In mid-2010, the president and chief executive officer of Phase Separation Solutions (PS2) needed to address potential cooperative opportunities with separate Chinese organizations regarding its Thermal Phase Separation (TPS) technology. PS2 was a Saskatchewan-based small environmental solutions company that had grown under the president's entrepreneurial direction to become a North American leader in the treatment of soil, sludge, and debris impacted with various organic contaminants. The company specialized in the cleanup of two waste streams using its TPS technology. The first was the remediation of soil contaminated with persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The second was recovering usable oil from industrial sludge generated in various industries such as the oil and gas industry.

A Stockholm-based sports broadcasting firm with five international offices is facing uncertain contract renewals by its current clients from several geographic territories. It must determine the likelihood of profitability if it purchases the global broadcasting rights of the Portuguese Soccer League (Liga Zon Sagres) for the upcoming 2011-2012 season.

Infosys, which had achieved meteoric growth by providing software outsourcing to US companies, had continued to hire despite the slowdown sparked by the 2008-09 credit freeze. In 2011, facing higher costs and emerging technological challenges such as cloud computing, its new management embarked on Infosys 3.0, a plan that included restructuring along several industry verticals. In this case students examine Infosys' historic growth; its culture, services and financial statements; and its 2011 strategic plan in order to discuss what strategy would fuel continued growth.

In January 2005 Dr. Mean Chhi Vun, director of the Cambodian National Center for HIV/AIDS, Dermatology and STDs (NCHADS), needed to decide how to control the spread of HIV/AIDS and save the lives of thousands of Cambodians who were dying from it each year. In the seven years since Dr. Vun had been appointed director, NCHADS had built an organization that was transparent and efficient, had implemented a nationwide 100 percent condom use program, had established a system that allowed individuals to voluntarily seek confidential counseling and testing, and had instituted a set of guidelines and procedures for staff at health facilities to refer HIV-positive patients to treatment clinics and link them with NGOs providing financial and psychosocial support. Now, however, Dr. Vun faced decisions about three initiatives that were critical to expanding care and treatment programs in his country. First, he needed to decide how to quickly and cost-effectively improve the national HIV/AIDS laboratory support infrastructure. Second, Dr. Vun needed to improve logistics and supply management in order to get the best prices and ensure patients had access to life-saving medicines. Finally, he needed to figure out how to provide sustainable care and treatment to the thousands of Cambodian children living with HIV/AIDS.

Mobile C.A.R.E. Foundation is a Chicago-based nonprofit that provides chronic asthma care to inner-city public school students using a community outreach model. The organization faces a lot of uncertainty in future funding, and executive director Steve Samuelson wants to undertake an operational improvement drive. Samuelson now faces the challenge of deciding which operational metrics most closely correlate with the organization's mission metrics and also have the usual desirable properties of process measures: actionable, real-time, and disaggregate.

This case focuses on an entrepreneurial training and consulting company considering if it should invest in new virtual training technology as part of its growth strategy. The decision could significantly impact the nature of the company's face-to-face training business, change the company's historically successful business model, and affect long-range plans for growth. Intertech was founded in 1991 and provided technology training and consulting for a wide variety of clients, primarily in Minnesota. Intertech CEO and founder, Tom Salonek, was evaluating the next steps to achieve the company's growth goals. While the decision to spend $25,000 was not significant financially, the virtual training decision needed to be viewed from a variety of functional and strategic perspectives because of its impact on Intertech's business model

How should a chief financial officer respond when he uncovers a serious accounting fraud? Richard Okumoto, the newly-appointed CFO of Electro Scientific Industries, Inc., learned that around midnight several months earlier, a group of managers, led by a man who later became CEO, had reversed an accrued liability associated with the anticipated cost of employee retirement benefits. This "midnight journal entry" had allowed the company to report a gain, rather than a loss, for the quarter. Okumoto believed that the reversal was improper and the company's earnings should be restated. When he approached the CEO, the general counsel, and the audit committee with his concerns, however, he was told to "just get past it." Okumoto had to decide how best to act on his conviction that the company had committed an unethical and illegal act, while minimizing the risk to himself and his future career prospects.

Susan Thibodeau, Executive Director of Bridge Adult Service Centre, contemplated how Bridge Adult could provide additional services and improved programming to current and new clients. Bridge Adult was a not-for-profit organization that aimed to enhance the lives and promote inclusion of intellectually challenged individuals in communities. There were 27 other service centres similar to Bridge Adult located throughout Nova Scotia, Canada. Funding from government sources remained relatively stagnant over the years but demand and programming needs had changed significantly in most of these centres. In order for Bridge Adult to continue to improve their current client offerings, programs that generated revenue while simultaneously provided meaningful experiences for clients were essential. Thibodeau, in collaboration with the Board, needed to determine strategic priorities for the next three years, her role in that process and who would be responsible for the various aspects of the implementation. This case was formulated for university undergraduate students in their fourth year of study or graduate students in a MBA program. It is intended to challenge students to consider the similarities and differences in strategy formulation and implementation and governance between for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. It should therefore be taught as a corporate governance or strategic planning case and ideally after students have been exposed to financial analysis, competitive analysis, value chain analysis, governance, SWOT analysis, and growth strategies.

Innovative IT applications such as patient-present telemedicine consultation services can save lives and reduce costs. Yet, despite extensive pilot-testing, few such services have achieved long-term viability. Partners HealthCare's TeleStroke service, in full operation and managed by the Massachusetts General Hospital Neurology department, is financially self-sustaining and serves a vital need. Clinicians at some participating hospitals are interested in using telemedicine for other medical applications outside of stroke care. Should Partners expand its service? What organizational, clinical, and technical issues would arise if Partners expand its telemedicine offerings? How can these issues best be managed? The case is intended for an MBA or advanced undergraduate course in IT Management. We use this case in the first module of a Strategic IT Management course. Module I, Use IT for Business Value, introduces students to the resource based view of management and the mechanisms through which IT (hardware, software, network, and data resources) can add business value-such as by being embedded in a product or service (Netflix case), by generating valuable data that enables management to make better decisions or improve operations (Harrah's Entertainment and Catching Tax Cheats cases), and by serving as a platform for collaboration (this Telemedicine case).

About 30 years ago, as its appliances business became less profitable, GE began moving manufacturing to low-cost countries in a combination of joint ventures and outsourcing. But competitors soon emerged in developing markets; shipping and materials costs rose; wages increased in China and elsewhere; and GE didn't control the supply chain. Finally, core competency was an issue: the company's most innovative appliance-design work is done in the United States, and at a time when speed to market is everything, separating design and development from manufacturing no longer made sense. Around 2008 GE came to the conclusion that outsourcing was outdated as a business model for its appliances business. It set about to build in-house innovation capability, lean manufacturing, and a new approach to labor relations in that business and others, creating thousands of jobs and investing billions of dollars.

Although the U.S. retains profound competitive strengths--for instance, in higher education and entrepreneurship--those strengths are increasingly threatened by weaknesses in areas such as the tax code, basic education, macroeconomic policies, and regulation. Steps to reverse the loss will require a new focus by government and business leaders.

What's good for individual U.S. companies is no longer automatically good for business nationwide, for U.S. workers, or for the economy. That, coupled with the failure of business, government, and other institutions to engage in productive dialogue and ultimately cooperate, has led to a crisis of human capital in the United States. In short, badly needed investments in the workforce are not being made, thereby threatening the country's future competitiveness and living standards. So argues Kochan, of MIT's Sloan School of Management. He explains precisely how the U.S. currently undervalues human capital; how exceptional companies such as Southwest and Kaiser Permanente buck the "maximizing shareholder value" trend with what researchers call "high-road" human resources strategies; and how labor unions and schools have a role to play in setting the nation's workers and the companies that employ them on the right path. Kochan's call to action for U.S. corporations and business schools emphasizes apprenticeship programs, technology-education partnerships, infrastructure investments, and a host of other practical ideas for jump-starting and then accelerating the journey on the high road. His jobs compact for America advocates a systematic approach, not a fool's errand to find a panacea. But it nonetheless has the urgency of now.

Multinational companies have long been vital to the U.S. economy, accounting for a large share of GDP, R&D spending, exports, and capital investment--not to mention labor-productivity growth and good-paying jobs. But in the past decade, a worrisome trend developed: As MNCs pursued faster growth abroad, their role in the U.S. economy declined on many measures. Breaking down the numbers, Slaughter and Tyson examine where MNCs are moving their activities (emerging markets), which sectors they are adding jobs in (services), and what, if anything, the U.S. can do to make itself more attractive to MNCs.

Economists have found that the higher a country's academic test scores, the faster its GDP grows. That puts the United States' perennially mediocre test scores in a particularly ominous light. Progress is being made, says Childress, of the Gates Foundation, but at the rate even the most engaged school systems are improving, it will take 80 years to catch up to where China is now. New approaches, including personalized technology, online videos, and innovations that combine software with classroom programs, could be the breakthrough tools American students need to improve dramatically faster.

A location decision is, in many respects, a referendum on a nation's competitiveness. When a company decides, say, to build a new plant in China rather than in the United States, it is effectively voting on the question of which country can best enable its success in the global marketplace. Over the past three decades, business activities have become increasingly mobile, and more and more countries have become viable contenders for them. But new data--including the results of an unprecedented survey of 10,000 Harvard Business School alumni--suggest that the U.S. is not winning its appropriate share of location decisions, even for high-value business activities such as R&D that it has traditionally been able to attract. In part, this is because U.S. policy makers are not addressing weaknesses in the national business environment. There are also problems at the corporate level: Many location decisions are incremental shifts of activities offshore; imagine a bucket with many small pinpricks. For instance, a software firm promotes American developers to high-end positions and hires workers from Eastern Europe to do lower-end work. As such, the decisions appear not to warrant exhaustive analysis. At the same time, managers ignore substantial hidden costs associated with non-U.S. locations and overlook the benefits they could reap were they to invest instead in local communities. This article examines the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. locations, identifies the kinds of activities the U.S. must compete for, and outlines an agenda for action for government and business leaders.

Too many U.S. companies base decisions about where to locate production largely on narrow financial criteria. They don't consider whether keeping manufacturing at home makes more sense strategically or take into account the impact it might have on their ability to innovate. The result has been an exodus of manufacturing from America, which has weakened the capabilities that domestic firms need to keep inventing high-quality, cost-competitive products. One problem is that it's hard to tell when moving production far from R&D will do damage. To make that determination, say Harvard Business School's Pisano and Shih, executives need to examine two things. The first is modularity, or the degree to which product design can be separated from manufacturing. When modularity is low, product designs can't be clearly specified and design choices affect manufacturing processes in subtle, difficult-to-predict ways (and vice versa). The second is the maturity of the manufacturing process. Immature processes are ripe for innovation, but over time opportunities for improvement become incremental. Viewed through the modularity-maturity lens, relationships between manufacturing and innovation fall into four quadrants: pure product innovation, pure process innovation, process-embedded innovation, and process-driven innovation. In the first two quadrants, locating design near production isn't critical, but separating the two functions is risky in the third and fourth quadrants. This framework will help business leaders make better sourcing decisions and reinvigorate America's innovation-driven economy.

Once a sleepy old boys' club, the U.S. financial sector is now a dynamic and growing business that attracts the best and the brightest. It is tempting to declare the industry a roaring success. But its purpose is to serve the needs of U.S. households and firms, and by this standard its performance has been mixed. The sector's growth has been beneficial for U.S. corporations, which enjoy ready access to the deepest capital markets in the world. Venture capital, for example, and the public equity markets that support it, has channeled money to innovative ideas that have transformed industries and generated new ones. The rest of the economy, however, has not been well served by the financial sector's boom. First, the shift from deposit-based banking to a market-based "shadow banking" system, without adequate regulatory adjustments, has left the financial system vulnerable to crisis. Second, trillions of dollars have been steered into residential real estate and away from more productive investments. Third, the cost of professional investment management is too high, which drains talent from other industries. The financial sector could promote the health and competitiveness of the U.S. economy by increasing capital and liquidity requirements, reorienting the discussion around housing finance reform from keeping mortgage credit cheap to ensuring financial stability, and instituting measures that compel asset managers to compete on the true value of the services they provide.

The United States is on a glide path to fiscal disaster, with experts projecting that the federal government will take in far less money than it spends--indefinitely. Our current fiscal policy is eroding competitiveness in several ways, and business conditions in the U.S. will deteriorate if there's no change in direction. The authors examine how fiscal policy relates to the three drivers of productivity: improving human capital, increasing physical capital (equipment or software, for example), and using these forms of capital more efficiently. Government spending for many public goods, such as education and infrastructure, contributes directly to one or more of them, whereas spending on health care and entitlements does little to enhance competitiveness directly. Taxes are needed to fund public goods, but they sometimes distort the allocation of human and physical capital. And large government deficits put upward pressure on the cost of borrowing for companies. The authors propose a plan--they call it "20/21 by 2021"--to reduce the deficit from 3.8% of GDP (the Congressional Budget Office's most likely scenario) to just over 1%.

New enterprises don't exist in a vacuum: They rise or fall depending on myriad contextual factors, all of them interrelated, and all of them affected by government policy. U.S. lawmakers must carefully consider the effects of interventions in at least 12 areas, ranging from capital markets to tax treatment to intellectual property to health care. Their decisions could shore up--or further weaken--what has long been America's greatest economic asset.

Incoherent U.S. energy and climate policies have cast a pall over the entire economy and are putting U.S. companies at a serious global disadvantage. The authors offer 10 prescriptions for reforms, two of which they describe in detail. First, they argue that the U.S. should impose a gradually increasing carbon charge; this would help internalize environmental costs, drive investment in energy efficiency, encourage innovation in renewable power, and raise substantial revenues that could reduce the national debt. Second, they say, the government should curb or redirect unwise energy subsidies and increase funding for clean-energy R&D. Environmental stewardship need not be an economic burden, they emphasize; on the contrary, investing in sustainability can enhance corporate and national competitiveness.