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Beanz Espresso Bar is located in downtown Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. It is operating in a market with high rivalry (11 other coffee businesses in a two-block radius). The economy in Prince Edward Island has seen several diners, restaurants, and coffee shops close their doors within the past few years, while simultaneously drawing in large corporate businesses such as Starbucks and Running Room. Beanz has thus far survived the major environmental changes and managed to keep its clientele and the owners, Lori and Doug, feel it is time to either sell Beanz and leave the industry, or exploit their competitive advantages to grow and capture more market share. Beanz specializes in high-quality, baked-from-scratch food and specialty coffee beverages. The café is known for its artistic vibe, warm atmosphere, and eccentric staff. After operating Beanz for 16 years, the couple has made few changes to the decor, menu, the set-up. Internally, the company faces several issues concerning management control systems, marketing, and strategic direction. Lori and Doug must choose between five different directions for the future of Beanz.

Success in business ecosystems that include well-established companies and new ventures requires collaboration and competition, a task that demands strategic thinking to leverage a firm's resources and capabilities. Strategic thinking and the entrepreneurial activities in an ecosystem influence one another in a cycle that perpetuates and even sparks innovation. These interactions vary significantly across four types of business ecosystems-Orchestra, Creative Bazaar, Jam Central, and Mod Station-and determine the success and failures of new ventures and established companies. The nature and effect of the dynamic interactions in a business ecosystem can have profound implications for organizational success.

Globalization has become an imperative and is no longer avoidable as a strategic choice for family businesses. However, globalization strategies are far from the norm among small and medium-sized family enterprises. This article reviews the main drivers for globalization, highlights the distinct characteristics of family businesses that may enhance or constrain their global expansion, and provides a framework for strategically evaluating business capabilities and global market opportunities.

A new breed of multinationals from emerging markets is appearing in many industries. Western firms are wrong to underestimate, as they often do, the competitive threat from these firms. The discussion here highlights the non-traditional competitive advantages these firms use to win at home and abroad and shows how these firms use internationalization not only to exploit competitive advantage but to bolster it. The article concludes with suggestions for how Western managers should respond to the competitive threat from emerging market multinationals.

The 21st century has brought both opportunities and challenges in our global, boundary-less world. Importantly, managers face a dynamic and interconnected international environment. As such, 21st century managers need to consider the many opportunities and threats that Web 2.0, social media, and creative consumers present and the resulting respective shifts in loci of activity, power, and value. To help managers understand this new dispensation, we propose five axioms: (1) social media are always a function of the technology, culture, and government of a particular country or context; (2) local events rarely remain local; (3) global events are likely to be (re)interpreted locally; (4) creative consumers' actions and creations are also dependent on technology, culture, and government; and (5) technology is historically dependent. At the heart of these axioms is the managerial recommendation to continually stay up to date on technology, customers, and social media. To implement this managerial recommendation, marketers must truly engage customers, embrace technology, limit the power of bureaucracy, train and invest in their employees, and inform senior management about the opportunities of social media.

Direct selling, defined as a sales channel without a fixed retail location, was built on the premise of leveraging an individual's social networks. This industry is being redirected by embracing social media; here, the challenge lies in providing the benefits of face-to-face selling, augmented by social media. An examination of the Direct Selling News 'Global 100 Top Direct Sellers' found that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter represent the most widely employed social networks in the industry. While 76% of direct sellers utilize social media for promotional purposes, 55% use it for recruiting new distributors and 42% use it for reactive purposes. Consumers are the most popular target for social media, followed by distributors and communities. Social media has evolved as a driver of strategy, and will become even more important in the future. Improved customer relationships are developing by listening and reacting to concerns. The transparency created by social media is enhancing trust and ethical organizational cultures. Finally, consumer brand communities are emerging that increase brand value.

In today's rapidly changing and fast-paced media landscape, consumer attention is a rare and fractured commodity. Within this environment, marketing and branding must serve customers who are attending to multiple media simultaneously, while brand placement moves brands outside of advertisements and into incidental exposure. Some brands offer a strong, consistent, and focused brand identity on all consumer-facing fronts, from advertising to event promotion and retail environments. These brands can retain their effectiveness in this new media reality, as mere exposure is all that's required to activate their rich brand identity. At the same time, brand exposure effects illuminate the vast role of nonconscious attention and processing in consumer cognition and behavior. New research shows that even incidental exposure to a brand can alter consumer behavior in manners consistent with brand identity, producing effects which may persist outside of marketing contexts and occur even when the product is not purchased or consumed. These findings suggest that strong brand identities can retain effectiveness in the modern media environment, but further work is needed to explore their multi-dimensional effects on consumer life.

New product development (NPD) practitioners are keen to benchmark NPD practices because identifying any practice that is able to more efficiently and/or effectively deliver a new product could represent the difference between success and failure. A common purpose is therefore to identify NPD best practices with the expectation that companies will manifest and sustain these to augment their NPD efforts. To help in identifying such practices, we present a framework developed from prior benchmarking studies, a Delphi methodology with leading experts, and a survey involving over 300 NPD practitioners. The uniqueness of the framework lies in its ability to distinguish NPD practice across seven dimensions: Strategy, Research, Commercialization, Process, Project Climate, Company Culture, and Metrics/Performance Measurement. The framework is also unique in that across each dimension, poor NPD practices are listed as a starting point from which to improve, alongside best practices to which companies should aspire. To further assist in continuous improvement, an audit tool is derived from the framework, suggesting investigative questions that practitioners can ask to evaluate their company's NPD efforts. We conclude with general observations about NPD practice as the continued search for NPD best practice endures.

On October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs tragically died of cancer. The recently retired CEO of Apple Inc. was a legend: he had changed Apple from a company near bankruptcy to one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Moreover, he had revolutionized several industries in the process, including music, phones, and computer tablets. The 'Apple Inc. in 2012' case explores Steve Jobs' successes and the challenges facing his successor, Tim Cook. Could Cook continue to revitalize the Macintosh? With iPod sales declining for four straight years, would Cook be able to continue the iPhone's dominance of smartphones in the face of growing competition from companies such as Google and Samsung? Would Apple's newest creation, the iPad, continue to dominate the tablet market, or would the new competitors, ranging from Amazon to Samsung, steal, share and drive down profits? And could Apple thrive with Tim Cook rather than Steve Jobs at the helm?

In October 2006, Wikipedia was the largest volunteer-run on-line encyclopedia which could be freely read and edited by anyone with internet access. Within almost six years of its founding in 2001, the project had attracted hundreds of thousands of editors who had written over 1.2 million articles in English alone. Almost 10 percent of world-wide internet users accessed Wikipedia at least once a month. Just as Wales was stepping down, the editor community was collecting opinions to decide whether to close down an informal association of Wikipedia editors called Esperanza. Some Wikipedia editors, including some of the most prolific ones, really enjoyed the programs. Others firmly believed that Esperanza made editors socialize at the expense of creating content for the encyclopedia. As the editor community was making the final decision on what to do with Esperanza, observers could not help but wonder what effect the decision would have on the types of editors Wikipedia would attract and the content they would produce.

This case documents decision-making processes, organizational culture, and other contributors to NASA's failed Columbia mission in 2003. Addresses the question of how organizations should deal with "ambiguous threats" - weak signals of potential crisis - and explores why ambiguous threats are so challenging to manage.

Supplement for 612095.

Why do certain product and service experiences seem like magic, making them all but destined for success, while other items languish on store shelves? For a better understanding of that, perhaps there's no better place to turn to than the world of magic. Consider that some professional magicians are constantly under pressure to come up with new "effects" that will wow the audience and ultimately result in a transformational customer experience. As such, these magicians can't just be innovative on a whim; they must have a systematic way of doing so on a regular basis. The note provides some practical insights into a process of creation that is common to both the "tricks" that awe a spellbound audience, and what companies need to do to give customers unforgettable product and service experiences.

The note articulates the ways in which strong stakeholder-company relationships developed through corporate social responsibility initiatives and other types of social strategies deliver bottom line benefits. The analysis follows stakeholder logic models connecting the impact of CSR initiatives on a stakeholder group (employees, customers, investors, government, the community, and suppliers) and its effects on company revenues, costs and market value.

Spreadsheet Supplement for case UV2560.

Spreadsheet Supplement for case UV2563.

This is the eighth in a series of lecture notes which, if tied together into a textbook, might be entitled "Practical Regression." The purpose of the notes is to supplement the theoretical content of most statistics texts with practical advice based on nearly three decades of experience of the author, combined with over one hundred years of experience of colleagues who have offered guidance. As the title "Practical Regression" suggests, these notes are a guide to performing regression in practice.This technical note discusses maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). The note explains the concept of goodness of fit and why MLE is a powerful alternative to R-squared. The note follows a simple example that develops the intuition of MLE as well as the computation of the likelihood score and the algorithm used to estimate coefficients in MLE models.

As Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) CEO David Denison and SVP and Chief Investment Strategist Don Raymond embarked upon a review of CPPIB's investment strategy, they reflected on the changes that had been made in recent years. The Reference Portfolio played an integral role in allowing CPPIB to look through the labels of asset classes and to holistically consider each asset in terms of its underlying factors. In this case, which draws upon interviews with both Denison and Raymond, students will learn about the history of CPPIB, the genesis of the Reference Portfolio, and how the Reference Portfolio operates to guide CPPIB's high performing investment strategy.

As Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) CEO David Denison and SVP and Chief Investment Strategist Don Raymond embarked upon a review of CPPIB's investment strategy, they reflected on the changes that had been made in recent years. The Reference Portfolio played an integral role in allowing CPPIB to look through the labels of asset classes and to holistically consider each asset in terms of its underlying factors. In this case, which draws upon interviews with both Denison and Raymond, students will learn about the history of CPPIB, the genesis of the Reference Portfolio, and how the Reference Portfolio operates to guide CPPIB's high performing investment strategy.

As Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) CEO David Denison and SVP and Chief Investment Strategist Don Raymond embarked upon a review of CPPIB's investment strategy, they reflected on the changes that had been made in recent years. The Reference Portfolio played an integral role in allowing CPPIB to look through the labels of asset classes and to holistically consider each asset in terms of its underlying factors. In this case, which draws upon interviews with both Denison and Raymond, students will learn about the history of CPPIB, the genesis of the Reference Portfolio, and how the Reference Portfolio operates to guide CPPIB's high performing investment strategy.