Welcome to The HBR Strategy Lab—an AI-powered tool designed to help senior leaders develop, refine, and communicate strategic direction with clarity and confidence.
The Strategy Lab combines Harvard’s world-class strategy frameworks with the speed and adaptability of conversational AI. Whether you are stress-testing a new initiative, aligning your team, or rethinking competitive positioning, this tool is built to guide you, step by step.
1. Asking Strategy Questions
The Strategy Lab features a broad conversational AI assistant that can answer your strategy questions across a wide range of topics—growth, differentiation, alignment, leveraging AI, and more.
The Strategy Lab’s research-backed answers are based on Harvard Business School frameworks and HBR expertise, and include relevant, real-world examples.
You can ask questions like:
- Ask questions like:
- “How can my company grow in a saturated market?”
- “What framework should I use to assess my pricing strategy?”
- “Where should I focus to gain a competitive edge?”
2. Document Uploads for Personalization
You can quickly and securely upload internal documents (e.g., strategic plans, business briefs) to receive tailored responses grounded in the context of your business, without needing to write paragraphs of description into the chat.
What you can do:
- Upload one or more documents in PDF, Word, PPT or TXT format.
- Ask the bot to analyze, summarize, or provide feedback based on the uploaded content.
3. Value Curve Exercise (Deep Dive)
The value curve exercise is a guided, interactive experience that helps you visualize how your business compares to competitors, and then helps you apply your findings to your strategy. The exercise will help you identify where to invest, where to scale back, and what tradeoffs to make. It also offers a downloadable executive summary and discussion guide to bring the exercise and its results to your team (see next section).
What you can do:
- Ask the assistant to begin the value curves exercise and follow the instructions.
- Dig Deeper into your current strategy by answering personalized questions.
- See how your current strategy is reflected in the value curves chart and interact with it to make adjustments.
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Generate a second, forward-looking version of your curve based on your strategic goals.
4. Value Curves Exercise: Discussion Guide
After completing the value curve exercise, you’ll receive a customized Discussion Guide designed to help you communicate your strategic thinking and foster team alignment.
What you can do:
- Use the guide to lead team discussions around tradeoffs and priorities.
- Compare your value curve with those of your colleagues to spark discussions that drive alignment.
- Drive clarity and buy-in with structured follow-up questions.
5. Conversation History Panel
The Strategy Lab automatically stores your conversations for easy reference and continued exploration.
What you can do:
- Access your previous chats via the right-hand Conversation History panel.
- Rename conversations to keep track of strategic themes.
- Start a new thread or revisit a past discussion to continue where you left off.
6. Viewing & Managing Artifacts
As you interact with The Strategy Lab, your outputs—value curves, discussion guides, uploaded files—are saved as artifacts for future access.
What you can do:
- Review, delete, or collapse saved artifacts.
- Use saved visuals to support strategic planning or executive presentations.
7. Data Privacy & Confidentiality
All information entered into The Strategy Lab—including uploaded documents and conversation content—is treated as confidential. Your conversations with The Strategy Lab are used to personalize its response to you, but they are not used to train the tool nor any of the underlying large language models (LLMs). Access to user interactions is limited to select members of the Harvard Business Publishing team who have a direct professional need, such as debugging or product improvement. No information is shared with third parties. See the HBR Privacy Policy for more details.