In November 2019, Sandra Richter, co-founder and CEO of Soofa, a network of advertising-supported digital bulletin boards, must decide between two different fundraising and expansion plans for her company. One plan entails raising $15 million in a Series A round and pursuing an aggressive expansion strategy, while the other represents a more modest $3 million raise to bring the company to operating profitability. Richter had developed the $15 million plan with an executive introduced to her by her venture capital board members with extensive fundraising and startup experience; however, after months of pitching to investors, the aggressive expansion plan had failed to produce a term sheet. Richter must decide whether the rapid expansion is the right course of action for the company as she begins to question whether her business could realistically meet the plan's projections even if she could secure the financing to fund it. Meanwhile, Soofa's capital was rapidly dwindling. Richter must raise another round of capital by early 2020, or will be forced to lay off the majority of her staff and close her operations. Should she continue pursuing the aggressive expansion plan, pivot to the more modest plan based on operating profitability, or attempt to pursue both plans simultaneously? And how should she navigate the growing tension on her board given the company's struggles?
Founded by Chris Czerwonka, John Roberts and Julie Monniot-Gaillis, Mosabi is an app-based solution addressing the lack of financial literacy education and financial inclusion for informal sector entrepreneurs in Africa. By providing an alternative to traditional credit-scoring through education, Mosabi seeks to empower its users in the long-term, generating a multiplier effect on their lives. It is designed to be financially sustainable as it also reduces the high cost of accessing the underbanked for the financial services providers (FSPs). In order to achieve its social and financial objectives, Mosabi measures both financial and social impact and ensures the two go in lock-step.
Huemen was a new men’s cosmetics start-up founded in mid-2018 by two business students. In 2018, the market for men’s makeup was in its infancy. Stigmas and stereotypes dominated ideas about men investing in their appearance, but the founders believed that cosmetics created for male-type skin could improve the confidence of those who chose to use it. Huemen’s go-to-market strategy and positioning would be pivotal to success. The founders and their team scheduled a meeting with an entrepreneur-in-residence at the business school, a seasoned marketing expert with strong corporate and entrepreneurial experience to consider how to position Huemen in a novel market.
Huemen was a new men's cosmetics start-up founded in mid-2018 by two business students. In 2018, the market for men's makeup was in its infancy. Stigmas and stereotypes dominated ideas about men investing in their appearance, but the founders believed that cosmetics created for male-type skin could improve the confidence of those who chose to use it. Huemen's go-to-market strategy and positioning would be pivotal to success. The founders and their team scheduled a meeting with an entrepreneur-in-residence at the business school, a seasoned marketing expert with strong corporate and entrepreneurial experience to consider how to position Huemen in a novel market.
Sam Washington is a young single mother looking to get back into the workforce six months after giving birth to her daughter, Kiki. Sam has lined up an interview for a secretarial position at Glass & Duvall, an accounting firm. The A case covers the morning of the interview from Sam's perspective, including details about what she does in the waiting room as well as her actual answers to the interviewer. Sam leaves the interview hopeful that she will get the offer. The B case details the following day when Sam gets a phone call from the interviewer, Marva Thompson, who asks Sam to come in for a follow-up meeting. Sam is very excited and rushes over, only to find out that Marva really called her in to give her feedback about her interview, not to offer her the job. Marva recognizes that Sam did not have an accurate idea of the expectations of working in a corporate setting, and she wants to provide constructive criticism to help Sam perform better in her next interview.
Supplement to case UV8051 Sam Washington is a young single mother looking to get back into the workforce six months after giving birth to her daughter, Kiki. Sam has lined up an interview for a secretarial position at Glass & Duvall, an accounting firm. The A case covers the morning of the interview from Sam's perspective, including details about what she does in the waiting room as well as her actual answers to the interviewer. This B case details the following day when Sam gets a phone call from the interviewer, Marva Thompson, who asks Sam to come in for a follow-up meeting. Sam is very excited and rushes over, only to find out that Marva really called her in to give her feedback about her interview, not to offer her the job. Marva recognizes that Sam did not have an accurate idea of the expectations of working in a corporate setting, and she wants to provide constructive criticism to help Sam perform better in her next interview.
This case focuses on how to think about personal and business ethical dilemmas. The case presents three ethical dilemmas: two hypothetical scenarios presented to Kiara in her ethics class, and one real situation in her personal life. While dilemmas one and two may be unethical but legal, dilemma three involves an actual crime. Kiara has been working as a cosmetologist at her aunt's salon for three years, and she has just discovered illegal business activity there.
HSBC (The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited) Holdings plc was a member of various trade finance consortia that aimed to digitise the traditional paper-based trade finance process. It had successfully executed multiple trade finance pilots by using a blockchain-based platform, Contour (formerly known as Voltron), and is planning to launch the platform commercially. The trade finance market was estimated at USD 18 trillion annually, and HSBC had a share of 12% in trade finance transactions worldwide. This case revolves around the challenges faced by banks or consortia while porting the traditional trade finance process to a blockchain-based system. Key aspects to be considered are the ways in which banks form consortia, implement blockchain and facilitate trading globally, given that blockchain is a new technology and the porting process will necessitate bringing all of the stakeholders involved in the trade finance value chain onto the blockchain-based platform. It is in this context that HSBC confronts questions related to making various decisions. What type of governance structure would facilitate a quick roll-out of services that could be provided robustly and with integrity of process and intent? How should HSBC price its trade finance services?
On April 8, 2019, Occidental's CEO Vicki Hollub made a private offer to buy Anadarko Petroleum Corporation for $72 in cash and stock. Anadarko's CEO Al Walker said he would consider the offer, yet three days later, on April 11, he signed a merger agreement with Chevron in a deal worth $65 per share in cash and stock. This agreement included a $1 billion "break-up" (termination) fee payable to Chevron if Anadarko accepted another offer. To avoid losing the deal, Hollub then made an initial public offer to buy Anadarko for $76 per share in cash and stock on April 24. When Anadarko failed to respond, Hollub, revised her offer on May 5. Although the revised offer had the same stated value of $76 per share, it included substantially more cash ($59 per share instead of the original $38 per share). With competing offers on the table, Walker now had to decide whether to accept Chevron's $65 offer or pay the break-up fee and accept Occidental's $76 offer? Of course, once he had made up his mind, he would have to convince his board that it was the right offer to accept and the right price.
In 2020, Numenta's co-founder, Jeff Hawkins, completed his pathbreaking research on artificial intelligence. His co-founder and CEO, Donna Dubinsky, had to find a business model to monetize the technology. This case explores the challenges of building a business around intellectual property.
In May 2015, Filip Daw, a human capital strategist with a leading consultancy, is hired by the Indian subsidiary of Semicon Inc (SI), an American semiconductor manufacturing company, to uncover the reasons behind the high attrition rate in the company. Established in 2005, SI is a design centre - a skill-intensive core business unit that directly impacts the parent company's competitiveness as a supplier to the end-user industry. India's low-cost and abundant talent was expected to add to the design centre's competitiveness but SI's high attrition rate proved otherwise and had started eroding its competitiveness and revenue. Daw must identify the turnover drivers and analyse how the company's HR policies influenced these drivers. Besides adopting a data-driven approach to diagnose the attrition drivers, Daw needs to examine assumptions held by various stakeholders. The case on Daw's hand requires finding a proxy metric for performance and then connect that performance metric with turnover, developing hypotheses, collecting requisite data and making insightful recommendations. This case documents a real-life analytics project in a semiconductor company that was later bought over by another company. The name Semicon India is used to disguise the identity of the original company. The project was helmed by the author Dr Fermin Diez, who was then its Regional Chief HR Officer.
Supplement to case SMU805 In May 2015, Filip Daw, a human capital strategist with a leading consultancy, is hired by the Indian subsidiary of Semicon Inc (SI), an American semiconductor manufacturing company, to uncover the reasons behind the high attrition rate in the company. Established in 2005, SI is a design centre - a skill-intensive core business unit that directly impacts the parent company's competitiveness as a supplier to the end-user industry. India's low-cost and abundant talent was expected to add to the design centre's competitiveness but SI's high attrition rate proved otherwise and had started eroding its competitiveness and revenue. Daw must identify the turnover drivers and analyse how the company's HR policies influenced these drivers. Besides adopting a data-driven approach to diagnose the attrition drivers, Daw needs to examine assumptions held by various stakeholders. The case on Daw's hand requires finding a proxy metric for performance and then connect that performance metric with turnover, developing hypotheses, collecting requisite data and making insightful recommendations. This case documents a real-life analytics project in a semiconductor company that was later bought over by another company. The name Semicon India is used to disguise the identity of the original company. The project was helmed by the author Dr Fermin Diez, who was then its Regional Chief HR Officer.
Erste Group ("Erste"), one of the largest financial services providers in Central and Eastern Europe, faced a rapidly changing business environment in 2019: fintech startups were unbundling retail banking services as consumers' expectations for service in the digital age were evolving-and increasing. Yet, on the 200th anniversary of its inception as the first Austrian savings bank, Erste had overcome a number of strategic, leadership and spatial challenges. In response to the rise of digital banking, Erste created George, a digital platform; grew an omnichannel offering; and developed a strategy based on being a trusted provider of financial literacy, thereby enabling customers' financial health. The creation and growth of George gave rise to organizational challenges: to support the business strategy, Erste's digital innovation lab, Erste Hub, was located in a separate organization, away from Erste's other Viennese properties. The dispersal of Erste's operations throughout 28 inner-city locations in Vienna created major organizational and logistical challenges for the bank as it grew, making the search for a suitable physical solution an imperative-for decades. The development of a consolidated facility for Erste was kindled by the purchase of an unusually large parcel of land in 2007, and culminated in the staged occupancy of an innovative new campus in 2016. In 2019, Erste celebrated a momentous anniversary and executives and employees reflected on the multi-faceted impacts of the spatial consolidation of the group's local operations, including Erste Hub. Throughout this time period, Erste implemented fundamental changes within the organization. In parallel, leaders looked to the physical configuration of the new campus to impact how teams completed their work and, ultimately, boost the ability of the members of the organization to deliver on the new goals of innovation at Erste.
This article develops a framework for driving innovation under highly ambiguous conditions. An analysis of the most novel medicines of the past 20 years shows that a very large group of small companies created more breakthroughs, at considerably less overall cost, than a much smaller group of very large companies. This article's findings present the first large-scale empirical validation of the theoretical literature predicting the superiority of decentralized parallel searches in ambiguous environments. Accordingly, companies that attempt to "de-risk" the innovation portfolio by narrowing their search efforts to minimize failures run the risk of filtering out the next breakthrough.
Cesar and Marco Esposito and Francisco Caceres, co-founders of the 14-year-old Chilean-based nutritional supplement company All Nutrition/Nutraline, are seeking to deepen their understanding of customers' behavior and buying patterns. After preliminary discussions with the sales force and in-store interviews with customers, they determined that well designed focus groups targeting sports nutrition customers would be an important first step in helping them to be "more in touch" with customers. This case describes the design, implementation, and analysis of the information gathered from these groups-and asks students to determine what kind of quantitative research would further deepen their understanding of who their customers are, how to segment them, and how to work with each of the segments.
Trust Merchant Bank (TMB), a leading bank in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), needs to decide whether to enter the soon-to-be-liberalized insurance industry. Since its founding in 2004, TMB has played a pivotal role in reshaping the DRC banking landscape by focusing on retail customers and thus promoting financial inclusion in the DRC. In 2018, the Congolese government decided to open up the insurance industry, formerly a state-owned and mismanaged monopoly. TMB is considering applying for the newly available insurance licenses as the bank is well-positioned to capitalize on its existing banking infrastructure to begin selling insurance. The bank's leadership team is assessing the opportunities and challenges with such a move. What is required of TMB to make this move a success? How will TMB's customers react? How should the bank grow in an increasingly competitive environment?
This compact case describes an incident between an aspiring manager and an employee, related to an interpretation of expected engagement of the latter in a planned Agile Boot Camp-an event designed to bolster the transfer of the organization towards new ways of working. Alexander, the main case protagonist, overhears Victor, his employee, say that he will take only a passive part in the event since it is classified by Human Resources (HR) as training, and not as a workshop, in terms of how working time for such an activity is accounted for. Alexander, for whom the Boot Camp is very important, feels the urge to engage in the conversation (which he does in part B of the case).
This compact case describes an incident between an aspiring manager and an employee, related to an interpretation of expected engagement of the latter in a planned Agile Boot Camp-an event designed to bolster the transfer of the organization towards new ways of working. Alexander, the main case protagonist, overhears Victor, his employee, say that he will take only a passive part in the event since it is classified by Human Resources (HR) as training, and not as a workshop, in terms of how working time for such an activity is accounted for. Alexander, for whom the Boot Camp is very important, feels the urge to engage in the conversation (which he does in part B of the case).