Mahindra Rural Housing Finance Limited (Mahindra Home Finance), a rapidly growing non-banking financial corporation (NBFC) in India, was on the cusp of a historic decision: Should the organization be among India’s first NBFCs to launch a machine-learning-led predictive platform that aimed to revolutionize the way loans were disbursed in rural India? Mahindra Home Finance had a strong focus on social impact, and the firm had to decide whether to take this giant leap. If successful, the project might become a beacon for many such businesses trying to create positive change across communities, as it would reduce the “risk” involved in lending to a segment that was traditionally shunned by the formal banking system. The decision was important—both to the company and to the industry as a whole. Was it time for the field of sustainability to embrace machine learning?
Michael Katchen, chief executive officer and co-founder of Wealthsimple Technologies Inc. (Wealthsimple), made history when his company launched Canada’s first regulated cryptocurrency exchange in 2020. By designing a platform complying with regulations, Wealthsimple provided Canadians with a safer and more secure platform to invest in cryptocurrency, thereby creating a point of differentiation and source of competitive advantage for the company. However, the perceived risks of cryptocurrency-based products meant that Wealthsimple’s pivot into cryptocurrency had not been met with unanimous support, with some industry commentators claiming that Wealthsimple’s strategy to enter cryptocurrency and the higher transaction fees that followed stood in stark contrast to the low-risk investment strategy and principle of wealth democratization upon which Katchen had founded the company. In 2022, with an aim to grow its user base, Wealthsimple had to consider whether to continue to expand in the Canadian cryptocurrency industry. Could it achieve its growth objectives by expanding its crypto offerings, or should it explore alternatives outside the sector?
In January 2022, the leaders of the Canadian charity organization International Needs Canada recognized that individual child sponsorship had serious flaws and was not as impactful as it once had been. They sought to move donors from individual child sponsorship to the more beneficial group sponsorship model. The director of communications and marketing had to determine which donor group to target as he launched the program. As the new model could disrupt the industry. The organization also had to consider the reaction of much larger competitors. Furthermore, International Needs Canada was not replacing its own individual child sponsorship model with group sponsorship; instead, both programs would run simultaneously.
In December 2021, Forest Essentials opened its one hundredth store in India and a store in the United Kingdom; the Indian home-grown luxury Ayurveda brand had rapid expansion plans despite the obstacles it faced. Twenty-one years earlier, the company's founder, liberal arts graduate Mira Kulkarni, converted the six-thousand-year-old science of Ayurveda into bottles and jars of luxurious skin-care and hair-care products, making Forest Essentials an aspirational luxury brand. Forest Essentials had grown to establish a robust presence in five categories-skin care, hair care, wellness, health, and makeup-while acquiring a large and loyal customer base in India. The company was meticulous about the quality of its ingredients and put great effort into sourcing high-quality ingredients from all over India; however, easy access to cheaper Ayurveda-based brands and the entry and availability of international wellness brands into the Indian market threatened Forest Essentials' customer retention.<br><br>Kulkarni and her son, Samrath Bedi, needed to sustain the growth of Forest Essentials across digital and physical channels in India's cluttered beauty and wellness market, with a price-sensitive customer base, while also growing the brand's presence in cross-cultural markets overseas. Could they pursue growth in both marketspaces consistently? Should Kulkarni and Bedi focus on engaging with their existing and potential customers in India, or should they aim to establish their luxury brand in international markets?
In January 2022, the leaders of the Canadian charity organization International Needs Canada recognized that individual child sponsorship had serious flaws and was not as impactful as it once had been. They sought to move donors from individual child sponsorship to the more beneficial group sponsorship model. The director of communications and marketing had to determine which donor group to target as he launched the program. As the new model could disrupt the industry. The organization also had to consider the reaction of much larger competitors. Furthermore, International Needs Canada was not replacing its own individual child sponsorship model with group sponsorship; instead, both programs would run simultaneously.
Mahindra Rural Housing Finance Limited (Mahindra Home Finance), a rapidly growing non-banking financial corporation (NBFC) in India, was on the cusp of a historic decision: Should the organization be among India's first NBFCs to launch a machine-learning-led predictive platform that aimed to revolutionize the way loans were disbursed in rural India? Mahindra Home Finance had a strong focus on social impact, and the firm had to decide whether to take this giant leap. If successful, the project might become a beacon for many such businesses trying to create positive change across communities, as it would reduce the "risk" involved in lending to a segment that was traditionally shunned by the formal banking system. The decision was important-both to the company and to the industry as a whole. Was it time for the field of sustainability to embrace machine learning?
Michael Katchen, chief executive officer and co-founder of Wealthsimple Technologies Inc. (Wealthsimple), made history when his company launched Canada's first regulated cryptocurrency exchange in 2020. By designing a platform complying with regulations, Wealthsimple provided Canadians with a safer and more secure platform to invest in cryptocurrency, thereby creating a point of differentiation and source of competitive advantage for the company. However, the perceived risks of cryptocurrency-based products meant that Wealthsimple's pivot into cryptocurrency had not been met with unanimous support, with some industry commentators claiming that Wealthsimple's strategy to enter cryptocurrency and the higher transaction fees that followed stood in stark contrast to the low-risk investment strategy and principle of wealth democratization upon which Katchen had founded the company. In 2022, with an aim to grow its user base, Wealthsimple had to consider whether to continue to expand in the Canadian cryptocurrency industry. Could it achieve its growth objectives by expanding its crypto offerings, or should it explore alternatives outside the sector?
In 2022, Cher Wang, CEO and Chairwoman of HTC, was focused on the company's pivot to virtual reality and the metaverse. Growing competition in consumer virtual reality from Meta, Sony, and Chinese headset manufacturers had altered the competitive landscape since 2017. This supplement updates the case "HTC and Virtual Reality" (718-421).
Daily Crunch was a sprouted-nut brand that launched in March 2020 during the beginning of a global pandemic. The co-founder and chief executive officer of Daily Crunch was responsible for determining the company’s marketing and business strategy in 2021. In this pivotal time for a new company, a multitude of avenues needed to be explored, such as deciding whether to focus on a digital or an in-person marketing strategy; examining new marketing opportunities in a new shopping environment; launching new products, flavours, or sizes; and deciding whether to focus primarily on direct-to-consumer sales through e-commerce. Daily Crunch had several key objectives—namely, increasing brand awareness and sales, and expanding distribution. However, its key objective was to survive as a start-up during a global pandemic.
Daily Crunch was a sprouted-nut brand that launched in March 2020 during the beginning of a global pandemic. The co-founder and chief executive officer of Daily Crunch was responsible for determining the company's marketing and business strategy in 2021. In this pivotal time for a new company, a multitude of avenues needed to be explored, such as deciding whether to focus on a digital or an in-person marketing strategy; examining new marketing opportunities in a new shopping environment; launching new products, flavours, or sizes; and deciding whether to focus primarily on direct-to-consumer sales through e-commerce. Daily Crunch had several key objectives-namely, increasing brand awareness and sales, and expanding distribution. However, its key objective was to survive as a start-up during a global pandemic.
The case is about Sea Limited (NYSE: SE), once Southeast Asia's most valuable listed company with a market capitalisation of over USD231 billion in October 2021. The company began as an online game distribution platform, and quickly evolved into a digital services ecosystem with an offering that included e-commerce and digital financial services. Being mobile-centric and focusing on emerging markets are at the core of Sea Limited's business model. In two post IPO fundraisings in December 2020 and in September 2021, it had amassed close to USD10 billion from the market. Investors were bullish towards Sea's prospects for growth. Yet, the global macro socio-economic conditions were challenging. Geopolitical tension between the US and China is increasing. Supply chains are disrupted. Interest rates are climbing, and the threat of global recession looms large. The case asks, under such conditions, how can Sea Limited address these challenges and realise its potential for further growth?
Developing AI systems based on neural networks can require large volumes of labeled training data, which can be hard to obtain in some settings. New techniques for reducing the number of labeled examples needed to build accurate models are now emerging to address this problem. These approaches encompass ways to transfer models across related problems and to pretrain models with unlabeled data. They also include emerging best practices around data-centric artificial intelligence.
Founded by the husband and wife team of Anshu and Meenakshi Gupta in 1999, Goonj had quickly emerged as one of the leading disaster relief and rural development organizations in India. Their main mode of development was through providing a clothing kit to the village families in return for development work (Cloth for Work). As Covid-19 struck India in March 2020, the organization pivoted its operational model to considerably broaden its set of activities in the field. In 2022 after nearly 70% of the country had been vaccinated against Covid-19, and with a semblance of normalcy returning, Anshu Gupta had to consider the future of the organization and its strategy, having raised twice the amount of funds ($20 million) as in the previous years.
This case teaches key success factors for both startups and established medtech firms. It examines how to structure a firm to maximize financial returns. Medtech entrepreneur Duke Rohlen is proposing a new model for innovation and business growth. From 2007 to 2019, Rohlen sold four medical technology (medtech) companies, all of which were acquired at significant multiples of the capital invested. While the average medtech startup exited 8.6 years after starting, Rohlen's companies had an average time to exit of 40 months. Rohlen then saw that the companies acquiring his startups were sold to larger firms, in short time spans after the initial sale, at prices significantly higher than their pre-acquisition value. Rohlen observed how much value his companies had created for others after he sold them: $1.5 billion for Covidien (after sale of FoxHollow to ev3), $1.1 billion for Philips (after sale of CVI's Stellarex from Covidien to Spectranetics), and $280 million for Stryker (after sale of Spirox to Entellus), for a total of about $2.9 billion. Rohlen wondered how he could still create innovative new products yet capture a higher portion of the financial returns. He proposed a new model for innovation and business growth, called the Chassis and Growth Drivers model. Partnering with major private equity firms Hellman & Friedman and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company (KKR), Rohlen's firm Ajax Health plans to invest $1.3 billion to prove the model's viability. For $1 billion, they're submitting a bid to buy Cordis, a maker of medical devices for cardiovascular and endovascular procedures. Cordis was formerly a standalone business before it was bought by Johnson & Johnson and then its current owner and seller, Cardinal Health. If their bid is successful, they will invest an additional $300 million to fund an off-balance sheet accelerator, which will develop innovative new products that will drive revenue growth for Cordis.
Digital technologies have become omnipresent in our professional and personal lives. While they provide numerous opportunities, they also cause tensions, many of which are paradoxical. They confront us with conflicting yet synergetic and interdependent alternatives that persist over time - such as benefiting from the increasing availability and access to information at the risk of information overload and technostress. Thus far, we know little about the specific paradoxes caused by digital technologies in the workplace and how managers perceive and cope with them. This article offers a comprehensive perspective on the multiplicity and interrelatedness of paradoxes in the digital white- collar workplace and suggests how managers can develop effective coping mechanisms for convergent change and transforming work practices in paradoxical environments.