The case opens in August 2021, as Habib and Shahysta Hassim, husband and wife co-founders of the data labeling company SmartOne, contemplate the strategy of the high growth company. Between 2016 and 2021, SmartOne had kept doubling its size every two years and now, with its workforce of 1,000, it was annotating data for global tech clients. The case provides a background on SmartOne's journey from call center operations to data labeling and elaborates on the company's operating and business model, providing details on processes such as: recruiting, training, managing the workforce, project management, and quality control. The case also provides a background on data labeling, data pipeline and the AI factory (a term explained in the case which represents the AI industry value chain) for larger context and gives an overview of the competitive environment. In August 2021, the co-founders needed a strategy to shape the company's future. Where in the AI factory could SmartOne position itself to remain relevant and take a piece of the evolving pie? Should the company grow upstream, to become a full data pipeline provider, or downstream into developing algorithms?
Kaitlyn Otashi opened her banking app and was shocked to see her balance went down compared to last month. She started a new full-time job six months ago, and was earning a decent salary. Although her expenses had gone up as a result of moving to a new apartment, she could not understand how her available cash was going in the wrong direction. This case weaves Kaitlyn through an analysis of her income and spending, including a detailed analysis of salary and benefits, personal taxes, and spending patterns. The case extends this analysis by considering three scenarios that involve Kaitlyn adjusting contributions to her health care savings plan, retirement plan, and changes in spending patterns to determine impact on income, after-tax cash flow, and net overall savings. This case is ideal for classes on personal finance, basic finance, and cash flow analysis, as well as workshops on budgeting and planning.
The exercise directs students to watch specific scenes from the movie Hidden Figures, which is loosely based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly that tells the story of three African American women who were mathematicians working at the Langley Research Center in Virginia in the 1960s. The women encountered racism and sexism as they attempted to contribute to the Center’s work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its space race with the Soviet Union. The clips assigned to students for viewing portray moments of leadership in the story of the three Black women who were considered “human computers.” The students are expected to view the assigned clips and consider how the scenes portray leadership and what character dimensions the actors demonstrate in their roles.
On January 3, 2017, the principal investigator at the Biomedical Engineering and Technology Innovation Centre (BETIC), in India’s Indian Institute of Technology Bombay was considering the next steps for a newly developed product. BETIC was a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional translational research and development network in the medical technology sector that acted as a running partner for innovators and entrepreneurs. The core vision of BETIC was to create global success stories of indigenous medical devices by providing systematic guidance and support to innovators developing medical devices. The principal investigator and his team had developed an indigenous and innovative smart stethoscope from the ideation stage to a functional prototype. The next critical challenge was how to commercialize the product and ensure that it could deliver the maximum amount of social impact.
In February 2020, the director of Global Creative Intelligence at McCormick & Company, Inc. (McCormick), was grappling with some challenges at his desk at the company’s headquarters in the United States. Having been mandated to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) in developing new products—in partnership with IBM—he had been interfacing with over 500 product developers at the company’s various locations worldwide. The director faced three managerial dilemmas: How should he get the company’s product developers to trust the findings of AI? How could he teach and train AI to become smarter? And how should he deal with the global-local dynamics at McCormick in launching AI-engineered products?
In March 2020, a physician in southwestern Ontario, Canada began working on the development of an innovative digital application called the Pandemic Population Health Navigator, designed to help mitigate the pressure on Ontario's health care system due to the rapid increase and spread of COVID-19 infections. The founder worked quickly to engage local health system partners, trusted advisors, the provincial government, and a digital health vendor to support the development of his innovation, which was intended to act as a COVID-19 triage tool. The project garnered widespread support and benefited from unprecedented quick approval times by the provincial government, which was undergoing a provincial transformation to a new health care system. Six months later, however, unexpected issues and risks began to surface. A key stakeholder was threatening to terminate the project's agreement due to increasingly complex customization demands from users of the Pandemic Population Health Navigator. The physician realized that he quickly needed to find a way to alleviate these complexities and associated risks, while maintaining the trust of his health care collaborators.
This case study describes the situation three days after the ill-fated launch of the European Super League (ESL). It can be used in a number of ways. This includes exploring the differences between US sports business models and those of European football; the strategy of the ESL and the possible misjudgements that it made, the dynamics of competition at the top level of European football, the governance of football, and the growing role of media in sport
Three business partners were stunned to learn their controller of five years had embezzled approximately $200,000 from their small technology firm. The attorney for the embezzler called and notified them the controller was resigning effective immediately and they had no hope of recovering any of the money. Such news would have had serious financial repercussions for any small firm. But, the attorney's revelation of the embezzlement came at a particularly tenuous time because the partners were in negotiations to sell their company. The partners wanted to report the former controller to the district attorney with hopes she would be prosecuted for fraud. Yet, they knew having the embezzlement become public likely would jeopardize the sale of their firm. With hindsight, the partners knew they had given the controller too many responsibilities with no internal controls and little supervision. They wanted answers to questions about exactly how she perpetrated the fraud, but they had a more immediate concern. What steps should they take right now?
Army First Lieutenant (1LT) Gavin Bell joined his unit in Afghanistan only weeks after graduating helicopter flight school in the United States. A new platoon leader in his troop, Bell had to get to know the members of his unit, familiarize himself with the combat zone, and progress through a rigorous flight refresher training program before flying combat missions. After a series of training flights, Bell felt more comfortable in the aircraft and in the unit. However, just as his confidence began to grow after completing his training progression and several intense missions in contact with the enemy, Bell's commander removed him from a high-profile mission due to lack of experience. Back on the flight schedule a few days later, Bell felt unsure of his ability to make tough decisions in the cockpit. On his first flight ever without the watchful eye of an instructor pilot, Bell sat in the helicopter, left temporarily alone at a remote forward operating base in northeast Afghanistan. Bell's team of two helicopters had landed to drop off reconnaissance materials to the ground force planners and the transfer was taking longer than expected. Beginning to run low on fuel and with Bell's experienced co-pilot still in the base headquarters, the base defense operations center ordered all aircraft to depart the base landing zone due to an immediate enemy attack from the surrounding mountains. Bell has only seconds to decide to make a life-or-death decision: depart by himself in the helicopter, disobeying regulations prohibiting single-pilot flights, or remain at the base his helicopter, a vulnerable target as the enemy fire intensifies.
In mid-October of 2020, Rico Ruiz, Director of Organizational Development at Tampa General Hospital (TGH), had to decide on a Digital Badging Platform (DBP) to support a professional development program hosted by University of South Florida (USF) for delivery to TGH's health care workers in the proposed People Development Institute (PDI). Ruiz was approached by TGH's CEO, John Couris, about a challenge with organizing and tracking the engagement of professional development of employees across its various departments. TGH was a highly respected hospital with nationally ranked clinical programs. Couris insisted that the development of the professional skills of 8,100 members in their interactions with other employees and patients needed to be better organized and tracked. Couris was prepared to invest $10M over a 10-year period into a healthcare professional development center, PDI, in partnership with the USF Muma College of Business. Dr. Matthew Mullarkey, a professor and co-director of USF's Doctor of Business Administration program, where Couris was in his second year of study, thought a system of micro-credentials based on academic digital badges could provide an innovative way to credential TGH's employees as they completed developmental programs through USF. The digital badges allowed for better tracking of TGH employee development and they could be stacked into more meaningful credentials such as college credits and certificates. Additionally, employees could share their earned digital badges on social media which would be free marketing for TGH. Although he had 19+ years of experience in education and organizational development, Ruiz knew nothing about digital badges or DBPs when first approached by Couris. After meeting with a DBP consultant who specialized in the digital badging space, Ruiz was able to narrow his choice to 3 DBPs: Accredible, Badgr, and Credly. Couris needed a proposal by Mid-November, giving Ruiz ten days to select a DBP and author a
After a child was seriously injured by a toy that was alleged on social media to be one of Magformers' products, Chris Tidwell, CEO of the company, had to determine the best way to deal with the crisis. Magformers' signature products were sets of shaped plastic pieces with strong cylindrical magnets embedded in the edges that allowed children to build things. Beck White, a 4-year-old, ingested 13 magnets from a copycat product sold by IMDEN on Amazon's website. He needed surgery to remove parts of his colon, intestine, and appendix. On December 27, 2018, Beck's mother, Jennifer, posted a warning about the danger of magnetic toys to other parents on Facebook. The post generated a social media firestorm in which Magformers was incorrectly identified as the toy at fault. At the close of the case, Chris Tidwell faced two problems. First, Tidwell needed to figure out how to restore the brand reputation of Magformers in the aftermath of the Beck White incident. Second, he needed to figure out how to address inferior and unsafe products that were sold on Amazon.
On August 14, 2019, WeWork filed its IPO prospectus. Within its pages, it stated that WeWork CEO Adam Neumann had purchased the rights to the "We" trademarks from an entity known as We Holdings LLC for $5.9 million. We Holdings LLC was also managed by Adam. When the media picked up on this, it initiated a tumultuous period of scrutiny by business pundits of the IPO prospectus. Furthermore, the lack of a clear path to profitability raised red flags with potential IPO investors, as did incidents of Adam's self-enrichment and conflicts of interest. This made investors question Adam's ability to run a large, public company. Something had to be done to restore investor confidence, but what? The voting power of Adam's shares made it difficult to impose sanctions or remove him from his leadership position. The IPO roadshow was scheduled to kick off as soon as the week of September 16, 2019! What should the board do?
Luis Currea, 59, was the owner and general manager of Nutripunto-a company dedicated to the manufacture and commercialization of balanced animal feed. In February, 2019, he faced the challenge of whether to accept a proposal that would engender growth capable of tripling his small company's current size, a proposition not seen before in the company's history. The company's biggest client of its balanced feed line for livestock, Jairo Ortiz, who represented 10.8% of the company's total sales, proposed making Nutripunto the sole supplier of feed for the livestock of eight large customers, including himself. The proposal demanded Nutripunto guarantee the feed's quality and raw materials, produced according to a formula adjusted to meet the conditions of each farm or ranch. Ortiz and his seven rancher neighbors had grown tired with their current providers, considering that the large brands, too focused on costs and profit margins, constantly switched their raw materials, to the detriment of the productivity of the clients' livestock. Ortiz said his proposal would lead to sales of around 400 tons of feed per month, compared to the 150 tons the company currently produced. The proposal therefore implied significant growth and associated challenges relating to management and investment. Currea was short on time when it came to answering Ortiz. He considered four options: buying a new production plant to meet the proposal's demands, increasing production shifts in order to manufacture more product, dedicating the company exclusively to the orders of these eight large clients (thereby abandoning his other clients in order to use the company's current infrastructure, in two shifts) or rejecting the proposal and continuing with his business as usual. Various economic, strategic, organizational and personal factors were at play, and Currea's consideration of Ortiz's proposal had turned into a complex situation, both for the family business and for him, personally.
Sally Witherspoon had a PhD in Statistics, was a 30-something mother of two young children, and was a highly successful manager at Legend Corporation, a high-technology company which sent its high-performing women managers to its Women's Leadership Workshop. Before attending the program, Witherspoon, like the other WLW attendees, asked colleagues and her boss to give her feedback on the Kouzes and Posner's 360-degree Leadership Practices Inventory. On the first day of the program, the participants received their 360-degree feedback: Witherspoon was stunned and emotionally distraught by the negative data that she received from her boss. Now, she needs to figure out how to calm herself; if and how to share her harsh feedback with others at WLW; and, in addition, how to prepare herself for a conversation about her feedback with her boss.
This article is a transcript of the plenary discussion at the North American Case Research Association conference in October 2020. In a (virtual) fire-side style conversation, author and protagonist involved in the case, KidZania: Spreading Fun Around the World, share their experiences in building a relationship based on trust, negotiating access and approval, disguising data, revising their work, and publishing the case in Case Research Journal (2018, Volume 38 Issue 2).