This case chronicles the rise of Meituan Dianping, the third largest company in China's hyper competitive e-commerce industry. Best known for its food delivery service, the company was changing the lives of hundreds of millions of consumers and millions of merchant through a suite of smartphone apps. To reach this point, the company had gone through several live or die competitive battles including the so called "Thousand Groupon War". Well positioned to ride the fast-growth wave of China's service e-commerce, there was no room for complacency. Competition was fierce and so was the pressure coming from merchants and consumers spoilt for choice. What strategies should the company implement to sustain long-term growth in the fast-evolving market?
Money laundering schemes disguise the criminal origins of an estimated 2% to 5% of the world's gross domestic product. Money laundering not only enables criminals to escape detection, but may also be used to finance further criminal operations including terrorism. This case introduces readers to money laundering and anti-money laundering (AML) techniques.
In 2019, Board Chair and third-generation shareholder Helen Fullerton was preparing for a meeting to discuss Ohio-based Hayden Saw Company's (Hayden) future as a family business. As the company entered its fifth decade, the Hayden family was dealing with three distinct pressures. First was the question of how to represent shareholders equitably in a way that would enable the family to move past its history of friction and estrangement. The second question was how to ensure a talented pipeline of family members working at the company as the family dispersed across the U.S. Third and relatedly, was the question of how to ensure informed family representation on the company's board to support its independent directors. To address these pressures, Fullerton had commissioned a family business consultant to generate a series of proposals. The consultant had come back with comprehensive ideas for a shareholders' council, a family office, family employment tracks, and a shareholder director process. Now it was time for Fullerton to review the proposals and decide how to move forward.
In its 2017 annual report, the Dairy Farm Group had reported a decline in sales and profits for its Singapore Supermarket and Hypermarket business, with increasing competition cited as the key reason for the lacklustre performance. Peter Goh, an analyst at Singapore Management University's Institute of Service Excellence (ISE) has been tasked with preparing a business pitch to the Supermarkets and Hypermarkets division of the company's Singapore office to help it address some of the challenges it faces. To help raise the performance of the service sector in Singapore, ISE conducts and releases the results of the Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG) to both the media and industry, as well as provides research and consulting services. The 2018 CSISG study had revealed "Ease of Getting to Stores" as one of the lowest-rated attributes for the supermarket industry, and Goh believes that rationalising store locations could be a possible answer to the challenges the Dairy Farm Group faced. In his opinion, a geospatial analysis of the company's customers' demographic profile relative to its current store locations would provide some key insights.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Singapore, Style Theory has successfully paired the sharing economy with the fashion industry by improvising its business model. With the ever-changing dynamics of the global world economies, the sharing economy is incrementally being adopted by different untouched commodities and industries. Finding the gap and offering fashion on rental, Style Theory's perfect timing in addressing the shifting consumer needs allowed its business model to effectively pair the sharing economy with the right industry. Style Theory's effective business model has helped the Company build a strong foundation towards success. With the gradual evolution of the business model components, such as key partners and expansion activities, customer relationships, sales channels and revenue streams, Style Theory stays ahead of the curve by continuously expanding and improving on their product and service offerings. This Case Study analyses how it was the right timing for Style Theory to enter into Singapore's fashion rental industry, studies the Style Theory's business model that successfully paired the sharing economy with the industry, and hints if it could be applied beyond the fashion industry in Singapore.
This annually updated exercise assesses one's exposure to the rest of the world's peoples. A series of worksheets require the respondents to check off the number and names of countries they have visited whether for business, family or tourism reasons, and the corresponding percentage of world population which each country represents. The summary of a group's collective exposure to the world's people will inevitably be the recognition that together they have seen much, even if individually some have seen little. The teaching note provides assignments and discussion questions which look at: why there is such a high variability in individual profiles; the implications of each profile for one's business career; and, what it would take for the respondent to change his/her profile. For marketers, it underscores the need to gather greater base knowledge about opportunities in 211 countries spread across 8 regions: Africa; North America and Caribbean; South America; Western Europe; Eastern Europe; Central Asia and Indian Subcontinent; Middle East; Asia Pacific.
In the first of three mini-cases on workplace mistreatment, "Casual Fridays Gone Wrong," the vice-president of compliance for a collections company faced the dilemma of how to deal with a complaint about a manager's racist comments. In the second mini-case, "Dial 911-Health Care in Distress," a nurses' union representative at a mid-sized urban hospital needed to respond to a patient's threat to take his complaints about negligence to the media; he planned to identify the individual nurses he claimed had provided negligent care, in part due to his race. In the third mini-case, "A Toxic Academic Environment," formal harassment actions have been taken against Professor Marybeth Gasman, holder of an endowed chair at the University of Pennsylvania.
This technical note discusses how a high-potential start-up entrepreneur should use equity in building and growing a new venture. One of the most crucial things for entrepreneurs to understand is equity: Most high-growth ventures grow through equity partnerships, but most new ventures fail because relationships between founding partners and other equity partners become conflicted and impossible to repair. You need to share equity to build an enduring high-growth venture. But sharing equity without understanding how increases the probability for the venture breaking up and failing. The note addresses multiple topics regarding equity, including compensation, profit sharing, decision rights, and cap tables.
In the summer of 2018, Drinkworks CEO Nathaniel Davis needed to make a number of go-to-market decisions ahead of his company's upcoming product launch. Formed through a joint venture between Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch InBev, Drinkworks had developed an innovative home bar system that let consumers make single-serving cocktails or beer with the push of a button. Keurig and AB InBev provided valuable technological, supply chain, and regulatory expertise, but since the Drinkworks Home Bar was a novel product, there were no established market benchmarks for the Drinkworks team to follow as they prepared for the Home Bar's upcoming market launch. After conducting several market research experiments, they needed to interpret the results and make several decisions around customer segmentation, value proposition, product assortment, pricing, and distribution channels. Could Drinkworks be the next billion-dollar opportunity for Keurig and AB InBev?
After nearly five years in operation, Doctor Cynthia Bamdad, founder and CEO of Minerva Biotechnologies Corporation (Minerva), was reflecting on the company's next steps. In a few short years, she and her small team had managed to develop a nanoparticle process for testing new drugs that was orders of magnitude faster than traditional approaches. Using this process, they had discovered the mechanism that caused 96% of all breast cancers and identified families of small molecule therapeutics that were effective in blocking this mechanism in live cells in the laboratory. Moreover, Bamdad did not think it would be long before the company could offer an early warning diagnostic for breast cancer, which would allow less invasive treatment of the condition. The company had filed several families of patent applications in support of these claims, but the challenge was funding. To date, Bamdad had relied on Federal Government grants and angel investors to fund the research, but the next steps would require much larger investment. Should Minerva seek to commercialize its drug development technology to help fund the riskier steps of drug development? Should it focus on a diagnostic which would make current treatments more effective? Should it license its small molecule therapeutics to one of the many well-funded companies seeking cures for cancer? Or should Bamdad raise capital to support tests in mice in order to reach the Federal Drug Administration IND (Investigational New Drug) application stage of drug discovery? This would allow clinical trials in humans, which would require more capital, but an IND would increase the value of Minerva's intellectual capital substantially. What should Bamdad do?
In 2010, amid a flurry of new discoveries, Cynthia Bamdad, founder and CEO of Minerva Biotechnologies Corporation (Minerva), raised $6.6 million to test her new cancer drugs in mice. It had been more than 6 years since she had announced that she and her small team at Minerva had identified the mechanism that caused 96% of all breast cancers and had discovered a number of small molecule drugs and antibodies to block it. Funding the next stage of development had proven very difficult, but, undeterred, Bamdad had raised enough to keep her laboratory open and continue her research work. In the process, she made the startling discovery that the "cancer" mechanism she had discovered was an integral part of the production of all human embryonic stem cells, and that cancer was a result of this mechanism going awry. As a result, Minerva developed the ability to produce high-quality stem cells, which opened up a whole range of new commercial opportunities for the company, including advanced therapeutics and processes for growing and replacing human cells of all types. However, resources were limited. Where should she focus her efforts?
In March 2020, Dr. Cynthia Bamdad, founder and CEO of Minerva Biotechnologies Inc. (Minerva), was reviewing the first results of human clinical trials for the company's novel CAR-T drug therapeutic, one of the first ever to target solid cancer tumors. The results looked promising. CAR-T therapeutics were a new field attracting a lot of scientific interest. They involved genetically re-engineering a patient's T-cells, a key element of the human immune system, to attack the cancer. The first CAR-T treatments for cancer were developed for the relatively small field of blood cancers, 7% of all cancers. For instance, early pioneer Kite Pharma Inc. (Kite) developed a treatment for a special type of lymphoma that only affected 7,500 patients a year. Still, the financial interest was huge, and Kite was acquired by Gilead Sciences Inc. in August 2017 for $11.9 billion. Similarly, Juno Therapeutics Inc. was acquired by Celgene Corporation for $9 billion in January 2018. Minerva's therapeutics targeted 96% of all breast cancers and 46% of prostate cancers, a market that was orders of magnitude larger. After 21 years, Bamdad believed that Minerva was on the threshold of something really big. Should Bamdad sell the business and work within a larger organization? Or should she IPO and continue to develop the company's long-term pipeline of therapeutics and diagnostics?
This case describes how Laura Franklin and William Colt conducted their entrepreneurial acquisition process. After the duo honed their method for contacting potential sellers, they found a company they were excited to close a deal with. Over the course of many months of diligence, and overcoming a large mistake, the duo were prepared to acquire their ideal company - then COVID-19 hit, leading them to consider pausing the deal.
By the end of 2019 the adidas Group was solidly the world's second largest multinational in the sportswear manufacturing industry. Following the successful implementation of a digital transformation initiated in 2015, the company enjoyed years of sustained growth and high profitability in the 2016-2019 period, strengthening its brand desirability and increasing sales volumes, especially in the online space. It ended fiscal year 2019 stronger than ever and its chief executive officer (CEO), Kasper Rørsted, was very optimistic about what the future would hold. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020 radically changed the business landscape. adidas was severely hit by the lockdowns imposed by governments. The new measures of social distancing were expected to have a lasting impact on consumer habits and consequently on the operations of companies such as adidas. Thus, unimaginable only few months before, the company's first earnings call of 2020 led by Rørsted focused on the negative results obtained in the preceding few months and the high degree of uncertainty looking forward. Aware of the many challenges facing the company, Rørsted had to decide which strategic initiatives he should prioritize to future-proof the company and keep it on a steady growth trajectory in a post-COVID-19 world.
Licensed foreign telecom operators in Myanmar were required to also provide mobile financial services (MFS). Due to a lack of trust in the banking sector, the government believed the adoption of MFS would boost financial inclusion in the country by enabling seamless money transfers, bill payments, and more. As they entered the MFS market, foreign telecom operators Ooredoo and Telenor grappled with fundamental questions that would determine their launch and customer acquisition strategies.