy initiatives for multicultural encounters, sharpen political and spatial segregation within the context of ethnic conflict. The article explores the variegated nature of neoliberalization and argues that the adoption of strategic planning and creativity discourses enables the development of a sophisticated political rationale for governing ethnic diversity. The analysis focuses on a range of advisory practices—including the role played by Michael Porter at the Harvard Business School and Richard Florida at the Creative Class Group in advising former Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat—in order to understand the dynamics of grounding imaginaries concerning a neoliberal role for the state and the depoliticization of the public sphere in a disputed city. By surveying official policy documents, journalistic interviews and two reports submitted by Porter and Florida to Barkat, the author examines how the branding of Jerusalem as a creative city involved managerial practices that classified the city's diverse population according to categories of creative and non‐creative labor rather than political subjects. The adoption of such discourses facilitated a novel approach for enhancing the state‐building ethno‐nationalistic project while at the same time reproducing the dynamics of occupation and annexation.

Centralization and Organization Reproduction: Ethnic Innovation in R&D Centers and Satellite Locations

We study the relationship between firm centralization and organizational reproduction in satellite locations. For decentralized firms, the ethnic compositions of inventors in satellite locations mostly resemble their host cities with little link to the inventor composition of their parent firms’ research and development headquarters. For highly centralized firms, by contrast, organizational reproduction has an explanatory power equal to half or more of the host city effect. Reproduction is strongest when a firm exhibits a hands-on approach to the satellite facility, such as cross-facility team collaboration or internal talent mobility. Funding: W. R. Kerr thanks the National Science Foundation, Harvard Business School, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation for financial support that made this research possible. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.16070 .

Shared Service Delivery Can Increase Client Engagement: A Study of Shared Medical Appointments

Problem definition: Clients and service providers alike often consider one-on-one service delivery to be ideal, assuming, perhaps unquestioningly, that devoting individualized attention best improves client outcomes. In contrast, in shared service delivery, clients are served in batches and the dynamics of group interaction could lead to increased client engagement, which could improve outcomes. However, the loss of privacy and personal connection might undermine engagement. The engagement dynamics in one-on-one and shared delivery models have not been rigorously studied. To the extent that shared delivery may result in comparable or better engagement than one-on-one delivery, service providers in a broad array of contexts may be able to create more value for clients by delivering service in batches. Methodology/results: We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 1,000 patients who were undergoing glaucoma treatment over a three-year period at a large eye hospital. Using verbatim and behavioral transcripts from more than 20,000 minutes of video recorded during our trial, we examine how shared medical appointments (SMAs), in which patients are served in batches, impact engagement. On average, a patient who experienced SMAs asked 33.3% more questions per minute and made 8.6% more nonquestion comments per minute. Because there were multiple patients in an SMA, this increase in engagement at the individual patient level resulted in patients hearing far more comments in the group setting. Patients in SMAs also exhibited higher levels of nonverbal engagement across a wide array of measures (attentiveness, positivity, head wobbling, or “thalai aattam” in Tamil: a South Indian gesture to signal agreement or understanding, eye contact, and end-of-appointment happiness), relative to patients who attended one-on-one appointments. Managerial implications: These results shed light on the potential for shared service delivery models to increase client engagement and thus enhance service performance. Funding: This work was supported by the Wheeler Institute at London Business School (WIBAD Ramdas_Sonmez CFP19), the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital at London Business School (IIE_3432_2019), Aravind Eye Hospital, and Harvard Business School. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2021.0012 .

Retraction of Gino et al. (2020).

Reports the retraction of "Why connect? Moral consequences of networking with a promotion or prevention focus" by Francesca Gino, Maryam Kouchaki and Tiziana Casciaro (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2020[Dec], Vol 119[6], 1221-1238). This retraction is at the request of the Research Integrity Officer at Harvard Business School after the results of a review into data for Study 3a collected and analyzed by Francesca Gino. The review identified unexplained discrepancies between (a) the data associated with Study 3a in the Open Science Framework platform and (b) the original, raw data collected in Qualtrics. These discrepancies, which involved 28% of the total data from Study 3a, biased the published results in the direction of the study hypothesis. A reanalysis of the original data invalidated the previous conclusion from the study. The report of the investigation did not concern either Maryam Kouchaki or Tiziana Casciaro, who agree with the retraction. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2020-42384-001.) Networks are a key source of social capital for achieving goals in professional and personal settings. Yet, despite the clear benefits of having an extensive network, individuals often shy away from the opportunity to create new connections because engaging in instrumental networking can make them feel morally impure. In this article, we explore how the motives people have when engaging in networking impact these feelings and, as result, change how frequently they engage in networking and their job performance. Across a correlational survey study, a laboratory experiment (with samples from the United States and Italy), two online studies, an organizational network survey study, and a field experiment with professionals (total N = 2,551), we examine how self-regulatory focus, whether promotion or prevention, affects people's experience of and outcomes from networking. We find that a promotion focus, as compared to a prevention focus or a control condition, is beneficial to professional networking, as it lowers feelings of moral impurity from instrumental networking. As such, networking with a promotion focus increases the frequency of instrumental networking as compared to a control condition, whereas networking with a prevention focus decreases frequency of instrumental networking as compared to a control condition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Modern methods of teaching of obstetrics and gynecology in higher education

This article examines in detail modern methods of teaching obstetrics and gynecology in higher education. Modern ones are given highly effective approaches to conducting lectures, with the introduction of discussion elements. In our opinion, the experience of the world and national systems of higher education proves the need to use the latest interactive teaching methods. It undoubtedly contributes to the introduction of the technology of personally-oriented learning into the didactic process, the use of methods of encouraging students to educational and cognitive activities, which in turn ensures a personal orientation of learning. In this regard, the statement that interactive training is aimed at activating the cognitive activity of medical interns through the organization of communication among themselves, interns with the teacher, between groups, which is aimed at solving a common educational problem, is relevant. Accordingly, the establishment of modern interactive training involves simulation of examples and joint solution of the relevant situation. Competence of students, which is formed by interactive learning, expands the limits of cognitive possibilities, promotes analysis and application information obtained in the process of learning, and contributes significantly to the accumulation of skills in future professional medical activity. Methodology of the study includes comparative, descriptive and case-sdtudy methods. A deep one appears internal motivation, interns begin to make important decisions and enjoy developing their professional medical skills. The structure of “question-answer” methods, their use in conducting practical classes, which contribute to the emergence of professional competence of intern doctors and significantly increase the effectiveness of their perception of academic material, are covered in detail. If the interactive method is used, the intern does not feel like an object of the learning process, but a subject of acquiring knowledge, this undoubtedly leads to internal motivation, which contributes to its effectiveness. Conclusions. Thanks to the effect of originality and novelty of interactive methods, with their correct organization, the interest of intern doctors in the learning process increases. The modern pedagogical process of higher education uses various methods of organizing training, education and revealing future doctors as individuals. Lectures are undoubtedly the main and necessary form of training. Some supporters of traditional didactics see its advantages, while their opponents claim that times have changed and should to realize that the lecture as a classroom form of communication with students is the least effective among other forms of education in higher education. The application of the "Case Studies" method is quite effective in teaching obstetrics and gynecology. Given that the method was first developed at the beginning of the 20th century. at the Harvard Business School, it is also called the Harvard method. In our opinion, the method of specific situations - ICS, or situational learning - is a very effective teaching method, which involves the use of specific situations (cases from practice) from a certain section or topic of the training course for joint analysis, discussion and acceptance decision, brainstorming within a small group and a public speech with the presentation and defense of the proposed decision are also used. The main stages of “Case Studies” are distinguished, such as: the teacher's introductory speech; formation of microgroups; work in a small group; presentation of solutions developed by speakers; questions to the speakers; general discussion; teacher's closing speech; summing up.