This case opens in June 2022, after Esas Group, one of Turkey's largest family-owned investment firms, implements a series of changes to professionalize the business and help transition family members from operators to responsible investors. In December 2019, the Group reorganized its structure. Measures were also taken to strengthen governance; for example, independent board members were brought in, and investment committees were formed. In January 2020, the founder, Şevket Sabancı, handed the chairmanship over to his son, Ali Sabancı. Şevket's daughter, Emine Sabancı Kamışlı, was still vice-chair of the Group, but she had stepped away from overseeing the company's day-to-day activities. By early 2022, Esas Group had a strong-performing product portfolio and it had started thinking about raising third-party capital. In June 2022, third-generation family member Fethi Kamışlı, who was heading Esas Ventures, received approval from the Esas Group's board of directors to move the venture capital business. Meanwhile, his cousin Kazım Köseoğlu, was pondering the future of the real estate business. He became managing partner and chairman of Esas Properties in late 2019 when the company hired a CEO to run the Turkish division of the real estate business. Can Köseoğlu and Kerem Kamışlı, two other members of the third generation, had become Esas Group board members, and both were living in London, each making their own private investments. As the younger generation was coming into wealth and managing their own choices, would the shareholders stay united and use Esas Group with the same level of commitment? What would the future of the holding company look like?
Stichting Het Potentieel Pakken (HPP) was launched to solve a systemic problem in the Dutch Labor Market: gender inequity that was leading to a large number of women to work part-time in fields that were in desperately short supply of labor, like health care, child care and education. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dutch Medical Care Minister Tamara van Ark announced that it would provide a large grant to HPP, a non-profit that aimed to help organizations-like hospitals-tap into the full potential of the Dutch labor market by helping them better manage their part-time workforce. HPP's President and Founder Wieteken Graven wondered how HPP could grow from an annual budget of €450,000 to more than four times that within months. Could her team scale this quickly and what would happen when the government funding ended?
This case is based on a hypothetical company that was newly established for a mobile gaming app. Before the company was incorporated, an experienced game developer and "creative strategist," Leon, and Lucas, a gaming influencer and streamer who was very popular in the Spanish-speaking world, had jointly created a game called sangre y acero®, meaning "Blood and Steel" in Spanish. Lucas's name on his streaming channel on Twitch and YouTube was Rey de Acero®, meaning "King of Steel" in Spanish. This game had passed most of the game-testing stages. A trademark had been obtained for the game's name and logo. A copyright was also obtained for the game's codes, art, music, scripts, and story and plot. These were the pre-incorporation events. Later, Leon and Lucas contributed their sangre y acero® trademark and this copyrighted game to the incorporation of the company. Their friends contributed funds. A new company, SYA Inc., was formed on 1 January 2022. On 1 July 2022, the app was fully launched. The purpose of the case is to have students prepare financial statements based on provided financial data, touching on a wide array of accounting concepts and common issues.
VaccineOnWheels (VOW), a social enterprise providing doorstep vaccination to India's low-income and marginalized communities, was founded in December 2019. After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and arrival of COVID-19 vaccines, VOW was perfectly positioned to contribute to the government's immunization drive. In 2021, the company entered into a public-private partnership with some of India's largest municipal corporations as their on-the-ground COVID-19 vaccination partner, then made forays into the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. VOW set out to vaccinate one million people by the end of the fiscal year 2021, but faced with shortages of funds and resources; its founder needed to decide on the target market and business model to allow him to achieve his goal and make the enterprise scalable. This case was the second winner of the 2021 Fox International Business Case Writing Competition.
On May 11, 2021, US federal agents raided the premises of a Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) temple in New Jersey and freed dozens of workers who had been operating under modern slavery conditions. Shortly afterward, six workers filed a class-action lawsuit against BAPS at the United States District Court, District of New Jersey. The lawsuit solicited to address the violation of the laws applied to workers, including laws prohibiting forced labour. The lawsuit claimed, among other things, that BAPS isolated workers, coerced workers to live and work in conditions causing psychological deterioration, limited workers’ outside contacts, and caused financial and reputational harm. Although this was only one particular case to come to light, it pointed to a broader problem faced by many companies across the world, either within their own operations or in the supply chains of the organizations they partnered with for corporate social responsibility purposes. How could companies ensure that they abided by fair labour practices and avoided the use of modern slavery?
Drawing on her new book, The Innovation Mindset, IBM Watson Health's Lorraine Marchand discusses common mistakes leaders make in managing innovation. One of her key pieces of advice for managers: Ask, "What problem are we solving for the customer?" and then follow a disciplined process to design a customer-focused solution, rather than first developing a new technology and then figuring out where it could be applied.
AllSpice, a software-as-a-service company that built a GitHub-like revision control tool for hardware engineers, was in the midst of preparing for rapid scale when the 2022 market downturn left them with big decisions to make. Cofounder and CEO Valentina Ratner had to map out the company's path to a successful Series A while deciding on how they should dedicate their resources. Early customer discovery experiments showed that engineers had an interest in the product, but Ratner needed to figure out the go-to-market motion they should focus their effort on: a bottoms-up freemium model, a top-down enterprise model, or something in between that relied on targeting engineers directly through inside sales efforts. Leading into her April board meeting, Ratner devised a plan to share with her investors.
The chief executive officer (CEO)of NorthCan Packaging and Logistics (NorthCan) was considering options for NorthCan’s planned expansion into the United States. He had to decide whether NorthCan should (1) construct or purchase a facility in the United States; (2) develop a strategic partnership with an established, complementary US-based packaging solutions company; (3) franchise sales and service in the United States; or (4) expand into the United States, while keeping core operations in Canada. The CEO had to ensure that, with any option, the full-service and value-added aspects of NorthCan remained central. He had to also consider the social and economic costs and benefits of each option, including potential for international growth and competitive advantage, sustainability, regulations, and stakeholder preferences.
In September 2019, Mircom Technologies Limited faced a serious crisis after sustaining a ransomware attack. The medium-sized manufacturer based in Toronto, Canada had been offering smart building solutions for almost two decades. The attackers encrypted all of the company’s data, halting all business systems and processes that relied on information technology, including email, voice-over-Internet phones, manufacturing, billing, shipping, and receiving. The company was suddenly unable to conduct basic business operations. The attackers demanded a large payment in bitcoin in exchange for a decryption key that would allow the company to access its data. Over the next several weeks, Mircom Technologies Limited faced unforeseen challenges in its attempt to recover its data, negotiate with the attackers, and eventually find a way to successfully restore normal operations.
Amara Hotels & Resorts is a family-managed public-listed company running three business hotels, one each in Singapore, Shanghai and Bangkok, in addition to a resort on the island of Sentosa off the southern coast of Singapore. The company is led by Albert Teo, the son of the hotel chain founder. The case describes the sustainability initiatives implemented by the Singapore hotels, and the firm's Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives in Singapore and Bangkok. As the COVID pandemic has deeply affected the fortunes of the hotel, Teo is considering various ways in which the hotel can respond in a substantive way to the growing requirements by investors, analysts and governments for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria to be fulfilled by corporations. Since it is a family-owned business, he is particularly conscious of the long-term legacy of the hotel brand name. In considering future initiatives for the hotel to advance its sustainability and CSR agenda, he would like to achieve a win-win situation in which there are tangible benefits for the world, as well as a long-term positive impact on the bottom line. The case illustrates this central challenge in running a modern corporation, especially a service business with an international clientele.
On June 21, 2022, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) went into effect, requiring companies to prove that goods imported from the People's Republic of China were not made with forced labor. The bill was a reaction to reports of products being made with forced labor from Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities being held in camps in the PRC, chiefly in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. However, implementation of the bill would be difficult. The PRC government denied the existence of forced labor, and this would make it nearly impossible for importers to trace their supply chains all the way to the origins of primary goods and prove that no forced labor was involved. Three industries were chiefly at stake - tomatoes, cotton, and polysilicon - at a time of high inflation and increasing urgency to do something about climate change, but the bill also threatened to fundamentally re-shape U.S.-PRC relations, potentially along the lines of a full-scale economic "decoupling."
The chief executive officer (CEO)of NorthCan Packaging and Logistics (NorthCan) was considering options for NorthCan's planned expansion into the United States. He had to decide whether NorthCan should (1) construct or purchase a facility in the United States; (2) develop a strategic partnership with an established, complementary US-based packaging solutions company; (3) franchise sales and service in the United States; or (4) expand into the United States, while keeping core operations in Canada. The CEO had to ensure that, with any option, the full-service and value-added aspects of NorthCan remained central. He had to also consider the social and economic costs and benefits of each option, including potential for international growth and competitive advantage, sustainability, regulations, and stakeholder preferences.
In September 2019, Mircom Technologies Limited faced a serious crisis after sustaining a ransomware attack. The medium-sized manufacturer based in Toronto, Canada had been offering smart building solutions for almost two decades. The attackers encrypted all of the company's data, halting all business systems and processes that relied on information technology, including email, voice-over-Internet phones, manufacturing, billing, shipping, and receiving. The company was suddenly unable to conduct basic business operations. The attackers demanded a large payment in bitcoin in exchange for a decryption key that would allow the company to access its data. Over the next several weeks, Mircom Technologies Limited faced unforeseen challenges in its attempt to recover its data, negotiate with the attackers, and eventually find a way to successfully restore normal operations.
This case features a woman entrepreneur whose early-stage company has achieved some regional success creating craft beer in a highly competitive, male-dominated beverage industry. Jennifer Newman, co-founder and CEO of Young Lion Brewing Company (YLBC), had entered the business not as a craft beer technician, as nearly all brewers do, but as a seasoned entrepreneur and business analyst. Newman recognizes that people may doubt her ability to produce a quality craft beer successfully. The reason? She is a woman, and they assume her beer can't be as good as beer brewed by men, or that women wouldn't be interested in craft beers and, therefore, wouldn't have the expertise or palate to judge a quality brew. Now, after her company has established itself, Newman ponders how to scale. What kind of marketing can improve YLBC's standing? For example, should she focus on being a woman-owned company selling beer targeted to other women? Or, should she emphasize that female-led Young Lion rises to the challenge of a market historically dominated by men? Newman herself was the primary information source for this case, sharing her professional background, experience at YLBC, and personal feelings and passion around being a woman in a predominantly male-dominated industry. This brings authenticity and an emotional connection that can motivate students.