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Zipline established the world's largest logistics network in Rwanda and Ghana by delivering medical supplies to hospitals via automated drones. The company is now looking to expand in the U.S. and partnered with Walmart to expand into home delivery. Zipline must navigate the U.S. regulatory space while prioritizing its growth opportunities domestically and abroad.

Before CVTE becomes a listed company, people rarely know its idiosyncratic management structure and process. None of the founders has ever served as CEO or Chair of the company, and none has ever been a majority shareholder. They have no need to clock in or out; they are accommodated in nearby apartments provided by the company; they have free canteen facilities; their children have access to high-quality company-run education; there is an internal medical center providing services not only to the employees, but to their families too. These amenities have been provided since the company began, even in the digital age and an era in which competition in the IT industry has been fierce. The key member of the founding team, Sun Yonghui, expresses the company philosophy thus: "We are committed to helping people around us succeed in their career and live a happy life..." It is this commitment that has shaped the unique management and organization of CVTE. The key positions are filled from a shortlist of candidates following a selection process in which all CVTE employees are involved to some extent and at some point. The company's unusual approach extends into product development and business development, growth and expansion. CVTE operates an internal incubation mechanism, under which more and more new businesses have emerged or developed. After the company's listing, the senior management team came under increasing pressure to sustain rapid growth. Given the limited growth space for traditional businesses, CVTE pursued new growth by continuously incubating new businesses, which placed higher demands on human capital. However, due to the uncertainty of profitability, new businesses often struggled to attract talent-specially sales personnel-unlike traditional businesses which had secured stable markets and enjoyed steady growth. Moreover, despite substantial initial investments, new businesses struggled to be profitable in the early stages. In addition, larger investment

LakeDiamond is a company founded in 2015 in Yverdon, close to Geneva, in Switzerland. Its goal was to leverage an industrialized method of producing high-purity diamonds through a process called "micro-wave chemical vapor deposition" (CVD). Such diamonds are much purer than diamonds obtained through mining, allowing for novel industrial uses for diamonds, such as in watchmaking or in developing military applications. An initial funding round allowed LakeDiamond to demonstrate its ability to grow such diamonds in an industrial reactor. In 2017, LakeDiamond's founder Pascal Gallo started seeking new funding to scale up the operation. At the same time, the hype around blockchains had started to drive a surge in startup funding through Initial Coin Offerings (ICO). As Gallo was reluctant to dilute his ownership and control over the venture, he decided to raise the money needed for LakeDiamond's expansion through an ICO. Despite significant press coverage regarding blockchains, ICOs remained at the time relatively niche investments. Therefore, to target a wider base of investors, Gallo partnered with Swissquote, a prominent Swiss online bank that was at the forefront in offering to layman investors access to crypto-currencies. The ICO did raise sufficient funds for new reactors to be purchases and production to start. However, LakeDiamond's sales never really picked up afterwards and by early 2020 the company was filing for bankruptcy. Framed from the perspective of a small investor assessing the opportunity of investing in LakeDiamond's ICO, the case is based on publicly released information by the company, and especially on its ICO. Extensive interviews with ICO experts who assessed the LakeDiamond fundraising at the time were also conducted.

In January 2020, India-based KhataBook, a digital ledger app for small businesses, is led by CEO Ravish Naresh, as his team faces a series of dilemmas regarding where to focus next.

The case tells the story of Dell Technologies and its efforts to revitalize its value proposition and escape a commodity trap by acquiring EMC for $67 billion-the largest tech acquisition in history. It also shows the deeply intertwined connections between a company's business strategy and its go-to-market operations. Michael Dell founded Dell Inc. in 1984 to assemble PCs. The company quickly became the market share leader by the end of the century. By 2008 (before the recession), Dell had expanded into servers, networking and storage, as well as services. Still, the hardware market was beginning to commoditize, with the trend accelerating after the recession. EMC, founded in 1979, had a similar story. It became the dominant player in data storage through early 2000 only to find that new technologies and nimble competitors were putting its business under severe commodity pressure by the turn of the century. Thus in 2015, when Dell made a $67 billion acquisition of EMC, many knowledgeable IT industry observers found it hard to comprehend the logic of two commodity/hardware players coming together. By then, most enterprises, large and small, were eyeing digital transformation. Cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud seemed to be serving their needs. Thus Michael Dell had to carefully construct a strategic position for the newly constituted Dell company in the rapidly evolving IT market space. In addition, Dell and EMC also had to decide how to merge their Go-to-Market operations to gain the synergies promised by the merger. Dell had over 365,000 customers and EMC nearly 430,000. Dell had 17,000 salespeople and EMC, 7,000. Each had over 10,000 channel partners. Adding a wrinkle to the merger was a third actor, VMware, an independently listed cloud software company, 80% owned by the new Dell Technologies entity. Integrating their software capability would be an exciting opportunity and a challenge.

Daily Table is a case about a grocery chain with two outposts in Boston neighborhoods Dorchester and Roxbury. Its mission is to provide healthy food at lower prices to people in lower-income neighborhoods. The case explores Daily Table's responsibility to its employees during the COVID-19 pandemic amid a series of changes to wages.

By 2020, Bridge International Academies and its "school in a box" model had achieved great scale. By leveraging digital technology and public-private partnerships, they had reached one million children across Africa and India through hundreds of schools. However, the organization encountered controversy as well as unexpected challenges resulting from COVID-19.

Category creation is the holy grail in business, but more often than not, the very companies that establish lucrative new markets don't end up being the category kings. Why? Many executives undermine their own ventures standing by misinterpreting and misfiring on strategies considered fundamental to creating new categories. Here, the authors spell out three common mistakes that turn would-be kings into commoners in the categories they create.

This leadership case package, a written case with a podcast supplement, describes the biggest challenges to confront four-star Admiral James G. Stavridis during two of his tours of duty-one as commander of U.S. Southern Command, or "SouthCom," the U.S. Defense Department's regional command for Central America, South America, and parts of the Caribbean) and one as the military commander of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Stavridis came to SouthCom with a reform agenda. Understanding that he had a short window to act, he tried to impose certain cultural and organizational changes on the Command, relying on traditional military top-down compliance. He got compliance-but only temporarily; his reforms were rolled back as soon as he left the Command. Learning from this disappointment, Stavridis took a very different approach at NATO. Appointed Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in 2009, Stavridis immediately confronted a crisis: the U.S.-led Afghan mission was failing and losing support from NATO leaders. What's more, NATO was not a top-down organization. Decisions were made by consensus-and skills of persuasion were consequently paramount. The written case relates Stavridis' reflections about the challenges he faced in SouthCom and at NATO, and the strategies he employed to address them. A 20-minute podcast supplement ("Reflections on the Inner Life of a Leader: Adm James Stavridis in Conversation with Prof. Robert Wilkinson," transcript available) features a more general discussion about tricky challenges in leadership-such as how to deal with a person with whom you deeply disagree; how to structure key processes to gain agreement, how to keep emotions in check in difficult moments; and what personal practices help to keep an extraordinarily demanding life in balance. Case Number 2195.0

When the COVID pandemic hit developed economies in full swing in the spring of 2020, companies scrambled to make sense of the implications for their business models. In most cases, reactions were defensive, aimed at ensuring the survival of the firm to the end of the epidemics. Cimpress, better known for its B2C brand Vistaprint, the world leader in e-printing, took a very different stand: it resorted to very creative finance to not only address the downside of the crisis (making sure it raised enough capital to weather the likely difficult quarters and renegotiating preventively loan covenants that could get breached in the worse scenarios from a position of strength) but also to possibly take advantages of emerging M&A opportunities. Competitors in less favorable financial shape would likely be put in situations of distress by the crisis: this could create extremely interesting opportunities for Cimpress. This aggressive use of refinancing during times of crisis for both risk mitigation and opportunistic gains is discussed.

Founded in 2015, Guild Education is an education marketplace that connects employers and universities to provide employees with 'education as a benefit.' The Denver-based company is transforming traditional tuition assistance programs by facilitating direct payment by the employer to the academic institution and by supporting students with coaching and advising. By October 2020, Guild had gained market traction and demonstrated impressive results. Rachel Carlson, CEO and cofounder of Guild, must decide how to manage the company's future growth. She believes there is great potential within its core education marketplace to expand the network of academic institutions and portfolio of company partners. Carlson also envisions extending the business model and entering the career placement market. To successfully do that, she needs to find the same incentive alignment in these new businesses as in Guild's core education platform. Would it be possible to find a solution that would result in a win-win outcome for all?

This case is an epilogue to "Wilderness Safaris: Impact Investing and Ecotourism Conservation in Africa" (2-321-020), which ends with the emergence of the pandemic in March 2020. The final discussion area for that case can be "What should Wilderness Safari CEO Keith Vincent do to confront the challenges of the pandemic?" This case documents, in the CEO's own words, what actions and plans Vincent and the company had taken or formulated as of July 2020. The areas covered are: Governance and Decision Making, Cash Management, People, Communities, Travel Agencies and Customers, Conservation, Reopening, and Investor Reactions and Future Projects. The case is only five pages, so it could be used as an in-class handout after the discussion of the previous case, with the follow-up class discussion taking place then, if sufficient time is available, or in the subsequent class. The focus of the discussion is on the students' analysis and evaluation of Vincent's actions and plans. The case particularly offers learning opportunities for risk assessment, leadership, and management in crisis situations.

In early January 2019, the founders of STMNT (pronounced "statement") a Canadian peer-to-peer clothing rental platform, were reviewing the performance of their venture. The sisters had formally launched STMNT in November 2018 and wondered whether they had implemented the right business model for their venture or if they needed to pivot. The rental transaction process was taking too long for customers and required too much of the founders' time to make scaling up a possibility. The sisters needed to take stock of their progress to date and chart the next steps for their venture.

Kaffee Kostuum is a short case that introduces inventory and supply chain management and its financial impact. The case provides a simple context for examining basic inventory performance measures to improve operational, as well as financial, performance. The case has three parts: (1) analyzing reordering decisions, leading to the economic order quantity (EOQ) model and corresponding cycle stock levels; (2) investigating the effect of demand uncertainty, leading to the concept of safety stock; (3) and analyzing the impact of various supply-chain redesign initiatives, such as product rationalization, reshoring, and physical centralization, to reduce inventories. The case shows how the EOQ model can be applied in a multiproduct environment, and it relates safety stocks to forecast accuracy. Indeed, although the classic formula for safety stock setting uses standard deviation in demand, it is, in essence, the forecast error that drives the need for safety stocks. The case also facilitates the understanding of the trade-offs inherent in defining an operations and supply chain strategy. It shows that it is difficult to compete in all dimensions simultaneously (here: variety, price, and responsiveness) while making a profit. One might have to choose which dimension to give up in favor of more focus and improved financial performance.

The pandemic is forcing many B2B companies to cut costs, but conventional approaches to cost reduction may not serve them well. Instead, leaders should intensify their focus on customers by identifying the small, select group of customer value drivers in their companies. They then should cut costs by reducing value-added waste, managing customer acquisition and retention more effectively, and prioritizing and eliminating strategic initiatives that don't align well with customer value.

Set in April 2020, with the backdrop of the Covid 19 pandemic, the case talks about the opportunities for visual search in the online retail market segment and beyond. Visense is a visual search software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions provider with a pay-as-you-use, API based, market solution that focuses on the retail segment. Visenze had experienced a spike of about 30% in the usage of its solutions between January to April 2020. Predominantly, usage growth had extended across all item categories, with footwear, apparel and jewellery products being the top gainers. The presumed understanding from this trend was that with more time in hand for home browsing during the pandemic, consumers were exposed to more visual inspirations and objects of desire. This inclination had led them to explore ecommerce websites increasingly, paving a direct path to progressive sales conversions. Moreover, consumers had started to demand shorter purchase journeys, in the quest for a frictionless ecommerce experience. While Generation Y and Generation Z were the major users of ecommerce and visual search, older generations (Generation X and Baby Boomers) had also started to increasingly use online channels of shopping. Visual search was firmly in a sweet spot with the promise of collapsing the conversion process from image to purchase in a few seconds. Amidst such market conditions, Oliver Tan, co-founder of Visenze, wondered if his firm required a new market strategy to tap on the latest opportunities. Should Visenze continue to focus on the retail segment? Should it target older consumers in the retail segment? Will its technology need to be enhanced to target the new consumer segment?

The Lee family, whose Hong Kong-based Lee Kum Kee company has established itself as a legend within the Chinese and Asian sauce world, sets out to create a daring new vision of what family legacy means. With the family business having been established in 1888, and by 2020 showing no signs of slowing down, the members of the third, fourth, and fifth generations sit down to hash out exactly what it means to be in the family. To this end, they realize that what they need is not a simple one- or two-step succession plan, but a 1,000 Year Plan to guide family governance and values over the next millennium. This grand idea, replete with lofty goals, comes with all types of questions as each generation of the family brings their own perspective. What should those goals be? How can one generation possibly expect to anticipate the needs of the next? Is it right to predetermine the outcomes of a family so far in advance? As the Lee family addresses these questions, they shed light on the more familiar questions about legacy, values, and preparing for the future. Do these same questions not apply even in the case of one generation planning for the next? If a family believes in its ability to hold fast against the chaos of the world, why not plan for the entire future? Each member of the Lee family meets these ideas with their own mix of practical and idealistic solutions, and their landmark document generates a battery of criteria against which other families may compare their own ideas of legacy.

This article examines the "multiunit back-end problem" of open innovation based on a case study of the Banque Populaire Caisse d'Epargne (BPCE) Group, a large French bank with two business units. The multiunit back-end problem occurs when internal business units who consider themselves rivals are asked to collaborate for the success of an open innovation initiative. BPCE failed several times to use external startups to accelerate its digital transformation due to rivalry between its internal business units. This article presents guidelines that firms with rival business units can use to align their front-end and back-end when working with startups to accelerate their digital transformation program.

In 2019, Netflix had 167 million subscribers globally and offered thousands of television shows and movies on its streaming application, a growing proportion of which it produced itself. Media giants, who for years had valued the relationship with Netflix because it provided an additional outlet, began to re-evaluate their own (make) versus contract (buy) distribution decision. Leveraging acquisitions, technology investments, and vast content libraries, they entered the streaming wars by going direct to consumers. Was Netflix vulnerable in head-to-head competition in an increasingly fragmented market? How should it respond to entry by its former partners?