Seedfund is an early stage venture capital (VC) fund focused on Indian companies building enterprises that address the growing Indian economy. The case traces the creation of the fund, the development of and the rationale for the investment theses for the fund, the way the investment team raised and constituted the funds taking into account the institutional regime governing the VC industry in India. In particular, it discusses how the investment team developed their investment theses, taking into account the competitive scenario in the market for early stage investing and the competences that they brought to the business. It also discusses the entire fund life cycle management, namely sourcing of deals, screening of deals, post financing value addition and exits. As a backdrop, the case provides an overview of the Indian VC and private equity (PE) industry in India.
The case describes the journey of Rashmi Vittal, founder of Little Green Kid (LGK), an organic clothing company based out of Bangalore, India. A big believer is sustainability business, Rashmi started LGK to create and retail a line of 100% organic clothing. A technology professional by training, she struggled to figure out the various aspects of the organic clothing business and painstakingly put together each piece of the puzzle. She built the business by using various means of bootstrapping - outsourcing, partnering, sharing capacity, and leveraging the support of friends and family. The case is positioned at a point where Rashmi has built a modest but cash flow positive business. She now needs to decide the future course of action for LGK, that is, if and how to grow the company to the next level. The case provides rich material to discuss the concept of bootstrapping; the challenges of building and scaling a venture that seeks to carve out a new market (organic clothing); the trade-off involved in seeking venture capital funding, especially for a sustainability business.
Jayalaxmi Agro Tech (JAT), a company based out of Bellary in Karnataka and co-founded by Anand Babu, strives to keep the Indian farmer informed about the modern best practices, thereby boosting the agricultural yield. The company's flagship product is a suite of crop-specific mobile apps in several regional languages with heavy emphasis on audio-visual content to break the language and literacy barrier prevalent in rural areas. The farmer is empowered with the right information at the right time to make agriculture sustainable and more profitable. JAT intended to collect data on sericulture (rearing of silkworms for producing raw silk) to improve income of silk producers. Karnataka is one of the largest producers of raw silk in India. Sericulture requires less investment but offers high returns if done correctly. Sericulture also involves cultivation of mulberry trees, the leaves of which are used to feed the silkworms. The yield of sericulture is heavily dependent on the quality of inputs such as the type of silkworm breed used, quality of the mulberry leaves and environmental conditions of the silkworm rearing house. Jayalaxmi Agro Tech collected farmer level data on sericulture practices in the districts of Belagavi, Bellary, Chikballapur, Mandya, and Tumakuru in the state of Karnataka. The company wanted to analyze the data collected to gain insights so that they could make grassroot level impact by fine tuning sericulture as an occupation. These insights could possibly help towards building better policy interventions to improve the welfare of sericulture farmers.
Paul Markovich felt that a time bomb was ticking inside his industry. Each year, the cost of healthcare was rising steadily, while incomes were only inching upward. In 2018, the median income for a family of four in the United States was $65,000. His company's most popular health insurance product for such a family? A package that would cost them $16,000 a year -- a whopping 26 percent of their gross pre-tax income. That was almost three times the cost of such a plan in 1999. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where Blue Shield of California (BSC) was headquartered, the situation was even worse. "If you have a Silicon Valley engineer, it would cost the company more to pay for the health benefits of that engineer [in the United States] than to hire one in India for a year," said Markovich, the CEO of BSC. The problem with insurance companies, Markovich thought, was not out-of-control administrative expenses or fat profit margins. For every dollar that Blue Shield of California customers paid, 87 cents went to pay directly for health care costs, taxes and fees. And as one of the largest not-for-profit health care insurers in the United States, Blue Shield of California capped its profits at just 2 percent per year. "Just being more efficient as an insurance plan is not going to solve the affordability crisis," Markovich believed. "Even if we eliminated our profit and our administrative costs, that would only buy us three years [before costs caught up again]." Something much more fundamental needed to change, Markovich reasoned. Insurers like Blue Shield of California needed to reimagine their role. No longer could they simply define themselves as middlemen who tried to bring together tens of thousands of scattered physicians, hospitals and pharmacies into a network, and make arrangements for treatment and payments.
Coda Coffee's commitment to ethical coffee came at a high cost. The company paid three times the commodity exchange rate for raw coffee beans, or cherries. By late 2018, their supply chains reached from Denver all across the world. Could AI, machine vision, blockchain, IoT help Coda Coffee, and in turn, their customers, receive assurance that this premium pricing translated into fairer wages for farmers? It is this assurance that Coda continually strived for through the relationships they built and the methods of sourcing they pursued. This case describes a partnership between relatively new Coda Coffee and Bext360, a technology startup, to leverage Industry 4.0 technologies to ensure greater transparency in Coda Coffee's supply chain. Specifically, the case addresses the motivation behind conducting a pilot study in Uganda. The case can be used to stimulate discussion about the strengths and limitations of Fair Trade certification and how companies can go beyond Fair Trade with their own certification programs supplemented by increased supply chain transparency. The case can also be used to generate discussion about how Industry 4.0 technologies can serve both business and the greater good.
In 2015, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Hart Schaffner Marx, a 130-year-old U.S. maker of men's suits and sport coats in Des Plaines, Illinois, set out to create an employment program for people with autism with the help of the company's partner, Autism Workforce. Unlike other similar employment programs, this program aspired to employ people who were seriously affected by autism challenges. The two partnering organizations had worked diligently to activate work skills in people with developmental disorders, and now sought to extend and leverage their initial successes. In 2017, the company's CEO and owner was now facing decisions about how to extend and leverage the employment program's initial success.
In March 2017, a pharmacy in Berlin encountered a personnel scheduling problem. The pharmacy's key activity was serving customers in-store with ready-made medication. These services had to be offered during regular opening hours, on occasional Sundays, and during pre-assigned emergency-service shifts. In addition, customer-specific formulations had to be prepared, and certain office duties had to be performed. A particular aspect of the problem was that, in addition to differences in the employment contracts, the employees' preferred attendance times had to be considered. Although the issue was presented as an operational problem, long-term considerations of determining the cornerstones of the employment contracts could be addressed.
On October 3, 2016, the Government of Ontario released its finance statements for the province without the opinion of Ontario's auditor general. This incident stemmed from a disagreement between the auditor and the government over public-sector pension accounting interpretations, which had the potential to seriously affect the province's budget balance and long-term debt levels. It was uncertain how this disagreement would be resolved. Many members of the media, think tanks, and opposition political parties decried the government for refusing to co-operate with the auditor, while others felt the auditor had gone too far in her interpretation of Public Sector Accounting Standards.
As a student at the Harvard Business School, Sadiq Gillani decided to focus his career on the airline industry. This case study explores Gillani's strategic decisions to take positions with aviation consulting companies, start-up airlines, and budget airlines-and gain valuable experience that prepared him to work on big transformative issues, skills he would later use as chief strategy officer at the Lufthansa Group, Europe's largest aviation company. At Lufthansa, a company with a German culture where people tended to work their way up, Gillani found himself an outsider. Networking and establishing a presence as a global expert and leader in the industry helped move his career forward. In 2018 Gillani became senior vice president at Emirates, which operated in 80 countries around the world and was the largest airline in the Middle East. As he reflected on the moves he had made to build his career and his reputation in the airline industry, Gillani wondered to what extent the career strategies he had employed were generalizable to other people in other industries-and whether these strategies would prepare him for his next position.
Set in February 2018, the case follows Gillian Tee and Lily Phang, the co-founders of Homage, a Singapore-based tech startup providing on-demand home care service to the elderly. Homage was founded as a solution to the growing social problems caused by an ageing population-the proportion of Singaporeans aged 65 years and above was on the rise while the support ratio was declining rapidly. Challenged by the shortage of skilled labour, the limited capacity of facilities, and rising costs, the government was keen on promoting the concept of families and communities as the first line of care for the elderly. However, tending to the needs of elderly family members was affecting the social, family and work life of family caregivers. Such informal caregiving was also causing discomfort to the elderly care recipients. The incumbent care agencies relied on foreign workers due to the shortage of a trained local workforce; their conventional operating model was less effective in meeting the requirements of the care recipients, and coordination between the care recipient and the care professionals was erratic and tedious. Homage's smartphone-based application addressed these problems in caregiving by matching elderly care recipients to care professionals based on more than 50 different criteria. The application empowered heretofore dormant caregivers to choose service requests that matched their terms and skill levels. By automating the entire process, the application rendered a seamless and cost-effective on-demand service for the elderly while creating flexible income opportunities for those who had dropped out of the workforce. After gaining ground in the market and securing funds for growth, Gillian and Lily were gearing up for scaling the business by driving up its adoption and usage. However, they had to prepare for the accompanying potential challenges.
Charity fundraising in the UK was a deep red ocean when Comic Relief started. Costs were up and donations were down. To stand out from the crowd, organizations had to work harder at fundraising and marketing. Yet Comic Relief rapidly achieved 96 percent national brand awareness and has now raised over £1 billion without spending anything on marketing. Its flagship event, held once every two years, is almost a national holiday in the UK. The case reveals how Comic Relief redefined the problem of the charity-giving industry - from how to get the wealthy to give out of guilt, to how to get everyone 'to do something funny for money' - thus reconstructing the market boundaries. It understood how to create new demand by looking to nondonors and what turned them off (the blocks to giving). In so doing, it erected formidable barriers to imitation - cognitive, organisational, economic and legal. Its enduring success relies on the alignment of its value, profit and people propositions. It can be used to teach the following Blue Ocean concepts: (1) the Buyer Utility Map; (2) the Three Tiers of Noncustomers; (3) Barriers to Imitation; and (4) Disruptive versus nondisruptive creation.
At the end of 2017, Disney announced it would acquire the majority of 21st Century Fox's assets including its movie studio, TV production company, cable channels and regional sports networks. If approved, the deal would give Disney the scale and content to develop its own streaming service by 2019, when its contract with Netflix expired. The rise of streaming had contributed to the steady decline of cable-TV, DVD sales and cinema attendance in the US. The case discusses the transformation of the media landscape with the growth of digital. Was Disney's apparent move away from "content is king" - its strategy since 1923 - recognition of the importance of distribution channels in the digital age?
The case starts by describing the transformation of ING Netherlands from a traditional bank with functional hierarchies to an organization that embraces digitalization and 'Agile' principles. Then it illustrates how the bank is re-organized around self-managed teams without traditional managers. Finally, the narrative recounts how employees are empowered to make decisions.
The case starts by describing the transformation of ING Netherlands from a traditional bank with functional hierarchies to an organization that embraces digitalization and 'Agile' principles. Then it illustrates how the bank is re-organized around self-managed teams without traditional managers. Finally, the narrative recounts how employees are empowered to make decisions.