In 2016, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJio), a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited, disrupted the Indian telecom sector by offering consumers access to the latest cutting-edge fourth-generation (4G) data and voice services at affordable prices. Competitors alleged that RJio had indulged in predatory pricing to acquire customers, but they lost the litigation as the anti-trust regulator held that the company should enjoy the benefits of a start-up and no predatory pricing rules were applicable. Within five years of its launch, RJio had become the top Indian telecom company. In 2023, competitors had caught up by offering better services at equitable rates. Had RJio indulged in predatory behavior to establish itself in a price sensitive market? Could the company continue at the same pace in the future? Had RJio transitioned into a new role as a technology company? What role should retailers play in ensuring customer acquisition to support RJio's future growth strategy?
October 8, 2021: Tata Sons won a bid to acquire India's national carrier Air India, marking the airline's return to its original owners after 68 long years. The winning bid of $2.4 billion gave Tata Sons full ownership of the airline and its coveted network of 6,200 landing and parking slots in Indian airports and 900 slots in overseas hubs. This bid marked the end of a two-decade-long journey for the Indian government that had been trying to sell the troubled airline which, according to recent estimates, was losing nearly $3 million per day. The chairman of Tata Sons, Natarajan Chandrasekaran (Chandra), described the occasion as a "historic moment." "It will be a rare privilege for our group to own and operate the country's flag bearer airline. It will be our endeavor to build a world-class airline that makes every Indian proud." The acquisition of a heavily indebted and loss-making public sector asset raised several questions: Why did Tata Sons acquire Air India? Was it an emotional decision to regain control of an airline they had started? Was this an example of Tata Sons helping India overcome another persistent challenge, a trait well documented throughout its corporate history? Was it a commercially sound decision?
On January 2, 2018, the chief executive officer of a private company in Karachi, Pakistan, Imaam Spinning Mills (Imaam), was planning to expand the company’s product line and enter the weaving business by setting up a new weaving plant. He asked his chief financial officer to conduct a financial evaluation financial evaluation of the project. To do so, she needed to calculate the weighted average cost of capital, using the comparative method to calculate the cost of capital for the unlisted firm based on financial data from Imaam and comparable firms, and determine the feasibility of the project.
In August 2022, a Canadian investor, Adam Eissa, was considering making an investment in Nautilus Inc. (Nautilus). Nautilus was a manufacturer of connected home fitness equipment that was experiencing financial volatility amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Before coming to a decision, Eissa wanted to analyze the financial data from Nautilus’s annual report and complete a business size-up of its corporate strategy.
Cynet Systems Private Limited (Cynet) was a subsidiary of Cynet Corporation, a technology services firm providing staffing support for US clients. The Cynet team in India was based in smaller Indian cities such as Karnal and Dehradun. When a lockdown was announced in early March 2020 to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the country, the recruiters working for Cynet had to shift to remote work. This was a dramatic shift for the young recruiters, most of whom were recent college graduates. The onus of ensuring the client deliverable was met was on Shyam Sharma, the team leader at Cynet. At that time, the company created a centralized data reporting team, and in December 2021 the organization was still looking to enhance an analytics dashboard to better predict employee performance; further analytical insights would allow Cynet's top management to make better predictive outcomes versus what was currently being measured to evaluate performance.
<p align="justify">Mamaearth, founded in 2016, started as a direct-to-consumer personal-care brand and carved a niche for itself as a trusted, toxin-free baby-care, skin-care, and hair-care brand in a competitive Indian personal-care market landscape that included established multinationals. In 2022, its parent company, Honasa Consumer Private Limited (HCL), raised $52 million in financing for a valuation of US $1.2 billion, becoming the first unicorn of 2022. HCL also acquired BBlunt, a hair-care and styling-products business in a ₹1.34 billion deal that was seen as a significant step toward meeting Mamaearth’s growth aspirations.<br><br> In a competitive personal-care market landscape, the leading companies had realized health-aware consumers’ need for natural and toxin-free products and were innovating and aggressively pushing chemical-free products. Mamaearth now faced a challenge in taking the next leap forward: it needed to grow its market, retain its sustainable positioning, determine its consumer segment, and build a communication strategy around these factors as a trusted, toxin-free skin-care and hair-care company.
Fundrr was a South Africa-based alternative funding business that launched in 2018. The business’s goal had been to disrupt the South African business lending landscape, specifically at the small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) level where the majority (about 71 per cent) of SMEs generated annual revenues of less than R200,000 and employed between two and five people. Reflecting on the company’s journey in October 2021, the company’s founders realized that Fundrr had weathered the COVID-19 storm and had grown 630 per cent between September 2020 and September 30, 2021. However, there was a discrepancy between their current client base and the founders’ vision for the company as a disruptive, innovative, entrepreneurship-friendly alternative funder seeking to offer financial backing options independent of those granted by traditional banking institutions. The typical Fundrr client was usually in their fifties and male. Operating on a continent with the youngest population in the world, what did this say about their marketing and brand positioning? How could they apply the same resourcefulness and relevance to position the business into the future?
Given the turmoil in the cryptocurrency sector, some say the blockchain revolution is over. Others think market setbacks and implementation challenges will eventually be overcome, potentially enabling the mass adoption of a decentralized “Web3” that will revolutionize how people work, play, and earn a living. So, what should executives think? In this Ivey Business Journal interview, Alex Tapscott discusses what has happened since the publishing of Blockchain Revolution, along with his new book Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic Frontier. Tapscott explains how with the rise of Web2, Internet users agreed to a system of digital feudalism by giving away their data in exchange for free services. The future he sees will invert the model from digital feudalism to a form of self-sovereign identity where you control and own your data, and you decide how and when it’s used—and if it’s used, you can get compensated. People will enjoy more privacy rights and many might end up working for a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which will benefit people in places where local markets don’t offer many employment opportunities. Creators will enjoy new ways to connect with fans and directly earn money from them, while fans will have a new way to experience the creativity they enjoy. However, without decentralized blockchain we’ll end up with hyped-up databases controlled by a single company, which wouldn’t be Web3 but “virtual Disneylands.”
Suparshva Swabs India (SSI), a family-owned firm started by Brij Mohan Jain and his sons in 1992, when India was going through liberalization, began its journey in the personal-hygiene category by launching high-quality cotton swabs (also known as cotton buds). SSI had steadfastly managed environmental challenges on the regulatory, economic, financial, and competitive fronts to offer good-quality products in India at an affordable price. In early 2020, as COVID-19 struck the whole world and the Government of India was under pressure to increase the number of COVID-19 tests conducted per day, the high costs of importing cotton swabs from the United States, Italy, and China exacerbated the crisis, making real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests unaffordable for the average Indian and reducing the number of tests conducted per day. SSI identified the opportunity to produce swabs indigenously in India and substantially bring down the costs. With very little time to respond to the challenge and meet the government's demand with a price acceptable to all stakeholders, SSI worked within severe time and cost constraints to make this possible. In August 2022, as the intensity of COVID-19 tapered off and a slew of substitute consumer-friendly methods for testing were arriving in the pipeline, SSI needed to determine what strategic alternatives were available for growth from this point.
Ola Electric Mobility Pvt. Ltd. (Ola Electric) was launched in 2017 by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd., better known as Ola Cabs, as a venture for making electric scooters. Bhavish Aggarwal, one of Ola Cabs' founders, acquired a 92.5 per cent stake in Ola Electric and pursued a path of rapid expansion. By 2022, Ola Electric had successfully raised a large amount of capital from investors, developed several subsystems (especially software) of its products in-house, carried out two product launches and generated tens of thousands of bookings from customers, and was building a state-of-the-art plant for making electric scooters. While Ola Electric's scooters had received positive reviews from a few expert reviewers and generated customer bookings, the company found it difficult to deliver defect-free scooters in sufficient numbers. The company was also mired in a number of controversies, such as some of its scooters catching fire, alleged safety issues with its products, publicly sharing a customer's private data, and the departure of several executive from the company. Blunt communication by the founder and majority owner Aggarwal made some of the controversies worse. Aggarwal and his team now had to determine how to address the challenges and decide whether to focus on tackling these or on aggressively pursuing greater volumes. In which direction should they steer the company's strategy?
Jonathan Gray, the head of Digital Assets at NorthCentral Bank, was tasked with deciding how the bank should approach the growing demand for cryptocurrency (crypto) investment products and services. As the fintech industry continued to grow rapidly and younger digital consumers expressed a desire for crypto-friendly products, the bank had to decide how to proceed. Gray considered three options: maintaining the status quo and not offering crypto products; developing investment-only products and services around digital assets; or becoming a meaningful ecosystem player by offering wallets and enabling users to acquire crypto assets and use them natively on blockchains. Each option had its own benefits and risks, and Gray had to decide which path is best for NorthCentral Bank to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving fintech industry.
This case follows the entrepreneurial journey of Tommie Lo, Founder and CEO of education platform Preface, as he pioneered an innovative business model that provides up-to-date education in coding and tech skills, specializing in concepts like blockchain, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and the metaverse in the fast-developing field of Web3, as well as AI-related topics such as machine learning and ChatGPT. While its Business-to-Consumer (B2C) segment targets schoolchildren from well-resourced families or senior executives who are willing to pay a premium for flexible and convenient courses, Preface's clients in the Business-to-Business (B2B) segment include leading brands in financial services, technology, and luxury goods. Headquartered in Hong Kong, Preface differentiates itself in multiple ways. First, in contrast to traditional classrooms or purely online learning, Preface matches students with teachers for training sessions that could be online or offline, anytime and anywhere. Second, Preface's instructors are top engineers from leading tech companies who are passionate about computer science and teach at Preface as a second career, with Preface tapping into a high-quality resource pool. Third, Preface opened physical food & beverage outlets to offer exclusive events and foster a sense of community among its clients, contributing to a cultural shift toward lifelong learning.
In July 2017, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) launched the world's first Humanitarian Impact Bond. This innovative finance pilot was an experiment by the ICRC to engage the private sector differently and diversify funding - critical given the widening humanitarian aid gap. It was a massive undertaking. The HIB, which had a maximum potential deal size of CHF 26 million, took over four years to plan and multiple stakeholders, including governments, foundations, investors and lawyers, to put together. How did the ICRC pull this off and what possibilities does innovative finance offer the humanitarian and private sectors? Drawing on a series of proprietary interviews with key characters, various internal documents shared by the ICRC, and secondary sources such as news reports, press releases and reports by third-party organizations, this abridged case delves into the ICRC's motivations for entering innovative finance, why it chose the HIB instrument, what it was, the hurdles and challenges of designing and setting up this complex instrument, and what the ICRC did to get the project off the ground. Participants interested in innovative finance, the humanitarian and/or development sectors, cross-sectoral/industry collaboration, and social innovation will find the case particularly interesting.
Over the past few decades, business schools have embraced game theorists, economists, and others who deal in abstraction, all but stopping the solving of real-world, real-time problems. This text argues for a return to the medical model in business: listen, observe, and test. These three steps are the roots of human relations and organizational behavior; managers must fully assess a business and diagnose its problems before solving them. This model helped managers, consultants, and management scholars diagnose and solve problems faced by small and large organizations for decades, and it can continue to help companies today with myriad issues-including competition, leadership, diversity, and organizational structures-by offering a framework for addressing these problems rather than abstract theories. Chapter 1 discusses the beginnings of the medical model in business and the connections across various disciplines (e.g., medicine, psychology, and sociology) its founders developed. Wallace Donham, the second dean of Harvard Business School, paved the way for thinkers of different backgrounds to come together and create the medical model, also known as the human relations model, in the early twentieth century. Many influential academics and thinkers helped to shape the medical model, which is dependent on dynamic equilibrium. Businesses are living entities, needing to respond to changes in technology, investment conditions, market demand, and the workforce. If managers and consultants are to treat organizations as the living beings they are, they need to study the business holistically and work backward from the current problem to the underlying causes.
Over the past few decades, business schools have embraced game theorists, economists, and others who deal in abstraction, all but stopping the solving of real-world, real-time problems. This text argues for a return to the medical model in business: listen, observe, and test. These three steps are the roots of human relations and organizational behavior; managers must fully assess a business and diagnose its problems before solving them. This model helped managers, consultants, and management scholars diagnose and solve problems faced by small and large organizations for decades, and it can continue to help companies today with myriad issues-including competition, leadership, diversity, and organizational structures-by offering a framework for addressing these problems rather than abstract theories. Chapter 2 explores the Hawthorne study in detail, an extensive project in the 1920s and 1930s led by Mayo and Roethlisberger concerning the Hawthorne Plant, which manufactured telephone equipment outside Chicago. This study was the key test for the medical model, showing that the medical model was a better diagnostic tool and debunking various theories about organizations and people working within them. For years after the Hawthorne study, researchers and practitioners continued to ponder it, and human relations eventually became a vital paradigm in business research. The lasting impact of the Hawthorne study is discussed at the end of the chapter.
Over the past few decades, business schools have embraced game theorists, economists, and others who deal in abstraction, all but stopping the solving of real-world, real-time problems. This text argues for a return to the medical model in business: listen, observe, and test. These three steps are the roots of human relations and organizational behavior; managers must fully assess a business and diagnose its problems before solving them. This model helped managers, consultants, and management scholars diagnose and solve problems faced by small and large organizations for decades, and it can continue to help companies today with myriad issues-including competition, leadership, diversity, and organizational structures-by offering a framework for addressing these problems rather than abstract theories. Chapter 3 looks beyond the Hawthorne study to other successes of the human relations paradigm. The Dashman study focused on a real company facing issues that defied management theory; observation allowed executives to see what was actually going on and led to actionable knowledge. Other examples discussed include Turner and Lawrence's work on job satisfaction and Lorsch's work with companies in the plastic industry. Contingency theory explains why companies use different mechanisms for functional integration based on necessary company tasks. Compared to classical business theories, contingency theory is flexible and malleable to the point of being able to work for any organization.