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In 2016, Swedish entrepreneurs Carl-Erik Lagercrantz and Peter Carlsson founded an electric battery company called Northvolt with the dual goals of creating a company to address climate change and bringing battery manufacture to Europe. Northvolt, which succeeded in building a "gigafactory" near the arctic circle in Sweden, was soon on track to become one of the largest and most sustainable battery manufacturers in the world. But, building "the world's greenest battery" to fight climate change was a difficult-and perhaps unrealistic-goal. How much could Northvolt really contribute to the European effort against society's greatest challenge?

Urban Company (UC) was a digital labour platform that connected consumers with service providers (referred to as "partners" by UC) for home services such as plumbing, painting, and beauty and salon services. UC was ranked as the top digital platform company in India in the Fairwork India Ratings in 2020, but on October 10, 2021, the company met with a protest by its women partners from the beauty and salon segment. Two months later, on December 20, it faced another protest from its partners for unfair work practices. UC had shown a stellar performance in 2020, registering a 146 per cent increase in its revenue. However, the company was unprofitable, and its losses inflated further in 2021. Accommodating the partners' demands might deteriorate the company's bottom line further and might adversely impact the success of its initial public offering, planned for 2023. Additionally, continued unrest by the women partners might tarnish the company's image, adversely affecting its rating in Fairwork's annual survey. There was also a possibility that the government might impose stricter norms for the functioning of digital platforms. What should the company do to appease the protesters while also protecting its bottom line?

Products and services that claim to provide business insights based on brain research are proliferating, but some of these applications may be of limited value. This article educates managers on some underlying issues with translating neuroscience findings into information that's useful for business.

This case is a 2-party deal-making negotiation regarding the sale and purchase of IT solutions involving hardware, software and maintenance services. The focus is on the practical application of interest-based negotiation theory and concepts. The facts of the case provide multiple opportunities for generating creative solutions and employing strategic communication techniques. The case is also designed to illustrate the use of alternatives and BATNA as objective and realistic measures of negotiation success.

This case is a 2-party deal-making negotiation regarding the sale and purchase of IT solutions involving hardware, software and maintenance services. The focus is on the practical application of interest-based negotiation theory and concepts. The facts of the case provide multiple opportunities for generating creative solutions and employing strategic communication techniques. The case is also designed to illustrate the use of alternatives and BATNA as objective and realistic measures of negotiation success.

In December 2021, Forest Essentials opened its one hundredth store in India and a store in the United Kingdom; the Indian home-grown luxury Ayurveda brand had rapid expansion plans despite the obstacles it faced. Twenty-one years earlier, the company's founder, liberal arts graduate Mira Kulkarni, converted the six-thousand-year-old science of Ayurveda into bottles and jars of luxurious skin-care and hair-care products, making Forest Essentials an aspirational luxury brand. Forest Essentials had grown to establish a robust presence in five categories-skin care, hair care, wellness, health, and makeup-while acquiring a large and loyal customer base in India. The company was meticulous about the quality of its ingredients and put great effort into sourcing high-quality ingredients from all over India; however, easy access to cheaper Ayurveda-based brands and the entry and availability of international wellness brands into the Indian market threatened Forest Essentials' customer retention.<br><br>Kulkarni and her son, Samrath Bedi, needed to sustain the growth of Forest Essentials across digital and physical channels in India's cluttered beauty and wellness market, with a price-sensitive customer base, while also growing the brand's presence in cross-cultural markets overseas. Could they pursue growth in both marketspaces consistently? Should Kulkarni and Bedi focus on engaging with their existing and potential customers in India, or should they aim to establish their luxury brand in international markets?

In January 2022, the leaders of the Canadian charity organization International Needs Canada recognized that individual child sponsorship had serious flaws and was not as impactful as it once had been. They sought to move donors from individual child sponsorship to the more beneficial group sponsorship model. The director of communications and marketing had to determine which donor group to target as he launched the program. As the new model could disrupt the industry. The organization also had to consider the reaction of much larger competitors. Furthermore, International Needs Canada was not replacing its own individual child sponsorship model with group sponsorship; instead, both programs would run simultaneously.

Mahindra Rural Housing Finance Limited (Mahindra Home Finance), a rapidly growing non-banking financial corporation (NBFC) in India, was on the cusp of a historic decision: Should the organization be among India's first NBFCs to launch a machine-learning-led predictive platform that aimed to revolutionize the way loans were disbursed in rural India? Mahindra Home Finance had a strong focus on social impact, and the firm had to decide whether to take this giant leap. If successful, the project might become a beacon for many such businesses trying to create positive change across communities, as it would reduce the "risk" involved in lending to a segment that was traditionally shunned by the formal banking system. The decision was important-both to the company and to the industry as a whole. Was it time for the field of sustainability to embrace machine learning?

Michael Katchen, chief executive officer and co-founder of Wealthsimple Technologies Inc. (Wealthsimple), made history when his company launched Canada's first regulated cryptocurrency exchange in 2020. By designing a platform complying with regulations, Wealthsimple provided Canadians with a safer and more secure platform to invest in cryptocurrency, thereby creating a point of differentiation and source of competitive advantage for the company. However, the perceived risks of cryptocurrency-based products meant that Wealthsimple's pivot into cryptocurrency had not been met with unanimous support, with some industry commentators claiming that Wealthsimple's strategy to enter cryptocurrency and the higher transaction fees that followed stood in stark contrast to the low-risk investment strategy and principle of wealth democratization upon which Katchen had founded the company. In 2022, with an aim to grow its user base, Wealthsimple had to consider whether to continue to expand in the Canadian cryptocurrency industry. Could it achieve its growth objectives by expanding its crypto offerings, or should it explore alternatives outside the sector?

In 2022, Cher Wang, CEO and Chairwoman of HTC, was focused on the company's pivot to virtual reality and the metaverse. Growing competition in consumer virtual reality from Meta, Sony, and Chinese headset manufacturers had altered the competitive landscape since 2017. This supplement updates the case "HTC and Virtual Reality" (718-421).

A French wine estate faced a 25% tariff on its U.S. exports following a multi-decade-long EU-U.S. trade dispute in the aerospace industry.

Founded by the husband and wife team of Anshu and Meenakshi Gupta in 1999, Goonj had quickly emerged as one of the leading disaster relief and rural development organizations in India. Their main mode of development was through providing a clothing kit to the village families in return for development work (Cloth for Work). As Covid-19 struck India in March 2020, the organization pivoted its operational model to considerably broaden its set of activities in the field. In 2022 after nearly 70% of the country had been vaccinated against Covid-19, and with a semblance of normalcy returning, Anshu Gupta had to consider the future of the organization and its strategy, having raised twice the amount of funds ($20 million) as in the previous years.

This case provides a brief update (2019-2022) on the rise and fall of JUUL Labs, the maker of the popular JUUL e-cigarette.

Developing AI systems based on neural networks can require large volumes of labeled training data, which can be hard to obtain in some settings. New techniques for reducing the number of labeled examples needed to build accurate models are now emerging to address this problem. These approaches encompass ways to transfer models across related problems and to pretrain models with unlabeled data. They also include emerging best practices around data-centric artificial intelligence.

The case is about Sea Limited (NYSE: SE), once Southeast Asia's most valuable listed company with a market capitalisation of over USD231 billion in October 2021. The company began as an online game distribution platform, and quickly evolved into a digital services ecosystem with an offering that included e-commerce and digital financial services. Being mobile-centric and focusing on emerging markets are at the core of Sea Limited's business model. In two post IPO fundraisings in December 2020 and in September 2021, it had amassed close to USD10 billion from the market. Investors were bullish towards Sea's prospects for growth. Yet, the global macro socio-economic conditions were challenging. Geopolitical tension between the US and China is increasing. Supply chains are disrupted. Interest rates are climbing, and the threat of global recession looms large. The case asks, under such conditions, how can Sea Limited address these challenges and realise its potential for further growth?

Daily Crunch was a sprouted-nut brand that launched in March 2020 during the beginning of a global pandemic. The co-founder and chief executive officer of Daily Crunch was responsible for determining the company's marketing and business strategy in 2021. In this pivotal time for a new company, a multitude of avenues needed to be explored, such as deciding whether to focus on a digital or an in-person marketing strategy; examining new marketing opportunities in a new shopping environment; launching new products, flavours, or sizes; and deciding whether to focus primarily on direct-to-consumer sales through e-commerce. Daily Crunch had several key objectives-namely, increasing brand awareness and sales, and expanding distribution. However, its key objective was to survive as a start-up during a global pandemic.

Spreadsheet Supplement for Case W28617

Alibaba Group Holding Limited is an operator of online mobile marketplaces in retail and wholesale trade. They are a multinational technology conglomerate that has a total of 115 subsidiaries with 785 companies. Some notable platforms owned by Alibaba include Taobao, Tmall, Aliexpress and Lazada. The company is involved in logistics, retail and wholesale, local consumer businesses, cloud services including network virtualization services, large scale computing, security and big data analytics. They also partake in innovation initiatives and digital media and entertainment. Their headquarters is located in China. They also have offices located in several countries around the world including Singapore, India, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US). Over the past decade, Alibaba has seen exponential revenue growth. Understanding Jack Ma's (co-founder and former executive chairman of Alibaba Group) leadership behaviours and Alibaba's organizational culture enabled us to appreciate how the group managed complex and intertwined issues during his tenure. Now that the baton has been passed to succeeding Chairman and Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang, the world's eyes have turned to Zhang to witness how he leverages on Alibaba's current position and sustains its business operations and rapid growth.