In December 2022, Loris's executive team considered their go-to-market strategy. Loris was an artificial intelligence (AI) software startup for the customer service industry with two products on the market: 1) Agent Assist which provided customer service agents (CSAs) with empathetic, on-brand responses to text-based live chat (live chat) conversations, and 2) Insights which provided customer experience (CX) leaders with CSA performance and customer satisfaction (CSAT) data. Loris was also developing a third product: Automated Quality Assurance (AQA) which analyzed quality assurance in customers' email and live chat conversations. The Loris team faced challenges to growth with prospective clients cutting costs through laying off their CX leaders and automating customer conversations through chatbots including the recently-released ChatGPT generative AI chatbot. To increase marketplace traction in preparation for raising a Series B round, the Loris team was reevaluating two aspects of its go-to-market strategy. First was sales approach: Loris previously used a sales-led growth model with robust marketing and sales teams, but had begun experimenting with product-led growth (PLG) which focused on developing exceptional products so that word of mouth would drive quick and exponential sales. Loris's PLG efforts had little success, though, and the team wondered if they should continue with PLG, revert to sales-led growth, or pursue pay-for-performance where clients only paid for Loris products upon Loris's achieving agreed-upon revenue or cost savings. Second, was product strategy: Loris had been offering Agent Assist and Insights as a bundled suite, but was considering using one of those products or AQA as a foot-in-the-door approach to cross-sell and upsell other products. Which sales and product strategy would help Loris grow, especially given the threat from ChatGPT which both raised awareness of AI tools like Loris and served as competition to Loris?

By August 2023, Re-Match, an artificial turf waste-to-value company, had operations in Denmark and the Netherlands and had recycled over 160,000 tons of waste and plastic fiber. With recent capital injection from the VC firm Verdane and a dual revenue business model, the company wanted to expand its operation to become the global leader in turf recycling. However, stakeholders were divided between rapid U.S. market entry and refining their proven model to generate more downstream revenue. This case study delineates Re-Match's business model and assesses the carbon reduction potential of recycling in comparison to landfilling or incineration. Additionally, it raises the question of whether to prioritize market dominance or operational efficiency and how to identify the most receptive market for Re-Match's recycling solution.

It was the height of the summer in 2022, and Michel Doukeris, the CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), and Peter Kraemer, the company's Chief Supply Officer, gazed across the vast desert surrounding Zacatecas, Mexico. They were visiting their Grupo Modelo Brewery, AB InBev's largest and the highest-volume producer in the world, to contemplate their goal of increasing sales while reducing the company's impact on the natural environment. This case documents how company executives led an organizational transformation designed to help the firm balance growth and sustainability and achieve two benchmarks: becoming the number-one consumer packaged goods company for top-line growth and achieving their 2025 sustainability target, referred to as 100+ goals, and composed of smart agriculture, water stewardship, circular packaging, and climate action. The case illuminates the key decisions AB InBev executives needed to make, including making capital-intensive investments into the supply chain that drive sustainability and growth, reinventing processes and an overarching business model that had remained largely the same for hundreds of years, as well as changing how people work in a culture steeped in tradition.

After selling the PerkinElmer name and several ancillary business units, Prahlad Singh (CEO) and his team at the newly christened Revvity faced a challenge on how best to capitalize on the opportunities ahead for the business and emerge as winners within the Life Sciences and Diagnostics industries. Would the focus on Life Sciences and Diagnostics allow Singh to capture the value in the market that eluded him when PerkinElmer was saddled with other non-core businesses, or would challenges persist by trading at lower multiples than their peers? Singh and the company had a clean slate, and needed to craft a corporate strategy that focused on core strengths and showcased the unpolished gems that Revvity had acquired and polished into a global stable of respected brands.

Sajjan Jindal, Chairman & Managing Director of JSW Steel, India's largest steel producer by market capitalization, was facing a dilemma. Steel demand in India was expected to grow exponentially over the next decade. However, given its traditional reliance on carbon, steel was a "hard to abate" sector and was one of the most highly polluting industries globally. It was particularly polluting in India, where its production relied heavily on the use of coal. Given investor's increasing focus on sustainability, and global regulatory changes that were likely to penalize high emitters, Jindal was acutely aware of the need to decarbonize production. But investing in these technologies required heavy capital expenditure. Moreover, technology was fast evolving and there was considerable uncertainty about which one would be the ultimate "winner." Jindal and his team needed to make decisions. What kind of emissions intensity should it target, how much should it allocate towards decarbonization strategies, and which technologies should it bet on?

US-based lingerie retailer Victoria’s Secret Stores Brand Management, LLC (Victoria’s Secret) was started by a man who had been embarrassed to shop for lingerie for his wife and aimed to make the lingerie purchasing experience more comfortable for men. In 2020, after struggling to adapt to changing consumer habits and tastes and suffering from decreasing quality in its products and increasing competition from online retailers, the company faced a final blow from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Revenue streams were drying up, stores were closing, and the company was struggling with a tarnished image resulting from its links to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Its parent company’s top management team and board of directors now faced a critical decision: Should they attempt to repair Victoria’s Secret’s brand image and fight to strengthen sales, sell the Victoria’s Secret brand, or spin off the brand?

This disguised case set in April 2016, based on true events, describes an existential crisis faced by an English law firm operating in Italy. English law firms entered Italy in the 1990s through alliances with reputed Italian firms. The intention was to gain access to the lucrative Italian legal market. When they started operations, these firms aimed to achieve a leading position in the Italian market (top three strategy). Hence, their Italian operations were afforded a high degree of autonomy and preserved their distinctive Italian identity. But later, in the 2000s, English law firms started adopting a one-firm strategy to integrate their Italian operations into the global network. This created a great deal of tension and complexity, as Italian professional logic differed radically from the English logic. Subsequently, alliances and mergers between the English and Italian firms unravelled quickly, resulting in an existential crisis for the English law firms in Italy after over a decade of operations. The case presents such a situation through the eyes of partner John Smith, of the firm Smith and Jones, who must determine how to avert such a crisis while taking into account the Italian legal approach, and without diluting the global nature of his firm.

FARM Rio, a twenty-six year old Brazilian fashion brand, had recently put down roots in the U.S. The brand, known for its bold, colorful, nature-inspired tropical prints, was testing the waters in Europe to assess if and how the brand should further expand globally. Balancing two different geographic markets was proving to be more challenging than expected and the team had needed to make changes to the brand's name and positioning, price points, and its product quality, styles, and fits to accommodate the needs of retailers and consumers in the U.S. Before deciding on a European investment strategy, the team was assessing the return-on-investment of the U.S. launch and determining if the company had achieved a sufficient level of product-market fit so that they could adjust if necessary. They were also working to optimize the distribution channel mix among its own branded stores, e-commerce, and wholesale partnerships. With the U.S. still requiring significant investment to fuel an aggressive growth path, the company would have to decide where to place its bets: in its initial market of Brazil where it was a market leader, in the U.S., which was showing strong initial promise, or in the untested waters of Europe, home to the world's fashion capitals. As they evaluated global expansion possibilities, the team had to coordinate with their colleagues who were busy managing the brand back at home at the company's headquarters in Rio de Janeiro.

For CEO Elon Musk, Tesla's mission required not only new technologies to create electric vehicles, but innovation on the software that connected every aspect of the organization. Tesla was founded in 2003 with the goal of revolutionizing the automotive industry, by producing electric vehicles that would help accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. Twenty years later, Tesla had achieved remarkable progress across multiple dimensions such as production capacity, innovative electric vehicles, customer experience, and financial performance. The case study offers unique insights by Tesla leaders into the company's journey to create a system and a process that would revolutionize the global automotive sector. To achieve its goals, Tesla had to deliver a dramatically different-and superior-customer experience to accompany the company's innovative electric vehicles. The case describes how Tesla's IT team set about custom-building a vertically integrated system operating system (OS) that connected and bound every aspect of the company's operations. In fact, the Tesla OS, a custom-built ecosystem, was far more expansive than a typical company's OS in that it powered all aspects of business planning and customer experiences-this enabled Tesla to go directly to the consumer, and bypass the traditional automotive dealership networks.

Automation, robots, and artificial intelligence (AI) were driving massive change by the 2020s-and it was perhaps only a matter of time before the planet had billions of digital workers executing standardized, repetitive tasks. In the 20 years since its founding, Automation Anywhere had laid a solid foundation in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which helped companies be more efficient via application user interfaces, application programming interfaces, and database access. In 2023 the global RPA market was around $3 billion-and analysts projected this would hit $24 billion to $30 billion by 2030. Mihir Shukla, CEO of Automation Anywhere, had seen the potential to transform how companies and people worked by letting technology take on repetitive tasks. Shukla had helped pioneer the technology that automated business processes with intelligent software bots - AI powered digital workers. And Shukla had led the company from its early days selling a low-cost software product, to its pivot towards the enterprise market and SaaS model. The company timed its series A funding round in 2018, positioning itself to be a leader in bringing new advances and AI applications to millions of people. By 2023, large and small organizations alike were increasingly open to adopting new technologies-and many companies believed the tipping point for AI had occurred with the emergence of the large language models and ChatGPT. The next five years promised to be exciting. What would Automation Anywhere tackle next in the fast-evolving intelligent automation market? How would it win the innovation battle, and brainstorm the path forward to build enterprise value?

Spreadsheet supplement for case 524034.

The case is set in April 2023, soon after DBS Bank Limited (DBS) reported a 20% net profit growth of US$6.02 billion. The bank's CEO Piyush Gupta had attributed this growth to the company's continuing digital transformation journey that had started more than a decade ago. Central to this journey was the bank's adaptation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to improve and diversify products and services. To become AI-fuelled, DBS had created a "Data First" culture and hired hundreds of technology professionals to build its technology capabilities. In addition, the bank had set aside substantial budgets to allow for experimentation, motivated individual departments to build and deploy AI-based applications, implemented an automation strategy to guide solution building, and embedded AI into nearly every part of the customer journey. Prior to the transformation, DBS was sometimes irreverently referred to as 'Damm Bloody Slow' due to its poor customer service, but had emerged as a customer-savvy, market-responsive, AI-fuelled company with more successes than failures, diversified lines of business, and dramatic growth in revenues. However, the financial services sector was seeing increased competition due to the entry of purely technology companies like Grab, PayPal, Alibaba, etc. with innovative solutions. How could DBS compete in a rapidly changing banking marketplace? Had the 'All in on AI' approach given the bank a competitive advantage? Could DBS's prior 10 years of successful efforts with digitalisation, analytics and AI position it to take advantage of the newest generation of Generative AI in an accelerated manner?

Student Spreadsheet for product W27158.

This case is written to help students explore how companies can maintain and develop trust while innovating, how to identify and respond effectively to warning signs that they may not be as trusted as they believe, and how being trusted can aid in expanding and growing a business. In June 2021, Mikhail Lomtadze, co-founder and CEO of Kaspi.kz (Kaspi), the number one player in digital payments, fintech, and online commerce in Kazakhstan, was weighing paths to future growth. In the fourteen years since he became CEO, Lomtadze had transformed the business from a commercial bank into a leading technology company. By 2014, Kaspi had built an impressive ecosystem of three planforms: fintech products, digital payment products, and an online marketplace. Yet that same year, a bank run fueled by misinformation made it clear to Lomtadze that Kaspi wasn't as trusted as he thought. In 2017, Kaspi unrolled a super-app, fulfilling a vision they'd had from the get-go of being a one-stop shop for all the products and services they offered. In 2020, Kaspi turned its attention to new customers, creating a suite of products to make merchants' lives easier, and collaborated with the government to begin digitalizing the most used public services. Kaspi's products enjoyed widespread adoption and were used by about 50 percent of Kazakhstan's population that year. As Lomtadze considered expanding outside of Kazakhstan, he wondered if Kaspi could successfully export its company culture and approach to building trust, and how Kaspi's image as a homegrown brand could be used as an asset to its expansion strategy. In addition to the main case, two short cases on management's response to the 2014 bank run, designed to be taught in class, provide a striking example of a successful response to a trust crisis and show how lessons learned can help companies become even more trusted by customers and employees.

Supplement to 218084, "Root Capital and the Efficient Impact Frontier".

Spreadsheet supplement to 218084, "Root Capital and the Efficient Impact Frontier".

Initially making its name as the backbone technology of Bitcoin, blockchain has been referred to as a distributed ledger, public database, Internet of value, digital infrastructure, network, and platform. Compared with fluctuating cryptocurrency and non-fungible token (NFT) markets, applications of blockchain technology in more diverse business scenarios have received less attention. By analyzing 16 international business use cases under eight categories of blockchain-based solutions, this article offers a contextualized understanding of the potential for blockchain to become a general-purpose technology (GPT). It discusses how the extensiveness, evolvability, and enabling (3Es) aspects of blockchain influence the value, vision, and viability (3Vs) required for successful real-world applications. The article discusses how firms can draw on lessons from failed cases and good practices of existing cases to enhance the 3Vs for blockchain adoption.