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Supplements the (A) case.

Supplements the (A) case.

Komia Holdings SA is the second largest fixed-telephone operator in Poland. The CEO must decide whether the company should participate in the government bidding process to acquire an operating license for the third-generation (3G) wireless telecommunications in Poland. This technology will allow the company to offer high-speed Internet access as well as many promising multimedia services on mobile handsets. He must consider his company's strategy, competition from other operators, and several political debates about the bidding process that has lead to changes in the way the process is handled.

This case describes one of the greatest LBO failures of the 1990s. It presents an overview of the difficulties two experienced buyout sponsors were forced to deal with.

Supplements the (A) case.

Jamcracker, a well-financed, young company is attempting to transform how IT services are delivered during a period of high-tech pessimism. Jamcracker is trying to popularize an "application service provider" (ASP) model of service delivery that will, if successful, take the industry to a new level of vertically disintegrated maturity. But it is a bold concept that it is selling to a cautious group of prospective buyers. The case poses questions about how to operationalize and sell the company's new service concept.

Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) is a key component of the security infrastructure for Microsoft--the large, internationally known software manufacturer. A hacker has informed the program manager of the center of potentially damaging security vulnerability in a piece of Microsoft's Internet server software. Neither the hacker nor MSRC knows for sure whether systems using the software have been compromised, but they do know that the vulnerability has been discussed in hacker news groups. The program manager must determine who should be told, what needs to be done, and when. This case looks at the strategy to solve the problems and deal with any possible public relations issues that arise from it.

Supplements the (A) case.

Supplements the (A) case.

Team-based exercise designed to illustrate the use of the Internet directly by executives. Requires going on the Internet to search for information required to construct a high-tech investment portfolio.

Confronted by a business proposal that is remarkably similar to a project recently financed by a sister office, venture capitalist Monique LeMieux ponders what she should do.

Introduces students to the wide variety of family business definitions in literature today. Also reviews prominent typologies of family business systems.

In mid-2000, United Technologies Corporation (UTC) was two years into a supplier development integration program. The major focus of this initiative was to strengthen relationships with "key" suppliers to fully leverage the supply chain. The qualities sought in the relationships included long-term commitments, confidential information sharing, cooperative continuous improvement efforts, and sharing risks and rewards. Both the nature of these relationships and the associated behaviors were new for UTC and represented a significant challenge. UTC believed it was making progress moving from supplier rationalization toward supplier integration. However, some UTC suppliers believed that they were not receiving any of the gains from these initiatives and viewed UTC as often focused only on cost cutting. UTC's Global Supply Management organization hoped to investigate individual supplier relationships and address supplier concerns. The objective was to assist high-potential suppliers so that they could improve their performance and, at the same time, align better with UTC's goals for a more productive and less costly set of reliable supply chain partners.

By the summer of 2001, Japan's economy had been generally stagnant for nearly 10 years--since the collapse of the bubble economy in 1990-91. The development strategy that drove the nation during earlier decades was fulfilled, and by 1989 Japan's GDP per capita exceeded that of the United States. Facing another downturn, Prime Minister Koizumi seemed ready politically to undertake real change. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

Paula Evans is in her second year as principal of the only high school in Cambridge, MA. Her mandate when she arrived was to redesign the high school so that long-standing inequities in academic achievement rates across race and socioeconomic class were removed. In her first year, she succeeded in obtaining approval for her proposed redesign and completing the physical and administrative restructuring of the high school. Now in her second year, the reforms in how teachers teach and how the school operates are fully under way. From early indications, she and her hand-picked leadership team are moving the school in the desired direction. But the school committee has just made a policy decision that Evans and her team believe will undo all of the redesign efforts that have been made thus far. Evans has threatened to resign and now ponders what she will tell her leadership team and the faculty the next day.

Supplements the (A) case.

Performance measurement is an important part of supply chain management. Timely, accurate, and detailed performance monitoring can allow a company to detect problems early, diagnose causes of problems, and come up with interventions promptly. SeeCommerce provides an Internet-based solution so that companies in a supply chain can have visibility of performance measures throughout the supply chain. This case describes the value proposition that SeeCommerce creates through its solutions and how the Mopar Division of DaimlerChrysler was able to make use of the solutions to improve greatly the efficiency and customer service of service parts operations at DaimlerChrysler.

NASDAQ's mission "to facilitate capital formation" is threatened by the emergence of Electronic Communication Networks, which are not as heavily regulated by the SEC. This case reviews the development of NASDAQ and its evolution from a loose network of broker-dealers through to its proposed SuperMontage. SuperMontage is a centralized order book, where multiple parties can place orders (both buy and sell) for the stocks they wish to trade and where entire supply and demand curves can be displayed. To understand the context, students will learn about the structure of the capital markets and why it concerns regulators and investors.

The economics of the Internet are often tied to determining the value of a communications network. However, there are several different kinds of communications networks, each with their own method of valuation. These networks are named by the laws that describe their valuation: Sarnoff's, Metcalfe's, and Reed's. This note describes each network type and its method of valuation.