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A sophisticated technology company located in Mississauga, Ontario, began operations on February 1, 2011. Initially, the company raised funds through the issuance of common stock. In mid-2011, new software development was put on hold due to increased concerns over patent protections. In June 2011, the company sought appropriate investment vehicles for its excess cash, which would provide investment income over a set period of time.

Duffinbear Inc.

The sole shareholder of a national supplier of evergreen trees is expanding its product line. This expansion requires a $6.5 million investment. The company decides to finance this expansion through the issuance of bonds and must record the accounting entries involved with this issuance, along with the related interest payments and amortization of the bonds.

Over the years, Zingerman's Community of Businesses (ZCoB) has regularly won accolades and awards - including being named "the coolest small company in America" by Inc. in 2003 - for its food, service, mail order catalog, training, and overall success. This case shows how Zingerman's went from a single delicatessen in 1982 to nine unique but complementary companies with combined revenues of $45 million in 2012. It details the novel methods ZCoB employs to create "a great place to eat and work" and touches on the challenges it faces moving forward. This case can be used in conjunction with Zingerman's: New Business Development and Zingerman's: Broad-Based Ownership, Governance, & Sustainability.

Amid worldwide market and economic uncertainty, Tesla debuted its stock in June 2010 on the NASDAQ Stock Market (Ticker Symbol: TSLA). The stock price jumped over 40 percent in its first day of trading to close at $23.89 in an upsized deal that valued the company at $2 billion and raised over $226 million. It was the first initial public offering by an American automaker since Ford's debut in 1956. While the primary market showed strong enthusiasm for the stock, the secondary market was much less convinced. Concerns were raised about the long-term viability of the company stemming from a limited operating history, a long history of losses, liquidity issues, unreliable consumer demand, expensive battery technology and competition from traditional automakers. As a result, the stock was frequently the subject of high short interest, a predictor of lower investment performance. The question plaguing investors was: were the short-sellers correct in their bearish sentiment, or was a short squeeze imminent? This case describes Tesla's road from founding to outsourced manufacturing of the Roadster, the first fully electric sports car, to in-house capacity production of the Model S, its highly regarded fully electric luxury sedan. Specifically, it focuses on the long-term viability of the growth company along with questions related to quality of earnings.

In early 2010, Robert Griffiths, Counselor for Economic Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, braced himself for the possibility of serious diplomatic fallout with Thailand's government. Griffiths was in charge of providing the analysis on human trafficking in Thailand for the U.S. State Department's annual Trafficking in Persons report, but with a steady rise in victims of trafficking, Thailand was at risk of being put on the State Department's "watchlist" of countries making inadequate progress. For the Thai government, which took pride in its counter-trafficking efforts, being placed on the U.S. watchlist would constitute humiliation by a longtime friend. And for Griffiths, a senior representative of the U.S. Foreign Service in Thailand, provoking the host government's ire could imperil not only future collaboration against human trafficking, but also important engagements on trade, intellectual property and security. The case traces the hard realities of fighting human trafficking even when close allies, like the U.S. and Thailand, share similar aspirations. With an in-depth profile of the U.S. legislation against global human trafficking, the case offers an insider's view of the charged diplomatic engagement between the two countries in 2010. Case number 1991.0

When Solyndra, a California-based solar panel maker, filed for bankruptcy in 2011, the U.S. government was left with more than half a billion dollars in unpaid debt. The bankruptcy was a major embarrassment for the Obama administration which had touted renewable energy companies like Solyndra as the wave of the future, and had invested billions of dollars in government loan guarantees to promote them. The Chinese government, however, had outpaced the U.S. in providing loan guarantees and subsidies to solar manufacturers and helped transform the country's nascent solar manufacturing industry into a world leader. Chinese dominance in the solar market ultimately triggered a high-stakes trade war between the United States and China but neither country could contain the massive downturn in the solar market that began in 2012. The case provides an in-depth account of the complex and often competing agendas on climate change, industrial policy and free trade which fueled the politically charged trade battles between the U.S. and China. Against the backdrop of the global environmental challenge, the case includes details on the Obama administration's signature energy subsidy program and the factors that led to Solyndra's collapse. It also traces the rise of China's solar industry as well as the trade complaints made by the U.S. against China at the World Trade Organization and the subsequent Department of Commerce decision to impose penalties against Chinese solar panel makers.

This technical note explores open innovation--initiatives that are executed with organizations or individuals outside the typical boundaries of the R&D organization. Through a broadening of the interpretation of open innovation, the note aims to help managers who are trying to be more open with their innovation initiatives. Understanding what works or what doesn't work in different settings helps answer questions such as these: What types of projects are good candidates for open innovation? What should an open innovation portfolio look like? Or, more generally, how should firms manage open innovation initiatives?

Spreadsheet supplement for case 213082.

On April 5, 2012, President Barack Obama signed into law the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, dramatically changing the landscape for many companies raising capital. One of the most interesting sections of the Act is Title III, the CROWDFUND Act, which enables entrepreneurs and small business owners to sell limited amounts of equity in their companies to a large number of investors via social networks and various Internet platforms. Prior to the CROWDFUND Act, selling equity interests in companies via crowdfunding was for all practical purposes illegal under United States securities laws. The Act attempts to exempt crowdfunding from expensive registration requirements and allow crowdfunding websites to avoid the classification of broker, which would impose substantial registration costs on such sites. Through the CROWDFUND Act, equity-based crowdfunding has the potential to open funding opportunities to countless underfunded entrepreneurs and small businesses. In addition, it can provide investors with new ways to diversify their portfolios. However, the benefits of crowdfunding do not come without substantial risks. Given the combination of unsophisticated investors, inherently risky businesses, and the zeitgeist that changed regulations quickly, crowdfunding must be approached with caution.

Increasingly, service innovation is a source of competitive differentiation for product-dominant companies such as manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. However, the relative intangibility of services has led to uncertainty concerning how to apply product innovation expertise to the services space. We argue that meaningful service innovation by a product-dominant company must begin with the recognition that services are solutions to customer needs. As such, the primary goal of a product-dominant company seeking service innovation should not be to innovate service. Rather, it should be to help customers get a specific job done better or to help them get more jobs done. To this end, we offer three approaches for companies seeking new service innovation based on how customers define value.

Drawing from the literature on self-presentation, leader-member exchange (LMX), and developmental networks, we attempt to explain how employees might react to a Facebook 'friend' request from their supervisor and why they might react that way. We then examine blog comments to determine how individuals feel about such requests and determine whether their comments support any of the aforementioned theoretical frameworks. We conclude with suggestions for how Facebook can be used in the workplace.

Firms must allocate some minimum amount of value to stakeholders in order to retain access to the resources they provide. Stakeholder theory suggests managers optimize firm-level performance by allocating more than this minimum amount. However, how much is too much? This article addresses the misleading notion that more is always better when it comes to the treatment of stakeholders and, in doing so, provides needed refinement of the boundary of stakeholder theory's predictions. The upside for managers is guidance in distinguishing between the types of value-allocating behaviors that will lead to greater value creation in their firms and actions that are likely to reduce value overall.

Even in these financially challenging times, business performance always comes down to a firm's competitive advantages. Subsequently, how can companies sustain a long-run competitive advantage, especially in the face of increasing competition? Apart from the pat answer that innovation is critical to organizational survival, we argue that it is the innovation process and how companies manage it that forms the foundation of a resilient organization. Our research finds that organizational innovation processes take three main forms: reactive, proactive, and anticipatory innovators. It is from anticipatory innovators that resilient organizations emerge. Here, resilient organizations not only anticipate the needs of buyers but do so by creating an innovation orientation within the firm's culture. This culture-based focus goes beyond any specific innovation; it directs leaders to create an organizational culture that is receptive to innovative ideas and to the changes they produce. Here, the competitive advantage is not so much innovation per se but the organization's ability to continuously create competitive advantages based on innovations.

Transformational leadership has emerged as one of the most important approaches for understanding and influencing employee effectiveness. Inherent in this approach is the belief that transformational leaders inspire employees to greater levels of motivation and performance. Recent evidence has shown that this effect is accomplished by managing the meaning of work for employees, yet it is often unclear exactly how leaders may influence perceptions of work for their employees. Consequently, in this article, we present behavioral and verbal cues leaders may use to enact positive change in their employees.

This article aims to scrutinize an emerging and prominent type of work team in organizations: the spontaneous virtual team (SVT). Despite the promising benefits an SVT can provide, it is confronted with great challenges throughout its lifecycle. In this article, we first highlight the unique structure and characteristics of SVTs as compared to other conventional types of work teams. Furthermore, we decompose the lifecycle of an SVT into three stages. We then use interview data among SVT managers and participants across several industries to analyze the challenges, corresponding solutions, and the role of information and communication technologies in each of the three stages. Understanding the emerging SVTs will be of salient value to professionals and corporate executives who are interested in finding effective technology-enabled means and work patterns to improve organizational work performance. The current work can also serve as a basis for future academic research on exploring the SVT phenomenon.

Over the past 20 years, a convergence has occurred regarding the importance of building relationships with valuable customers as the cornerstone of service strategy. Customer satisfaction and delight have been associated with supporting the retention and growth of important relationships. More recently, firms have adopted penalties and fees as a central means of growing revenue. This has caused friction with the programs targeted at improving customer relations, and increased defections and spurred government regulation. In this article, we collect and analyze data to identify the aspects of penalties that generate customer dissatisfaction and negative emotional and behavioral responses. We offer guidelines for the implementation of penalties that balance the goals of revenue generation and customer loyalty. These include: preventing unintentional failures, managing the perceived magnitude of penalties, effectively educating customers on the offer, ensuring that penalties are clear and transparent, linking penalty decisions to responsibility for the transgression, taking into account narrowly missing avoiding a penalty, and consideration of the customer relationship and employee empowerment.

Recent trends in advertising and social media (e.g., facial/body recognition technologies) will change how people need to think about their digital representations and privacy, as well as how managers can use these technologies to interact with customers. The term avatar is usually associated with a video game character or a pictorial representation on a social network, and among other components of the definition of the concept is the notion that users control the avatar's appearance and actions. Facial recognition and video analytic technologies being applied in public digital signage displays and on social networks like Facebook capture and create an embodied biometric database that is essentially an avatar-like profile that will be used for marketing products and supporting consumer applications. In this article we discuss the nature of these new marketing avatars, which we call mavatars, and offer a framework for understanding where and how these embodied profiles are and will be used. We also discuss and speculate how these representations and the applications they spawn will evolve; where they will be used; and the ramifications of these embodied representations for consumers, managers, and society at large.

This exercise asks students to use consolidated balance sheets and statements of stockholders' equity for ConAgra Foods, Inc., to help them answer three questions pertaining to the issuance of stock shares, stock repurchasing, and cash dividends.