In February 2021, political turmoil had engulfed Myanmar following a military coup under which elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi was jailed after her party won a landslide victory in the elections. CEO and co-founder of Daung Capital (Daung), a microfinance institution (MFI) in Myanmar, Leon Qiu recalled the years before the coup, when inclusive finance businesses like his had just begun to flourish. Daung had offered a variety of loan products in Myanmar since its inception in 2017. Its products included short-term loans for purchasing motorbikes, short-term loans to salaried workers for purchase of everyday utility items, and educational loans to students from poorer households. In 2019, Daung had launched a new loan product for farmers. Unlike other loan products, the loan scheme for farmers did not entail regular repayments. Instead, the farmers were expected to repay the loan as a lump sum after the harvest. Careful credit risk assessment of the target customer base was a key criterion in designing a loan product for farmers. Ethical obligations and decision-making were important considerations as well. Qiu pondered over the various constraints around which the farmer loan product had been constructed and how it could be improved. How could Qiu and his team assess the credit risks associated with the farmer loan product? What strategies could they implement to control the credit risks associated with farmer loans? Could they use machine-learning algorithms to assess the credit risks? The case illustrates (1) the various challenges faced by an MFI in assessing credit risk of agricultural borrowers (mainly farmers) (2) the dynamics of the MFI sector in Myanmar (3) credit risks presented by rural lenders. The case can be used in undergraduate, postgraduate and executive education classes to teach concepts on credit risk management in microfinance for emerging markets.
The case describes the scientific approach taken by the founders of Mimoto - an electric scooter-sharing company offering dockless, keyless scooters available 24/7 - to develop their business idea. After a successful launch, they must decide whether to scale up their current strategy of renting scooters to individual customers or enter a new segment - renting to businesses (moving goods rather than people).
Pigeonly was launched in 2012 as an affordable technology provider serving the incarcerated population. Growing out of his own 5-year experience as an inmate, Founder Frederick Hutson created a business model, launch plan, and corporate mission statement: to create easy, affordable mail and telephone services to better connect the 2.3 million people incarcerated in America to their loved ones. A for-profit company with a social mission, Pigeonly overcame the complexities of dealing with the US prison system and grew quickly: by 2015, its operations supported on average two million minutes of phone time and 250,000 photos sent every month. In 2016 Hutson learned that its key photo supplier was going out of business. This case provides students with data on the US prison population, the cost of available communications services, and details about Pigeonly's own business model and asks them to consider how Hutson should respond to its operational crisis.
Arnie Katz, chief product and technology officer at StubHub (SH), was helping to lead a contest intended to result in innovative and valuable new ideas. Product managers presented more than 100 new business initiative proposals to create new value for customers and provide additional revenue streams and differentiation opportunities. The secondary-ticket (resale) market in the United States was becoming increasingly fragmented, and SH was losing market share. It was imperative to move SH from being a trusted platform for conducting ticket-resale transactions to becoming an integral part of fans' experience of live events. This case is intended to be used in conjunction with a technical note on product-market alignment (PMA): ""Product-Market Alignment"" (UVA-OM-1706). Katz and his teams conduct successive rounds of investigation and data gathering across the three dimensions of PMA: defining the customer need, identifying business value, and evaluating operational capabilities. This case also presents a bridge between high-level operations strategy and a more granular discussion of process capabilities. Agile software development is discussed. This case is suitable for operations-management classes focusing on Agile, scale-up, product and project management, emerging technology, and new product development. It can be used with a graduate, undergraduate, or executive education audience.
The ability to achieve product-market alignment (PMA) differentiates businesses that will thrive from those that will fail. Yet many find it difficult to create-and sustain-products that continuously generate value, even as their markets change. Traditionally, managers seeking to develop new products or reexamine current offerings have relied on frameworks that compare customer views on the desirability of various product features to the financial potential of those features. This note expands this common approach to explicitly include the consideration of operational resources and capabilities. This includes the resources needed to develop the product or service and to deliver it. An organization's operational capabilities can dictate whether, how, and which potential new products can be built, so it is important to understand the interplay among marketing, finance, and operations when developing new products or refreshing existing ones. The framework in this note is useful both when developing new products and reexamining existing offerings. This note can stand alone, but works well when used with a case, ""Product Development at StubHub: Don't Stop Believin'"" (UVA-OM-1705), that explores a company's efforts to innovate and create new value for its customers.
This case provides many different examples of pricing with ethical concerns that are spread across two common pricing contexts-value pricing and dynamic pricing. The examples include pharmaceutical pricing, ridesharing, dynamically priced vending machines, and more. These brief examples raise substantial issues about pricing for class discussion. Students should think about why ethical dilemmas arise in each of the examples, and if there is any underlying essence that ties together these ethical dilemmas.
In November 2020, Paul Dietrich was wrapping up his busy harvest season for the 1,100 acres of farmland he currently operated. Although the fall harvest season demanded much of Dietrich's time and attention, he simply could not ignore an investment opportunity that had been presented to him. A local farmland owner was selling a 150-acre parcel of farmland that adjoined some land parcels already owned by Dietrich. Dietrich estimated that a competitive bid would need to be at least CA$20,000 per acre and the bid would need to be made immediately. He sat down to consider both short-term and long-term impacts on his cash flows.
This short case describes how Ana L. Mamede, Hellmann's brand manager at Unilever Portugal, responds to an aggressive campaign by rival Kraft Heinz by developing a brand "purpose" for Hellman's mayonnaise focused on reducing food waste. When Heinz, the ketchup king, sought to increase its market share by offering high discounts and enhanced distribution, it threatened Hellmann's lead in Portugal and throughout Europe. Ana pushes promotional activities in the short term, which yield good results, but realises a new plan is needed for Hellman's in the long term. She considers three options: (i) further promotional activities, (ii) innovation - developing the product line by launching new products and flavours), (iii) branding and communication - enhancing the brand's identity by developing a purpose - to inspire consumers to waste less food.
In 2014, ProGlove emerged the third-place winner in Intel's "Make It Wearable Challenge". The ProGlove team of four who had met at the Technical University of Munich in Bavaria, Germany, had submitted the idea of a "smart glove," which was a barcode scanner, motion detector, and RFID reader connected to the back of an industrial-grade work glove for use in high volume manufacturing. The idea was based on observations of BMW's assembly lines, where each item had to be scanned before being assembled. The process involved finding a scanner, picking it up, scanning the component, and then putting away the scanner again. A smart glove could achieve this more quickly and ergonomically, optimising worker productivity and allowing extra steps in quality control to be included in the production. The team eventually walked away with US$250,000 prize money from the competition. A visit to the Consumer Electronics Show in the US in early 2015 made them realised there was interest in their product not only from manufacturing companies but also from the logistics and service industries. The company grew, developing a sturdy and easy-to-use smart glove with bar code scanning capabilities. Customers eagerly adopted the new glove, benefitting from the combined improvements in speed, quality and ergonomics for a relatively low up-front cost for just the scanner and glove. In 2018, the new CEO, Andreas Königs, brought the company's focus back to the software side, and launched the new "ProGlove Insight" in March 2021. ProGlove Insight combined hardware with software that was capable of analysing the glove's data and making it available to the management for advanced analytics and decision-making.
In early 2022, the technology firm MicroStrategy unveiled a series of letters with the SEC that questioned its accounting practices around its holdings of Bitcoin. Since 2020, the firm had shifted its strategy to include not just selling software but buying and holding large quantities of Bitcoin. But accounting standards for cryptocurrency remained unclear, which could lead to conflicts such as this one with the SEC.
In 2013, two employees debated whether to blow the whistle on their employer, Uptown Bank, after completing an internal review that revealed undisclosed conflicts of interest. Uptown Bank's Asset Management business disproportionately invested clients' money in Uptown Bank's mutual funds over funds managed by other banks, letting Uptown Bank collect additional fees-and the bank had not disclosed this conflict of interest to clients. Both employees agreed that failing to disclose the conflict was a problem, but beyond that, they saw the situation very differently. One employee, Neel, perceived the internal review as a good-faith effort by Uptown Bank's senior management to identify and address the problem. The other, Akash, thought that the entire business model was problematic, even with a disclosure, and believed that Uptown Bank may have even broken the law. They considered their options: Should they escalate the issue internally or report it to Uptown Bank's board of directors? Should they go even further and report their findings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission? What would the potential risks and rewards of speaking out be?
Ebidding, Shanghai Huizhao Information Technology Co., Ltd.’s key product, was China’s only “Internet+” integrated bidding and procurement service provider, integrating supply chain management consulting, project implementation, and electronic bidding platform operation. Its main business was to provide enterprises with a full-process electronic bidding and procurement solution. The Ebidding team had developed a full-process electronic bidding platform in 2012, and it had been upgraded and developed regularly since then. A business expansion opportunity emerged for Ebidding as a result of shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of precautions to combat COVID-19, offline bidding and procurement across China were severely curtailed. Electronic bidding procurement projects were also stalled due to the inability of experts to evaluate online bids. To seize this market opportunity, gain competitive advantage, and grow its business in the face of significant uncertainty, Ebidding would have to determine how to quickly develop a remote decentralized bid evaluation system, gain acceptance for it, and lead customers to accept the new system.
Swedish technology start-up Primateria AB (Primateria) was founded in November of 2004 with the main idea to provide science-backed consulting services for cutting-tool producers and end-users. What had started as a consulting service without the need for assets turned quickly into a production-driven service to support the cutting tool supply chain. The company had managed to consistently grow without external capital, had automated processes, opened a second physical location, and added physical vapour deposition coating capabilities. For the road ahead, the owners had to now decide how to protect Primateria’s intellectual property and how to meet the need for localized services for their large international clients quickly.
The owner of a tennis ball manufacturer was reviewing the company's financial performance for its third fiscal year. The bookkeeper had already recorded the fiscal 2020 cash transactions, but may have done so incorrectly. The owner recorded the opening balances, cash receipts, and cash disbursements to calculate the unadjusted trial balances for fiscal 2020. She started with the bookkeeper’s unadjusted trial balances and planned to use the balance sheet and the list of cash receipts and disbursements, if necessary. She would have to figure out where the bookkeeper posted each entry, determine whether it required an adjustment, and adjust accordingly.
Case B presents the choices the company made and the execution issues it confronted. It shows that the CEO put online revenue growth at the center of the strategy. He also used "test and learn" budgeting process to avoid investing too much in stores. The case enables participants to see how the CEO reorganized parts of the organization to drive strategy execution. This case clearly shows how strategic decisions are crafted, executed and modified. It demonstrates the execution challenges a firm might face when transforming in a competitive marketplace and shows the dramatic transformation and improvement in the firm's financials. It also shows the rare success of a retail digital transformation.
This case describes the ESG journey of Pro-invest Group, an asset management and investment firm specialising in private equity real estate across the globe. It begins in 2017, when the Group is launching its second hotel fund, Pro-invest Australian Hospitality Opportunity Fund II (in parallel to managing Fund I) and there is a growing appreciation of the financial and competitive benefits of strong environmental, social and governance considerations. As investor interest in ESG standards rises, Dr. Sabine Schaffer, co-founder and co-CEO Europe, commits to implementing them at every level of the company. The case describes how she drove these efforts, from achieving the GRESB Real Estate Assessment (formerly Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark) to the adoption of a standardized third-party-administered ESG certification scheme across the Group's hotel assets in Australasia. The case ends in 2021 with Pro-invest looking at certification schemes for potential investments in the UK and Europe. It highlights the decisions that were taken, the challenges faced, and the key learning along the way.
Ebidding, Shanghai Huizhao Information Technology Co., Ltd.'s key product, was China's only "Internet+" integrated bidding and procurement service provider, integrating supply chain management consulting, project implementation, and electronic bidding platform operation. Its main business was to provide enterprises with a full-process electronic bidding and procurement solution. The Ebidding team had developed a full-process electronic bidding platform in 2012, and it had been upgraded and developed regularly since then. A business expansion opportunity emerged for Ebidding as a result of shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of precautions to combat COVID-19, offline bidding and procurement across China were severely curtailed. Electronic bidding procurement projects were also stalled due to the inability of experts to evaluate online bids. To seize this market opportunity, gain competitive advantage, and grow its business in the face of significant uncertainty, Ebidding would have to determine how to quickly develop a remote decentralized bid evaluation system, gain acceptance for it, and lead customers to accept the new system.
Swedish technology start-up Primateria AB (Primateria) was founded in November of 2004 with the main idea to provide science-backed consulting services for cutting-tool producers and end-users. What had started as a consulting service without the need for assets turned quickly into a production-driven service to support the cutting tool supply chain. The company had managed to consistently grow without external capital, had automated processes, opened a second physical location, and added physical vapour deposition coating capabilities. For the road ahead, the owners had to now decide how to protect Primateria's intellectual property and how to meet the need for localized services for their large international clients quickly.