The founder of Osaro saw the potential of deep reinforcement learning to allow robots to be applied in a wide range of new applications. Osaro targeted warehousing, already a dynamic industry for robotics and automation, for its initial product - a system which allowed robotic arms to "pick and place" individual items into boxes for shipment to consumers. Despite receiving significant attention in the robotics space, the problem of universal "picking" had not been solved. Osaro believed deep reinforcement learning would provide the solution by allowing robots to handle the complexity involved in perceiving and grasping a wide range of objects. The case discussion will focus on the decision to choose the warehouse automation market, provide an overview of key machine learning concepts, and introduce students to some of the contours of competing in the machine learning space during the late 2010s. The case also introduces key concepts for thinking about how the combination of artificial intelligence and robotics will change work in the future.
This case depicts a financial analyst trying to make sense of Starbucks' finances and drawing from recent projects of the IASB and FASB to identify lease accounting as a key issue for the firm. The case underscores the importance of having a full picture of a company's obligations in order to understand its overall performance. In reviewing the case, students examine Starbucks' extensive use of leases and use spreadsheet tools to understand the full extent of the corporation's indebtedness. Although heavy users of leases such as Starbucks have argued that lease accounting is complex, an estimation of lease indebtedness can be made using relatively simple tools that are easy for students to understand. The case allows issues of high-level accounting standards to be elucidated, using a well-known company with which students identify. The case illustrates the real-world consequences of accounting policy choices.
The case is based on the fixed income investment team at Value Partners Group Limited (VP), a publicly-listed, Hong Kong-based fund and asset management company founded in 1993, focusing primarily on Greater China and Asian investments and following an investing approach referred to as value investing. Set in December 2014, the cumulative returns from September to November 2014 for the Value Partners Greater China High Yield Income Fund (The Fund)-the firm's flagship fixed income fund-were negative. The year had started out slowly, but momentum picked up in the summer until a number of external events affected returns, including: Occupy Central in Hong Kong; the market's concern about the end of the US Federal Reserve's quantitative easing; Chairman Xi's anticorruption campaign in Beijing; and the Chinese property market suffering from excess inventory. Investors reacted to these events by pulling their money out of The Fund, and September returns for The Fund were down 2.2% for the month. The December bond market movement was drastic enough that Gordon Ip, Fixed Income Fund Manager for VP, and his team needed to react. Ip was under intense pressure to increase performance, since December was the last month of the year and investors would more closely scrutinize his performance. He needed to make a decision.
On April 30, 2018, the athletic director of Grand River University was drafting a plan for his department to be reviewed by the school’s board of trustees. Grand River University was a small university supporting several varsity sports teams that competed regionally and nationally. The men’s hockey, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball programs had struggled in recent years. In fact, the women’s hockey program had been cut several years earlier. The school wanted to reduce the athletics program’s dependence on grants. With the university facing increasing costs and stagnant revenue, the athletic director had to provide information that clearly outlined the cost to the school of each program and athlete. A group of researchers had used activity-based costing to show that the actual cost of having a team was much higher than schools had reported. The athletic director wondered what his school’s costs would look like after applying that method to his calculations.
In early 2019, transportation was set to undergo a major transformation with the advent of autonomous vehicles (AVs), also referred to as driverless cars, which were nearing completion from an R&D and testing phase. Yet many questions remained open regarding exactly how and when that transformation would occur. The case lays out key issues to consider with respect to the marketplace penetration of AVs and delineates several predictions for how things might play out. The case further describes the motivations and potential courses of action of the multiple stakeholders involved (firms, consumers, government). Students are tasked with examining the various factors that will likely impact the future success and widespread acceptance of AVs, identify potential barriers to customer adoption, describe how a number of industries will be impacted, and propose effective business-models for firms to embrace. Students should also suggest what role they believe government (local and federal) should play in regulating AVs. The case provides relevant information for conducting both qualitative and quantitative analyses.
CEOs often talk about wanting to create a high-performance culture--but many go about it ineffectively. New research from Gartner, based on surveys and interviews with HR leaders around the globe, identifies three common pitfalls. Instead of using single buzzwords to describe the culture they aspire to--collaborative, innovative, and so on--leaders should illustrate it by acknowledging the tension between the ideal and the present reality. They should avoid measuring culture with data alone and seek unfiltered feedback from open-response survey questions and by encouraging employees to speak up at any time. And they shouldn't forget to alter policies to support the desired cultural change. The article includes a Q&A with Oscar Rivera, the chief culture officer of the Guatemalan conglomerate CMI.
The case highlights the differing trajectories of two, contemporaneous models of microfinance in India. The well-known Grameen MFI Model made inroads in the mid-90s, primarily in the four southern states of India. This was in a setting where there was an extensive network of a pre-existing indigenously developed group lending model, called the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage (SHG Bank Linkage) model. Today, the Indian microfinance story stands at a crucial juncture with respect to these two models. The SHG model, while being recognized as a key player in changing the financial inclusion discourse in India, is no longer salient in the current financial inclusion narratives. Grameen MFIs on the other hand, are on their way to being "mainstreamed" as banks, pretty much along the lines of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Using the dramaturgical approach of the sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982), the case differentiates the two models based on the front-stage (borrower-groups) and back-stage (organizations, investors, and the State). This distinction is useful for our microfinance narrative because while the front-stage is steeped in discourses of community, and poverty alleviation; the back-stage revolves around the hard-nosed financial ratios, fund disbursement and recovery pressures, break-even analyses around lender-borrower relations - which are unrelated or even detrimental to the front-stage discourse. Differentiating between the front-stage and back-stage interactions thus allows us to reveal processes that played out very differently for both these microfinance models. It helps us parse out a key question: did the more globally attuned model Grameen Model end up gobbling the clunkier and local SHG Bank Linkage Model?
The case follows social entrepreneur Wilma Rodriguez's journey of three decades as she creates and grows Saahas Zero Waste. Wilma wants to address the social issue and seeks various forms of solutioning, partnership, and organizational structure to take advantage of whatever opportunities arise along the way. The case spotlights Saahas when it faces the challenges of increasing scale as part of achieving product market fit. Saahas delivers value that cannot easily be quantified, to first-time large customers who do not understand the quantum and impact of the waste they generate. Saahas needs to communicate the value it delivers. It also needs to determine how to scale further.
The case narrates the inception and operationalization of a public, private partnership (PPP) between the Government of Andhra Pradesh (GoAP) and Apollo Tele Health Services - the tele-medicine arm of one of the largest hospital chains in India, to provide free Tele-Ophthalmology services to rural population residing in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP) using technology. The PPP is called "Mukhyamantri e-Eye Kendram (MeEK)", and its objectives are to provide (i) ophthalmic diagnosis and (ii) free spectacles, to the needy citizens of the state. As part of the PPP, Apollo refurbished 115 vision centers across 13 districts of the state and launched the MeEK project in February 2018. Apollo created a pool of 30 ophthalmologists to provide tele-diagnosis from a remote location; contracted a vendor to manufacture and deliver spectacles; and designed and developed an electronic medical record (EMR) software to integrate all stakeholders in a seamless fashion during the delivery of these services. However, after the launch of MeEK, Apollo began to face various challenges in terms of both software customization and integration, as well as delivery of spectacles, as the demand far outweighed supplier's capacity. As a result, Apollo could not meet the key performance indicators (KPIs) put in place by the government, and began to incur penalties. The case provides the students with an opportunity to analyze various operational trade-offs such as cost, quality, variety and speed in a capacity constrained environment and identify opportunities for improvement without sacrificing one performance indicator for another.
Eureka Forbes, part of the conglomerate Shapoorji Pallonji Group, is currently one of the world's largest direct sales company known for its water purifier brand Aquaguard with a turnover of more than INR 30 billion. The company is estimated to have a customer base of 20 million across 53 countries. The company's distribution channel includes a direct sales force of dealers, institutional channels, business partner network and a rural channel across 1500 cities and towns in India. The company's previous customer acquisition model ensured that interested customers were individually visited for demonstration of the product and for completion of purchase. While this made the company a household name, it kept the acquisition costs on the higher side. With the imminence of online retailing, the brand had been taking steps to establish their digital presence and build a stable online sales channel. The company website (www.eurekaforbes.com) attracts online traffic from various sources such as organic searches, google ads, email campaigns, etc. The company has started to use this click stream data to build a rich database of visitor acquisition factors and behavioral variables such as session duration, device category, pages visited, lead forms filled, etc. using the Google Analytics Reporting API. The company identifies these visitors as potential customers and is actively deploying remarketing campaigns with optimism to convert them. While these campaigns have shown some success, they have resulted in substantially high retention costs. The business goal is clearly defined for the company - they want to target potential customers while keeping the cost per lead (CPL) as low as possible. For Kashif Kudalkar, the Deputy General Manager for Digital Marketing and Analytics, the task is to achieve better conversion at lower costs. This is achievable when the target audience is narrowed down to a sizeable number for remarketing campaigns.
Fantasy sports is the fastest growing online gaming industry worth several billion dollars. An important debate associated with fantasy sports across the world is whether it is a game of skill or chance. In India, the online gaming laws are not very well defined and hence there is always a threat to fantasy sports companies of getting into legal battles. While the game of skill is permitted by Indian laws, game of chance is strictly prohibited. Indian courts have recognized that no game is a game of pure skill or game of pure chance. When there is a chance involved, the Indian courts decide based on the dominant factor test that requires determining whether skill is dominant, or chance is dominant factor for a given instance. Ramasubramanian Sundararajan (Ramsu), the head of AI at the Cartesian Consulting was convinced that the debate around whether the dominant factor is skill or chance should be settled using data. With this objective, Ramsu approached Dream 11, one of the largest fantasy sports companies in India. Dream 11 has created fantasy games for sports such as cricket, football, hockey, kabaddi, and the National Basketball Association (NBA). Being a cricket fanatic, Ramsu wanted to check whether fantasy games played in cricket involves skill or not. Ramsu was convinced that several hypotheses can be designed and tested to check whether fantasy sports is skill dominant or chance dominant.
Baldor Specialty Foods, a family owned, New York City-based food intermediary, served business customers in the country's north east corridor. A key activity that Baldor performed, called the "Fresh Cuts" program, was sourcing and preparing various vegetables for use by its customers. An outgrowth of Fresh Cuts was the approximately 150,000 pounds per week of produce scraps generated that was unfit for sale. Thomas McQuillan, Baldor's Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Culture, and Sustainability was charged with the disposal of these scraps in an environmentally friendly way that would also help the company's bottom line. After McQuillan designated Baldor's food scraps as "SparCs," ("scraps" spelled backwards) he and the company had early success in selling "SparCs" primarily for animal consumption and partly for human use. However, in 2018, waste disposal continued to be a significant cost for the company. At an upcoming offsite company retreat, McQuillan had to present a plan to address Baldor's food waste disposal that would help the company both financially and, in its sustainability standing.
Brita's Stephen Curry sponsorship splash is set in the U.S. water filtration industry in the first nine months of 2016. The case study documents the initial period of market-leader Brita's sponsorship of the NBA's Golden State Warriors' point guard Stephen Curry. Curry was regarded as one of the greatest basketball shooters of all time, had recently won his second Most Valuable Player (MVP) award from the NBA League, and was ranked as the ninth most powerful celebrity endorser in the United States. Although the announcement of the sponsorship deal had generated substantial and positive media reaction, sales of Brita products were still declining nine months into the period of the sponsorship deal, after several years of sluggish growth. By August 2016, Brita had experienced a 7.2 percent annual decline in total sales, including its well-known water pitchers and filters. The case documents the communication activities related to the Curry sponsorship undertaken by Brita's Director of Marketing, Tad Kittredge, during 2016. Given the pressure to deliver weekly sales and the regular NBA season scheduled to begin in just three weeks' time, Kittredge needed to find a way to use the Curry sponsorship to contribute to a sales turnaround in the coming months. The case offers four strategic alternatives that Kittredge was considering in October 2016 to change the way Brita used Curry.
This case is from the point of view of Peter Clarke, Vice President of Mergers and Acquisitions for Lockheed Martin's Information Systems and Global solutions (IS&GS) division. Clarke has a personal decision to make about keeping his substantial Lockheed stock holding or converting to the partner company (Leidos Holdings) stock. About a year prior to the decision point in the case, Lockheed made a strategic decision to divest its IS&GS division, which engaged in consulting (largely defense and other governmental agency consulting). Clarke reviews Lockheed's actions which led up to the decision to divest the IS&GS division through a Reverse Morris Trust (RMT), which included rejecting a more conventional spin-off or outright sale. The RMT, a complex transaction which required the creating of a new company and a merger with a second company, Leidos Holdings, allowed the divestiture to be tax-free. There were a number of rules required for this transaction; for example, former Lockheed shareholders needed to own more than 50% of the resulting company. Clarke believed the enterprise IT, cybersecurity, intelligence, health IT, and engineering business was a good growth area. Clarke needed first understand this unusual financial transaction and make a personal decision about whether keeping his Lockheed shares or exchanging them for Leidos shares would be the best decision for him.
The decision focuses on sustainable green retailing strategies surrounding meat donations by Giant Foods in their meat rescue pilot program called "Meat the Needs." John MacDonald needs to decide whether to expand or to eliminate the pilot program, now that the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank (CPFB) will no longer be picking up the meat after 2012. Green retailing strategies include opportunities and risks. The opportunities include reducing food waste by increasing food donations; risks include risk to brand, cost, and logistics for safe food handling. Will Giant Foods' disposition decision fit with the company's new focus on zero-waste and its desired edict of "Living Here, Giving Here"? Are the risks and costs too much for the future of the program? MacDonald and his team need to work through these important sustainability issues. This case is complemented with video components throughout the written narrative. The videos are accessed by students clicking on links imbedded in the case which take the student to the appropriate video available in youtube.
CEO Lisa Sedlar was two weeks from the start of meetings with venture capital funders to raise $10 million for a West Coast expansion of her urban, convenience-store startup - Green Zebra Grocery. Delivering a healthy take on the traditional c-store assortment, Sedlar was positioned to leverage growth trends that signaled a shift from the traditional fuel fill-ups that defined the c-store industry, toward urban food retailing. However, a massive oversupply of retail square footage dedicated to grocery, had made investors skittish about putting money behind another brick and mortar retail chain. On top of that, Amazon had just announced plans for a 3,000-store national rollout of Amazon-Go, their high-tech, self-serve concept store, described as the future of c-store retailing. To preempt investor concerns, Sedlar was considering using a content analysis of customer reviews to let shoppers speak for themselves. She needed evidence that either validated the Green Zebra 'healthy convenience' positioning or customer insights that would help her decide how to pivot her customer value proposition to create a differentiated positioning relative to key c-store competitors.
It is March 2019, and Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's newly elected president, is deciding what to do about Brazil's participation in the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change. Bolsonaro must weigh the economic and political costs and benefits of taking drastic action to curb environmentalism and environmental protections in Brazil. Exiting from the Paris Agreement would provide far greater freedom to reboot Brazil's economy, which is one of Bolsonaro's campaign promises. Ignoring climate change would enhance Bolsonaro's ability to roll back fines and regulations aimed at protecting the Amazon Basin, the world's largest carbon sink. This move would likely boost his popularity with the agribusiness sector, but draw ire from social and labor groups in Brazil that have fought long and hard to improve environmental protection throughout the country. And there are broader international considerations: Would leaving Paris mean objections from trading partners and the broader global community?
When the author began working at Match, in the mid-2000s, online dating often required monthly fees and endless patience. It was mostly done by middle-aged people sitting at PCs who scrolled through profiles and waited for responses. If they found and connected with someone, they'd often claim they "met through friends" to avoid the stigma that online dating carried. Since then, significant industrywide shifts in technology and business models have completely changed how people use Match products. Now online dating is done via apps on mobile phones; it has moved from monthly subscriptions to a "freemium" pricing model; and it has been embraced by people in their twenties, who are the dominant users of Tinder and similar brands. Mandy Ginsberg describes what it's like to lead in an industry with such fast innovation cycles and discusses incorporating full-motion video into dating apps--part of an effort to predict whether sparks ignited online will persist as chemistry in real life.