Buckeye Chiller Systems and International Steel Corporation formed MicroFin Incorporated in 2017, in South Carolina, United States, as a joint venture to produce tubing for industrial chillers. After four years of losses, the chief executive officer of Buckeye had lost patience with the joint venture. He gave his chief operating officer until the end of March 2021 (less than three weeks) to turn around MicroFin or dissolve the partnership. With no chance of making money in the short term, the chief operating officer focused on three options for terminating the joint venture. Time was running out, and something needed to change.
The social enterprise Apni Shala Foundation (ASF) provided social and emotional learning programs to disadvantaged communities in Mumbai, India. Since its founding in 2013, ASF had engaged with more than 16,000 students. Before February 2020, ASF was directly engaged with more than 4,600 students, 1,000 parents, and more than 500 teachers at 35 government schools and non-profit organizations. However, on March 31, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced ASF to shut its office and discontinue operations, and its mission of equipping children, educators, and parents with skills to support improved mental well-being stopped abruptly. Amrita Nair, the co-founder of ASF now faced a dilemma regarding resuming the foundation's social and emotional learning programs: If ASF did continue, which categories should it choose to serve, and why? How could it transform its offerings and operations without compromising much on the quality of programs?
Driven by a passion to develop his own brand, Sandeep Yadav started Rock Pharmacy in 2014 in a rented area of 700 square feet and with seed capital of US$6,665. His primary customers were patients who required medication regularly for conditions including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and kidney issues, and people who worked for companies in the local area. The venture dealt mainly in patented medication. However, over 2018-2020, there had been a dramatic decrease in sales and profits due to the rise of e-pharmacies and organized pharma, and the business was struggling to meet its operating expenses. Considering the options available to save his business, Yadav had to decide: should he give up his brand and collaborate with online/organized pharma players, or should he compete with them?
On March 23, 2021, Vineet Sharma, the sole owner of MedStar Polymers, India, a medical-grade latex glove manufacturing company, was considering the dilemma of how to scale up production to fulfill an unprecedented order during COVID-19. With demand for protective equipment outstripping global supply during the pandemic, an exceptional business growth and expansion opportunity for glove manufacturers had emerged. Several manufacturers had expanded production by adding new production lines. On the surface, a production ramp-up looked as simple as increasing inputs: raw material, labour, machinery, equipment, and cash. However, a decision to rapidly increase production could create risk and almost destroy a business-especially when constraints such as raw material unavailability, transport and travel restrictions, logistical problems, and state- and area-wide lockdowns started impacting the production process. Sharma had to decide how to increase output while also dealing with disruptions such as a shortage of labour and concerns about the use of natural latex rubber. Was now the right time to add a new production line? Should he switch to making nitrile gloves? He needed to make decisions quickly, as the current high demand would likely not last.
ShakeeBee Honey Inc. was a relatively small producer of pure honey and beeswax and provider of pollination services located in central Newfoundland, Canada. The company needed to consider further expansion beyond the facility modernization it undertook in 2018; this expansion would involve acquiring additional land and attracting key personnel. In March 2020, the owner reached out to his accountant for assistance with a variety of accounting-related matters. The company needed an analysis of its current operations, including profitability by product/service line offered. It also needed an assessment of its application for a government pollination grant and a declaration in support of this application, and assistance in evaluating tax implications of some upcoming decisions.
Anna Bender, VP of product at Workaround, a large human resources (HR) software firm, had just been presented with a number of different recommendations from her employees on how to integrate the functionality and data from a recently acquired software company that had a leading chat app into Workaround's offerings. Although she was impressed by many of the suggestions, Bender was also ethically conflicted about some of them. The business opportunities and ethical implications of each of the three proposals weighed on Bender's mind as she prepared to meet with the senior leadership team the next day. Before doing so, however, she had to identify the potential ethical issues with each suggestion and analyze ways they might be minimized, particularly with regard to privacy and potential antitrust concerns. The worst possible outcome would be getting dragged up in front of Congress. Yet, more broadly, she wanted her decision to reflect the core values of Workaround's business and her own personal values.
Reframing your B2B company as a business-for-business company can increase revenues, customer retention, and employee morale. The authors describe how Luker Chocolate of Colombia made this strategic shift and has grown by helping its customers succeed.
<p align="justify/">In 2021, the chair of the admissions committee at The School of Management in Gandhinagar, India, had only three months to prepare for the start of the school’s next master of business administration program. During these three months, prospective students who had received admission offers could decide to decline offers, even though some had already paid relevant fees. Understanding the uncertainty of those decisions was critical to estimate the number of additional offers to send out to other candidates. If the final number of prospective students joining the program was lower than the school’s available capacity, The School of Management would lose contributions toward its fixed business costs and potential profit. It would also mean that the school’s resources would be underused. On the other hand, denying admission to students who had received offers to join the program, due to a lack of space, could adversely affect the school’s brand image and future admissions. Understanding the decision-making process of prospective students was critical over the long term to develop appropriate retention strategies and encourage all candidates to accept their admission offers.</p>
Copenhagen Airports A/S (CPH) has been severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with flight activity at levels not seen since the 1970s. Although the virus overshadows everything, three senior managers discuss a more long-term trend: the steadily declining revenues of the airport’s shopping mall. Over the past number of years, consumer interest in food, beverages, and tax-free items has continuously decreased, posing considerable challenges to CPH’s business model. About 80 per cent of the airport’s profits are generated by the non-aeronautical business, of which the shopping mall is the biggest part, and CPH needs that income to continue investing into the airport’s status as an important hub for airlines. What could CPH do to deliver better existing services, and what new services would merit serious consideration? Could CPH launch new products or services that would be attractive to both passengers and shopping mall tenants, or would it need to redevelop its entire business model? Since the commercial business was key to driving the airport’s further development, the managers knew that finding answers to these questions was important to sustaining CPH’s position as a leading hub in Northern Europe. The case is not about the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for the aviation industry. This is a case about the long-term trend of declining revenues in the airport’s shopping mall.
The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the global economy, laying bare the coordination challenges and vulnerabilities of global value chains (GVCs) across sectors. Governments, consumers, and firms alike have called for greater GVC resilience to ensure critical products are delivered to the right place, at the right time, and in the right condition. This article investigates whether GVC reconfiguration through the adoption of redistributed manufacturing (RDM) in local production can deliver greater resilience against unexpected, disruptive global events. It proposes actionable steps for managers to ensure more resilient GVCs in the face of global shocks.
The Center for Sustainable Agriculture was founded in 2004 as a solution to various problems in India’s agricultural industry. The founder developed a sustainable agriculture model to help farmers lower crop failure risk and reduce production costs, to which pesticide and fertilizer use contributed over 30 per cent. The Center for Sustainable Agriculture built a sustainable agriculture model by collaborating with farmers, producer associations, governments, and markets. The introduction of organic products allowed the company to integrate sustainability into its core business plan. In 2021, after achieving success in Telangana, India, the founder was planning to expand his organic farming model across the country, but he wondered what challenges he would face in other states and how he could overcome these.
Agora was a civic technology (civic tech) startup founded by Elsa Sze, who wanted to enhance the connection between political officials and their constituents by facilitating virtual "town halls," making underrepresented voices heard and benefiting elected and appointed leaders who often struggled to collect meaningful feedback. Despite success in startup accelerator programs, challenges and complexities with government sales cycles led Sze to pivot the company multiple times, until she was selling customer service software to corporations and pondering whether she still wanted to build and sell Agora. A short financial runway meant she had to quickly decide where to invest her energy.
This is the conclusion to Agora (A), where founder Elsa Sze decides if she wants to continue investing energy in her civic technology startup. Agora was a civic technology (civic tech) startup founded by Elsa Sze, who wanted to enhance the connection between political officials and their constituents by facilitating virtual "town halls," making underrepresented voices heard and benefiting elected and appointed leaders who often struggled to collect meaningful feedback. Despite success in startup accelerator programs, challenges and complexities with government sales cycles led Sze to pivot the company multiple times, until she was selling customer service software to corporations and pondering whether she still wanted to build and sell Agora. A short financial runway meant she had to quickly decide where to invest her energy.
Nicolas Dupont, the owner of Chateau de Montana, a struggling (and old) boutique hotel in Crans-Montana Ski Resort, Switzerland, wished to renovate and reposition his family-owned hotel to target higher room rates. Dupont commissioned Olga Mitireva and Yulia Belopilskaya as consultants to assess the proposition. The consultants had to extract cues for the room rate of the repositioned hotel from comparable hotels. However, the room rates varied significantly across similar hotels due to their differing characteristics and locations. It was a cognitive challenge to read the patterns from a few comparable hotels. They collected the data of 200 hotels from similar locations and simulated room prices using hedonic regression models.
This case follows the organic growth story of ServiceNow, a workflow platform serving enterprise customers. ServiceNow found product-market fit in streamlining workflows for IT service management. It later evolved its product, engineering, and go-to-market organizations to expand first into adjacencies within IT and then into additional domains such as HR, customer service, and others. The case charts ServiceNow's path of organic growth towards $10 billion in revenue, challenging students to consider decisions around build vs. buy, organizational design, innovation investments, and the leveraging of a unified platform technology.