In the fall of 2019, "flight shaming," a growing environmental movement, was gaining speed. The movement, which was sparked in Sweden and popularized by Greta Thunberg the previous year, sought to express the "unease about flying experienced by environmentally conscious travellers." As a short-haul airline, EasyJet plc (EasyJet) needed to determine whether this was merely a passing fad that it could ignore or a threat that might damage its reputation and growth ambitions for the future. In the latter case, EasyJet would also need to determine what it should do to mitigate such risks.
In May 2022, Shopee Pte. Ltd. (Shopee), the e-commerce division of Singapore-based Sea Limited (Sea), was at a critical juncture. Over the past several years, fuelled by the growth of its e-commerce business, Shopee had achieved rapid revenue growth. Starting from Singapore and Southeast Asia, the company had expanded its international footprint to countries in Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin America. But early 2022 brought several new challenges for Shopee: Sea's stock price plummeted as investors sold off high-growth and unprofitable Internet stocks; and Shopee exited France and India rapidly because it was facing pressure from multiple sources, including an industry association in India and the Indian government, which had banned sales of Shopee's best-selling game in India. Shopee had to carefully choose an appropriate strategy for further international expansion. Should it pause its international expansion and consolidate in the short term or carry on with the rapid pace of expansion?
Marlow is a new menstrual health company that developed the first-ever lubricated tampon for smoother and more comfortable insertion and which aimed to deliver the product through a direct-to-consumer subscription model. During its first year in business, the team of female founders focused on product development, including completing the research and testing required to secure regulatory approval from Health Canada and the US Food and Drug Administration. After successfully raising $500,000 in an angel pre-seed fundraising round, the team was ready to bring its innovative product to market. In preparation for the launch, Marlow needed a comprehensive marketing plan that identified the consumers who would benefit most from the product and who would be willing to purchase it. Key messages and a communications plan had to be finalized highlighting Marlow's differentiated advantage, and the financial estimate for the first year had be forecast and presented to investors.
Kinbor, a pioneer and top brand of creative planner journals in China, was launched in 2015 by Guangbo Group (Guangbo), a leading stationery manufacturer and worldwide exporter. In January 2022, Jessie Yu-Kinbor's, founder and general manager- was facing several urgent issues in moving the start-up forward. Like many intrapreneurial projects, Kinbor was only contributing a small fraction to Guangbo's total annual revenues, so pressure to boost sales and scale up the operation was mounting. In addition, Kinbor's incongruence with the parent company's business model was making integration a challenge. Externally, major stationery industry competitors were launching their own creative planner journal brands, thereby intensifying the market's competition. Kinbor had to find the right strategy to address these issues.
Founded by CEO Steve Barnard in 1983, California-based Mission Produce was a leading supplier of Hass avocados with a global sourcing, marketing, and distribution network and $892 million in 2021 sales. Barnard had been influential in the global avocado trade's transformation in recent decades. For instance, Mission's use of ethylene gas ripening for avocados had allowed it to supply consistently ripe avocados to the U.S. market for the first time. Moreover, Mission had established an early presence in key avocado-growing countries, including Mexico and Peru, as they were on the cusp of gaining access to the U.S. and other key import markets. Barnard believed Mission's scale, global presence, value-added offerings, and vertically integrated model gave it many advantages in the maturing avocado market. Yet, he recognized the challenges Mission would face in the years to come. In its supply network, these included political instability, declining cost advantages, and the high cost of land in California. Perhaps most of all, water scarcity and cost were mounting concerns with no obvious fix. Mission recently entered the mango category, which, in the U.S., shared notable traits with the 1990s avocados market: mangos were a relatively minor U.S. product that many consumers did not know how to prepare, and their ripeness was variable at retail. Like avocados, mangos could be ripened with ethylene gas in destination markets, but they were more easily damaged during handling and had a shorter shelf life post-harvest.
Marfrig, one of the world's leading meatpackers, strived to comply with its commitment to have a deforestation-free value chain in Brazil by 2030. The company also pledged to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases in accordance with the guidelines set by the Science-Based Targets Imitative (SBTi). Controlling shareholder and chairman Marcos Molina, and Director of Sustainability and Communications for South America Paulo Painez, must figure how to achieve these goals while dealing with increased pressures from NGOs, customers, and foreign governments. The pair believed that a solution to the company's-and the sector's-challenges would only be achieved by working together with other stakeholders of the Brazilian beef industry: cattle ranchers, NGOs, the government, and civil society at large. Aligning the interests of the different players, while keeping Brazil's lead as the world's top beef exporter, was especially challenging given the country's fraught political environment and its tarnished image abroad.
The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) was named a top ten plastic polluter by the Break Free from Plastics coalition in 2019. P&G faced backlash over the plastic waste associated with the distribution of consumer goods in single-use sachets. While sachets provided access to everyday household necessities to low-income individuals, they also created negative environmental externalities. The company had to decide how to tackle the problem of waste they were responsible for and, at the same time, deflect accusations of greenwashing. How could this environmental issue be solved without raising prices for low-income individuals? What did P&G’s key stakeholders expect? How could P&G achieve the “triple bottom line” by caring for profits, people, and the planet?
On June 5, 2021, an eleven-story building developed by the BROAD Group was completed in Changsha, China, in just 28 hours and 45 minutes. This building, known as the Holon Building, had the advantages of a long lifespan, short construction period, strong earthquake and typhoon resistance, low cost, high comfort and energy savings, and global transportability. Because of its standardized installation and 100 per cent factory prefabrication of all modules, Holon was well suited to various types of buildings. However, as a newly emerging technology, the Holon Building needed time and great effort to gain wide acceptance. BROAD's chairman and chief executive officer, Zhang Yue, was wondering about the feasibility of Holon buildings’ global market expansion.
Subir Shukla, the Principal Coordinator in Ignus Pahal, was involved in improving education for marginalized children. After working for many years at the policy level and assisting various governments across Asia in improving the public education system, he realized that the lack of access to reading material in India was hampering the children's ability to develop reading skills. In 2017 he decided to open Manan Publishing to cater to this need. He was strapped for funds for the initial years and was looking at some financial assistance for the first three years. His immediate need was to evolve a strategy for generating funds.
Fortum started operations in India in 2012 as a producer of solar energy and soon became one of the country's leading clean-energy companies. It was driven by the values and code of conduct established by its parent company, Fortum Oyj. headquartered in Espoo, Finland. In December 2019, Fortum acquired land in Jaisalmer (Rajasthan, India) to construct a 250-megawatt solar power plant. The Covid-19 pandemic hit the world soon after. India initiated a complete national lockdown. Construction activities were suspended, resulting in joblessness of the migrant construction workers. Fortum faced a sudden and acute shortage of construction workers in Jaisalmer. Although the Government of Rajasthan allowed extended work-hours, Fortum India Pvt. Ltd. struggled in deciding what to do. Each choice came with a consequence of either delaying the plant commissioning or bearing additional and high costs towards ensuring safety and health of the workers amidst the fast-spreading pandemic. Employing fewer workers for longer hours may breach universal labour practices, and could thus attract negative attention. Keeping the construction workers employed using regular work hours is expected to increase the construction time due to shortage of construction workers.; Measures to protect workers from COVID infection will increase project costs, rendering the produced power uncompetitive and violating the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). What should Fortum do?
The transition to a low carbon economy introduces many risks and opportunities for businesses. Risks emerge from regulatory actions, such as carbon taxes and cap and trade systems, technological innovation that develop alternatives for customers making existing products and services obsolete, changes in market preferences, such as consumers shifting purchases towards low carbon products, and liability concerns, from litigation connected to the physical impacts of climate change. Opportunities arise from new products and services that will be needed for the world to decarbonize (i.e., renewable energy, battery storage, hydrogen, plant-based protein, carbon capture and storage etc.). The business analysis of climate-related risks and opportunities will be critical for the optimal allocation of resources inside organizations and markets. This paper presents a generalizable framework for such analysis. Risks create demand for decarbonization solutions which in turn create opportunities for the supply of these solutions. Central considerations include the measurement and analysis of organizational carbon exposure, sensitivity, and adaptability.
The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) was named a top ten plastic polluter by the Break Free from Plastics coalition in 2019. P&G faced backlash over the plastic waste associated with the distribution of consumer goods in single-use sachets. While sachets provided access to everyday household necessities to low-income individuals, they also created negative environmental externalities. The company had to decide how to tackle the problem of waste they were responsible for and, at the same time, deflect accusations of greenwashing. How could this environmental issue be solved without raising prices for low-income individuals? What did P&G's key stakeholders expect? How could P&G achieve the "triple bottom line" by caring for profits, people, and the planet?
On June 5, 2021, an eleven-story building developed by the BROAD Group was completed in Changsha, China, in just 28 hours and 45 minutes. This building, known as the Holon Building, had the advantages of a long lifespan, short construction period, strong earthquake and typhoon resistance, low cost, high comfort and energy savings, and global transportability. Because of its standardized installation and 100 per cent factory prefabrication of all modules, Holon was well suited to various types of buildings. However, as a newly emerging technology, the Holon Building needed time and great effort to gain wide acceptance. BROAD's chairman and chief executive officer, Zhang Yue, was wondering about the feasibility of Holon buildings' global market expansion.
Economic growth is a recent phenomenon in human history. This technical note explores this phenomenon in detail, examining the work of Nobel laureate Robert Solow, whose growth model is the dominant paradigm for practitioners when evaluating countries' growth prospects. For math-oriented readers, this note pairs well with a companion technical note, "Determinants of Economic Growth: Supplemental Note" (UVA-GEM-0204).
The task before Siddhidhar Parulekar seemed challenging. Only eight months before, in March 2021, he had joined Dovrex Company (Dovrex) as senior director of global strategic supply chain. In an industrial-equipment company that utilized roughly a thousand suppliers and tens of thousands of part numbers, he knew there were bound to be opportunities for savings and supply chain improvements-but where were they? And how should he start to find them? Parulekar formed an internal team to partner with a consulting firm to conduct a procurement diagnostic, which he hoped would justify investment in a transformational strategic sourcing initiative. The consultants produced a "spending cube" (included in the accompanying student spreadsheet) that covered every line item of every purchase order over the prior 11 quarters. As Parulekar perused the spending cube, he realized the team needed to prioritize a subset for the initial analysis. This case is taught at Darden in the second-year "Operations Strategy" course in a module covering strategic sourcing. It could also be used in a course with the focus or one on the broader topic of supply chain management.
In this field-based case, the founders of udu, Inc. (udu-pronounced "you-do"), a company whose proprietary technology helped private equity clients source deals by identifying target companies and overlooked opportunities, and by shortening the business-development cycle. Clients who had found success with udu's help raved about the technology, but despite their product's promise, the founders were still struggling to find a scalable and profitable application for it, and to grow revenue for the company. The founders eventually sought funding in the amount of $5 million to boost udu's growth potential, but Jay Sarcone, a general partner at Brotherhood Park Ventures, had said udu wasn't ready for that amount because it would not result in a desirable company valuation, and made a far lower offer: $1.3 million in convertible note financing. All three founders agreed that $1.3 million fell far short of their hopes, and that udu would need another fundraising round in a year. But any money, at this point, would help udu progress. Should the founders accept Sarcone's offer, or risk alienating a trusted ally by seeking $5 million elsewhere? And if they did seek $5 million, would it result in a low valuation for udu?