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At the end of 2018, Applied faced questions of stakeholder management and scale. Glazebrook wanted clients to get rid of CVs altogether. To do this, they would have to help hiring managers and recruiters easily build task-based assessments of the skills that their positions required. Applied used several strategies to encourage clients to rely more strongly on skills assessments.

This case traces the rise of James Conant from a working-class neighborhood in Boston to president of Harvard University. The case describes how Conant, as a young man interested in chemistry and physics, embarks on studies to build his academic credentials and the pathbreaking changes that he makes to admissions criteria and curriculums while president of Harvard. The case also describes his pivotal role in developing the atomic bomb that ended World War II. Students will learn how James Conant navigated life's choices to leave a lasting impact on the world.

In January 2020, Founders Factory (FF) Executive Chairman Brent Hoberman and CEO Henry Lane Fox were considering FF's expansion strategy. FF operated as a venture capital (VC) fund built around an accelerator and incubator, and organized around sectors within technology innovation-media, education, beauty, travel, finance, home & hygiene, AI & big data, and retail. FF sought a quasi-exclusive corporate partner to fund investments in each sector. By 2020, FF had 11 partners across 9 sectors; it had raised more than £280 million and launched nearly 100 startups. FF had three offices in addition to its London headquarters-in Johannesburg, Paris, and New York City. Each was set up as an independent operating company with roughly the same ownership structure. Deploying a "franchising" model limited FF London's financial risk; it also enabled each satellite office to leverage FF's reputation and resources while operating with a fair degree of autonomy. Hoberman and Lane Fox were considering other approaches to adding their next international office. With those thoughts in mind, the pair were meeting with their leadership team to address a series of questions related to organizational design: should they maintain their current ownership and operating structure, and continue to establish each new office as its own operating company? Or should they pursue an expansion strategy with a centralized approach and scale by adopting a more traditional corporate structure?

The case opens in November 2020 as Eyad Alkassar and Mahmoud Fouz, co-founders of Iran's first and leading ride-hailing platform, Snapp, eagerly await the results of the U.S. presidential elections. The case takes us through the challenging times between November 2019 and November 2020, as the confounders navigated Snapp through an increasingly challenging environment of sanctions, stricter restrictions of big tech companies, and since February 2020, through the operational difficulties exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that shook Iran to its core. The case highlights the challenges of operating under sanctions and the different ways the co-founders try to find to keep Snapp alive and asks how the U.S. election results could change the environment in which Snapp operates, as the two presidential candidates have vastly different approaches to their policy to Iran.

Supplement to case 720030

Provides an overview of the U.S. home improvement sector in 2020, reviewing sources of growth in the decade ending in 2020, with special attention to the impact of COVID-19 on market leaders Home Depot and Lowe's and the spike in online revenues for both. Also noted are ongoing supply chain and efficiency improvements at Home Depot, and ongoing turnaround efforts by African American CEO Marv Ellison at Lowe's.

The Pay As You Go solar power company in East Africa had sales of $71 million in 2019. It wished to grow to $300 million by 2025. M-KOPA, founded by three entrepreneurs in 2011, had grown nicely in Kenya and Uganda to reach nearly 750,000 households with an innovative direct sales force model. Jesse Moore, the founder, wished to scale the company through organic growth as well as geographical expansion into Nigeria. The strategy called for decisions on product/service offerings and go-to-market options. On the product side the company had increasingly migrated to larger in-home connected electronic and electrical devices. It had to decide how much further to go. On the go-to-market side its innovative Direct Service Representative network was hard to create and manage, and it had to think if there were viable alternatives.

Companies whose executives are digitally savvy outperform other companies on growth and valuation by large margins. But less than 10% of companies have digitally savvy top teams in place. Research from the MIT Sloan School of Management's Center for Information Systems Research describes the level of digital savviness found in top teams, the business value it delivers, and the actions you can take to increase the digital savviness of your company's executives.

In early April 2020, COVID-19 began impacting trade, commerce, and industry globally. The founder and president of Innovative Automation Inc., a custom machine builder in the small and medium enterprise sector in Ontario, Canada, was facing two main dilemmas. First, how should he ensure that the internal channels of communication at the company remain open as its employees-like everyone in the rest of the province and indeed the rest of the world-dealt with a largely unknown virus? Second, how should the company enforce social distancing-made mandatory by the provincial government in its bid to contain the spread of the virus-at its manufacturing facility?

In August 2004, Interbolsa's risk management committee had to decide upon a request to double the authorized quota for repurchase agreements (repos) on Interbolsa's own stock. Two months earlier, Jorge Arabia had joined Interbolsa, the largest stock brokerage firm in Colombia, as CFO. In this role, he had a seat in the risk management committee. Arabia had noticed that these repos carried large and diverse risks, not only for the firm but also for other stakeholders, that would lead to an eventual solvency crisis if they were not contained. And the repo business as conducted at Interbolsa entailed conflicts of interest, violated fiduciary duty to the firm's clients, and relied upon lax reporting practices to make transacted volumes meet limits imposed by regulation. However, this business was an important source of revenue for Interbolsa's majority shareholders, including the firm's CEO. The field-based A case asks students what they could do if they were in Arabia's role and wanted to stop the repo time-bomb. Students must create an action plan, based on information available in the case, aimed at preventing further increases in the repo quota. In the B case, the two faculty case authors reflect upon the problem and discuss what they think Arabia could have done to try to prevent the increase in repo operations.

In August 2004, Interbolsa's risk management committee had to decide upon a request to double the authorized quota for repurchase agreements (repos) on Interbolsa's own stock. Two months earlier, Jorge Arabia had joined Interbolsa, the largest stock brokerage firm in Colombia, as CFO. In this role, he had a seat in the risk management committee. Arabia had noticed that these repos carried large and diverse risks, not only for the firm but also for other stakeholders, that would lead to an eventual solvency crisis if they were not contained. And the repo business as conducted at Interbolsa entailed conflicts of interest, violated fiduciary duty to the firm's clients, and relied upon lax reporting practices to make transacted volumes meet limits imposed by regulation. However, this business was an important source of revenue for Interbolsa's majority shareholders, including the firm's CEO. The field-based A case asks students what they could do if they were in Arabia's role and wanted to stop the repo time-bomb. Students must create an action plan, based on information available in the case, aimed at preventing further increases in the repo quota. In this B case, the two faculty case authors reflect upon the problem and discuss what they think Arabia could have done to try to prevent the increase in repo operations.

In 2019, the pricing manager at the US manufacturing facility for Sparrow GmbH (Sparrow), a chemical manufacturer based in Germany, asked the project manager at Roland Berger, a global management consulting firm, to provide her opinion on the pricing for Sparrow's bid on a basic chemicals contract with Impendium Chemicals. The basic chemicals industry was a highly competitive and commoditized environment; as a result, pricing decisions with respect to formulating bids were very important. Although the company had traditionally relied on the estimates of salespersons for pricing, it needed to develop a more refined approach to its pricing strategy. The project manager had to decide which costing method was most appropriate for this contract and recommend a price for the bid.

Dasra, a pioneer in the Indian Strategic Philanthropy space founded by a husband and wife team, had grown and evolved with the fast changing philanthropy scene in India. By 2017 it had managed to raise nearly $100 million of new capital for NGOs and Nonprofits in India. At the same time, the rapid growth demanded internal changes that stretched the organization and raised questions regarding structures, systems and capabilities.

In February 2018, Nayana Mawilmada (Nayana), investment head for the Sri Lankan government's ambitious $40 billion Megapolis project, must weigh an attractive job offer to move from the public sector to the private sector. A massive government project aimed at improving the lives of 5.8 million people living in and around Colombo, the Megapolis was stalled for many years until Nayana took on a leadership role. The case documents what he has learned to do to move things forward across a complex web of stakeholders (vying government agencies, politicians, funding institutions, academic experts, the press, users, and the general public). Just as the project gains official approval and is set to move to actual implementation, Nayana faces a career choice. Alongside that choice, students must determine whether Nayana has been successful or not.

The skills needed in many roles are continually changing--and sources of talent are too. PLUS a silver lining for female founders, bankruptcy in the time of Covid, the psychology of jargon, and more.

Is your transformative company program having trouble getting traction? New research from Europe suggests that a little humor might propel it forward.

The case guides students to resolve a number of questions when embracing a new technology, with a focus on Blockchain, a radical new technology that has attracted a lot of hype although the adoption rate remains low among firms. Consequently, there are few successful business applications and many challenges, uncertainties and risks to be overcome. The case emphasizes two aspects of Blockchain. How to adapt a business's involvement with the technology to (i) the pattern of its development over time, (ii) to the geographic concentration of investment and development, certain locations being at the hub of development. As a framework for these issues, the case considers a start-up entrepreneur based in Paris as a means to help students/executives consider their own context. Paris is not at the forefront of Blockchain development, but neither is it on the periphery - which should inform their views of whether and how to embrace the technology. The case prompts participants to think about non-crypto-currency-related applications, and how far their options re influenced by the uncertain path of technology development and their own location in the broader global and local network. The issues addressed in the case also apply more generally to executives in large firms considering investment in emerging technologies such as Blockchain.

In 2019, David Behrends, head of Trading and Managing Partner at Sucafina, founded and launched Farmer Connect, a blockchain-based end-to-end transparent solution for the coffee trading industry. Following its successful launch, the tool needs to scale, which means bringing the whole coffee 'ecosystem' on board, analyzing the future structure of Farmer Connect in relation to Sucafina, resolving issues of fundraising and partnerships, as well as incorporating key learnings from a 2020 pilot in Brazil. The case follows the intrapreneurial journey of David, Farmer Connect and Sucafina. It puts managers in the driving seat, asking them to reflect on what it means to create value through innovation, and to disrupt an industry using technology to create positive social impact.

Many companies are unable to consistently gain business value from their investments in big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. A study of the data science functions and initiatives in three of India's largest private-sector banks identified five obstacles to successful data science projects and suggests remedies that can help companies obtain more benefit from their data science investments.