In October 2021, Miles Arnone, CEO of Re:Build Manufacturing (Re:Build), was thinking about Re:Build's next acquisition. Arnone contemplated the pros and cons of each of three candidate companies as he prepared for a discussion with his colleagues. His associate had synthesized the results of a screening assessment for the three potential acquisitions, one element of Re:Build's acquisition decision-making process. Arnone and others had launched Re:Build in 2020 to help rejuvenate the US industrial base. The vision entailed acquiring and scaling manufacturing and engineering businesses into a tightly integrated portfolio to leverage technical capabilities across the enterprise. Adding a company to the Re:Build stable was no small decision, and getting it right would be another step forward in creating a "new" type of conglomerate-one where each company worked together to share technology, knowledge, and ideas. Which company (if any) offered the best fit with the overarching strategy? This partially disguised field-based case includes discussion of Re:Build's company structure, decision-making process, and acquisition criteria, as well as data about its current companies and the three under consideration for acquisition. This case is taught in "Operations Strategy," a Darden School of Business elective MBA course. It could also be used in other MBA courses and Executive Education programs that address entrepreneurship, private equity, and general strategy.
Founded in 1984 in Vancouver, Aritzia has been a massive success story, expanding across Canada and into the United States with no signs of slowing down. In March 2020, however, with the COVID-19 pandemic spreading rapidly through North America, the women’s fashion retailer was forced to shutter all its 97 boutique stores and shift sales to the e-commerce channel, while making other key financial and operating decisions to respond to the pandemic. In May 2020, with Aritzia given the green light to begin slowly and cautiously opening its locations, the CEO and the executive team needed to decide how to move forward in a time of crisis and continue its growth plans.
In May 2019, a retail investor in the Philippines had to decide whether or not to immediately sell his shares in Holcim Philippines, Inc (HPI). The San Miguel Corporation had just announced the acquisition of around 86 per cent controlling interest in HPI. The price of HPI had increased considerably in the months leading up to the acquisition announcement, and this investor was anticipating a large gain. Now, he needed to run a fair value estimate of HPI’s price using both the capital-asset-pricing-model-based discounted cash flow method and the comparable multiples method in order to decide what to do: Should he sell his shares at the prevailing market price, wait until the future potential tender offer, or hold his shares indefinitely?
The case explores the journey of Marek Claassen, a German art lover who transformed a passion for building databases for local art galleries into a commercial venture that ranks artists worldwide. Artfacts seeks to rank all artists as transparently as the facts allow. Instead of focusing on transactions, which are often shrouded in secrecy, rankings are weighted according to the attention artists received from experts in the art world such as curators, art historians, art critics, gallery owners and collectors. Generated by an algorithm that is updated on a weekly basis, rankings capture the entire spectrum of art from the intellectual to the psychological, the spiritual to the aesthetic. Twenty years after starting Artfacts, Claassen hired a CEO, Jonas Almgren, and CMO Andrew Antoniades to launch an online mobile app. 'Limna' takes advantage of Artfact's world-class database to estimate the value of artwork coming onto the market. Buyers and gallery owners can use it to assess and negotiate the price of an artwork.
Pairwise discusses the strategic approach of a company aiming to "snackify" fruits and vegetables by using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to create nutritious, bite-sized foods that could compete with packaged snacks. The company is confronting a number of challenges, including distinguishing their approach from that of GMO foods, which had a mixed public reception.
In 2021, Slack was acquired by Salesforce. While widely viewed as the best corporate collaboration and messaging software, Slack was being challenged by Microsoft, which was giving away its competitive product, Microsoft Teams, for free with a subscription to Microsoft's Office software suite. The purpose of this case is explore how to compete with "free." The case examines the advantages and disadvantages of bundling and how to build an enterprise software platform.
Dare2Compete was a global platform connecting students, professionals, educators, colleges, and companies through innovative challenges, events, and gamified hiring assessments. It catered to two markets-students and companies. For students, it provided information on competitions, and listed internships, scholarships, and hackathons. For companies, it was an employer branding consultant and recruitment service provider. Dare2Compete was one of the largest networks of college students in India. Prospective employers could discover, engage, and hire students through the platform, facilitated by competitions, quizzes, hackathons, business simulations, and case studies. In 2020, after five successful years of operations, Dare2Compete's founder, Ankit Aggarwal, believed it was time to grow and was deciding on a growth strategy to pursue for achieving his objective of doubled growth for Dare2Compete in the coming year. He was considering three directions for growth: penetrate further into the market, expand globally into new markets, or develop a new product for the existing market.
In early June 2020, the owner of BYKlyn, an exercise bike fitness studio in New York, was considering her response to the business disruption that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had caused the health and fitness industry. BYKlyn had recorded consistent annual growth since its launch in 2014. The fitness studio owner had been confirming her business expansion plans by moving into a larger space in the city when the pandemic struck in early 2019. Consequently, she was forced to shut down the business in mid-March 2019, in compliance with COVID-19 regulations. After a two-month lockdown, the New York state government announced phased-in reopening plans, and the fitness studio owner was considering three options for restarting her business: reopen at the existing premises; move to a virtual environment with a new business model; or set up an outdoor fitness club, which would offer fitness club members a completely new workout format.
The Hill & Levene Schools of Business (HLSB) Paul J. Hill Business School at the University of Regina, were considering widely divergent strategic alternatives, in what was expected to be a new and permanently altered post Covid-19 competitive environment, for business schools and higher education learning. The case considers three alternatives: 1. a return to the classic business model, with a new state-of-the-art building; 2. specialize as a virtual business school, for maximum national and international student access; or 3. Take advantage of the learning during the Covid-19 crisis and excel as an adaptive hybrid business school. Each alternative has strategic, marketing, operational and financial implications.
In November 2016, the chief executive officer of CanniMed Therapeutics Inc. was considering the company's options for raising capital through an initial public offering. The decision was critical for the Saskatchewan-based medical cannabis company, which had been an early leader in this fast-growing sector and was seeking to take advantage of growth opportunities. The company's history in the space dated back to 2000, when it was awarded a sole source five-year contract from Health Canada to supply Canadians with medical marijuana. Since then, the demand for medical cannabis had grown exponentially, and policy liberalization had opened up prospects for the recreational market. CanniMed Therapeutics Inc. had positioned itself as a leader with extensive experience in research, development, and commercialization. The decision for it to go public was clouded by many burning issues and risks, which led to intense speculation among investors as to whether the firm should be going public at this time and, if so, at what price.
In April 2020, Katerra executives struggled with a series of decisions that would determine the fate of one of the best-funded construction startups in history. Katerra was founded in 2015 by technology-industry executive Michael Marks and commercial real estate developer Fritz Wolff to "redefine the construction industry." Over the next four years, Katerra raised $2.5B in venture capital investment and grew to 7,500 employees. Focused on creating a fully integrated commercial real estate development process, Katerra built and operated factories manufacturing building components ranging from pre-fabricated wood panels to windows, acquired architecture and general contracting firms globally, and developed a series of proprietary software systems to design and manage construction projects. Management touted a project pipeline filled with eager commercial real estate developers and multifamily housing projects, but actual revenue was lacking. Katerra would soon run out of money without additional investment. Customer complaints about Katerra's ability to deliver on promised time and cost savings, coupled with the departure of one of the company's co-founders, call into question the company's strategy and Marks' leadership. Investors must decide whether the company's vision is salvageable, and if so, what steps they should take to construct a pathway to profitability.
In May 2020, SoftBank executives, having invested nearly $2 billion in Katerra, decided the vision of an end-to-end, vertically-integrated construction process was worth saving-with some major changes to company structure. The SoftBank Vision Fund invested $200 million in Katerra as part of a company restructuring in which cofounder Michael Marks stepped down as CEO, and former oil industry executive Paal Kibsgaard was promoted from chief operating officer to CEO. However, by June 2021, Katerra had initiated the bankruptcy process. Should Katerra's failure be attributed to mistakes made by the company's management team? Or did the company encounter a series of misfortunes that made it impossible to continue forward?
In May 2010, a year after becoming President and Managing Director for Southern Europe at Discovery Inc., Marinella Soldi faces a make-or-break meeting with Discovery's global Executive Committee. Her region is about to lose half of its revenues in a contract renegotiation with Sky Italia. Hired from outside the organization with a mandate to turn the region around, Soldi energizes the local team and proposes a new strategy that involves bypassing Sky's content distribution and broadcasting some channels through Digital Terrestrial Television. The move represents a radical change to Discovery's business model, from B2B to B2C, and means abandoning the partners with whom Discovery has grown into a global business. This implies not only a digital transformation but changing the corporate culture. This case illustrates the interplay between digital transformation, talent management, and efforts to encourage diversity and inclusion. The focus is on challenging the distinction between strategic and cultural change. To change business strategy often involves confronting cultural assumptions and biases that keep legacy strategies in place. External hires, up-and-coming talent and members of minority groups are seen as more able to do something different, because they are different and unencumbered by established traditions. Yet because they are different they are subjected to stronger scrutiny and push-back. Despite being hired to confront longstanding traditions, they are pressured to conform to them.
Most novel ideas either stall out at some point in product development or lose their originality before they make it to the marketplace. How do you defy those odds? By helping your organization's innovators adapt their collaborative behavior to support ideas wherever they are in their journey. Each stage of that journey idea generation, concept elaboration, internal promotion, and implementation has its own set of collaborative needs. Here's how to meet them.
Relying on expert panels to judge which innovation projects should get the go-ahead for funding produces mixed results. The authors' study of how R&D projects are green-lighted reveals multiple flaws in the process that can result in biased and poor decisions. The article details potential problems and suggests alternative ways that companies can review and decide on new projects. These newer approaches are aimed at mitigating bias and often involve engaging a wider variety of perspectives.