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In May 2018, the De Beers Group shocked the diamond industry when it announced it was launching a new fashion jewelry brand of laboratory-grown (synthetic) diamonds. The reaction was swift as people sought to understand the company's motivations: was it a "huge gamble" or a "Machiavellian masterstroke"? What was the objective of the new product launch, would it succeed, and how would this new business affect the Group's core business of selling natural (mined) diamonds? This case is intended to be used in conjunction with and to follow a related HBS case: The De Beers Group: Exploring the Diamond Reselling Opportunity (HBS #717-430).

This case follows Enfoca, Peru's largest local private equity firm and its portfolio company Maestro, a leading player in Peru's hardware retail market. Peru's GDP growth between 2008 and 2014 was the highest of any Latin American country. Growth of Peruvian middle class led to a wide array of investment opportunities, particularly in industries such as housing, construction, and home improvement. While the post-recession years were very good for Maestro, due to the market's small size, Enfoca could not escape some of the longstanding specificities of the Peruvian private capital market, namely, limited exit and new investment opportunities. As Enfoca faced an aging fund, its leadership team began considering alternatives to the traditional private equity fund model. This case presents an example of a local private equity firm operating in a small emerging market with relatively low market capitalization. It also evaluates the costs and benefits of the traditional finite-life fund structure and introduces the concept of a secondary transaction as a means to transition fund shares between existing and new limited partners while maintaining the original fund investments.

In 2017, the contract between the Andretti family auto racing business, Andretti Autosport, and Honda Motor Company (Honda) would come to an end following the racing season. Generational family resources and dynamic social media capabilities had created a sustained competitive advantage (SCA) for Andretti Autosport. Also, key strategic decisions surrounding primary engine sponsorship and enterprise diversification afforded the chief executive officer the benefit of financial resources required to fund his Andretti Autosport racing operations across multiple racing platforms. More strategic decisions would have to be made as the contract between Andretti Autosport and Honda was coming to an end. Although the Honda collaboration had been successful, was it the best partnership to sustain the multi-generational organization into the future? What engine sponsor would be the best for Andretti Autosport to partner with for the next racing season?

In early 2017, Voot was one of India's popular video-on-demand (VOD) service providers of movies and television series. By that time, more than 50 million users had installed the application on the Android mobile platform alone. Voot's parent company, Viacom18 Media Pvt. Ltd. (Viacom 18), was popular for its television channels Rishtey, Colors, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central India. Due to a rise in VOD service providers and a growing number of Internet users in India, VOD consumption had been increasing rapidly; therefore, launching Voot was important for Viacom18 to secure a place in the surging digital market. Even though Viacom18 was already a popular television network service provider at the time of Voot's launch, it was not the first service to enter the VOD market, and its competitors were doing well. Voot had to determine what monetization model to implement and it had to choose a content strategy that would allow it to be competitive in the market, considering its diversified consumer base in terms of language, culture, and economic conditions.

Nathalie Parizat and her husband, Hugo, were contemplating a new real estate investment. For two years they had been frustrated by and lamenting their situation of paying high rents to third parties while the couple had idle cash in the bank. They also were convinced that Brooklyn's rising rents and property prices were showing no signs of abating. The couple had $100,000 in savings, which they intended to combine with mortgage financing to purchase a residential income-producing building. Nathalie focused her search on Brooklyn, narrowing it down to Williamsburg, where she thought there was better potential to make a good return on their investment. She had quit her full-time job and was planning on managing the building and the renovation-should it be needed-herself. Was she ready to take on this challenge or was she in over her head?

Spreadsheet supplement to case 218077.

As its Series A extension round approaches, the founders of Hubble, a subscription-based, social-media fueled, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand of contact lenses, are reflecting on the marketing strategies that have taken them to a valuation of $200 million and debating changes to them that will allow them to grow their business. Ensuring that their marketing dollars were being spent efficiently was critical to the data-driven management team and proving to be complicated as the company moved spending from digital marketing to offline media, which made attribution modeling more difficult. Decisions pertaining to product extensions, channel expansion beyond DTC e-commerce, and geographic expansion were also on the table to prove that Hubble's customer value proposition and operations could profitably scale.

The case describes how Bayer, one of the oldest and largest life-science companies in the world, recognised that innovation driven solely by the traditional R&D process that characterised the sector would not be sufficient to remain competitive, given the major changes underway in pharma and crop science and the broader trends in digital disruption. This recognition came from the very top, CEO Marijn Dekkers, who took the decision in 2015 to instigate a major corporate restructuring: Bayer would focus on its core life-science businesses (pharmaceuticals, consumer health and crop science) and spin off its material science business as a completely separate company. Beginning in 2016 under Board member Kemal Malik, Bayer began to put an innovation strategy in place that deliberately sought a systemic approach, meaning company-wide, to make innovation the responsibility of all Bayer employees. The question then arose how to put this vision into effect. How could Bayer promote greater innovation throughout the company, given that it had more than 100,000 employees spread over 75 countries? What actual initiatives could be undertaken to make innovation more effective and impactful? The case details how Monika Lessl, who reported directly to Malik, put in place a cross-divisional and cross-functional team to identify the most important areas to tackle and how, by 2018, the innovation programme she oversaw had "real momentum", with more than 1,000 people having some sort of formal role in support of innovation, more than 5,000 involved in innovation training, and more than 35,000 connected through the company's innovation portal.

The case describes how Mike Bracken, the newly appointed head of the UK Government Digital Service (GDS), took on the massive challenge of setting up, from scratch, a centralised team to deliver online public services efficiently online across all of the government's digital channels. This involved not merely overcoming great operational and technical challenges - legacy IT systems, lack of recognition and reward for specialist skills - but instigating deep cultural change and securing senior-level buy-in to make the necessary changes happen. The case illustrates how to approach implementing large-scale change across a highly bureaucratic organisation; in this case, the UK government. As such, it is a beautiful illustration of where agile works well. One key point to note is that, rather than focusing on the specifics of agile working, it demonstrates when agile methods can be a very powerful tool for enabling change. It also illustrates the importance of a decisive leader in getting an agile way of working implemented (and to some extent, risk-taking on the part of Mike Bracken and his sponsor in government). We will discuss the pros and cons of this approach.

On April 21, 2014 two companies, Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Pershing Square, announced an unsolicited merger offer for Allergan Pharmaceuticals. The unsolicited offer quickly turned into a hostile acquisition. The following months saw a raging public debate over the future control of Allergan and its primary product, Botox, as well as the business strategies and philosophies of the two offering firms and their CEOs.

Corporate sustainability has gone mainstream, and many companies have taken meaningful steps to improve their own environmental performance. But while corporate political actions such as lobbying can have a greater impact on environmental quality, they are ignored in most current sustainability metrics. It is time for these metrics to be expanded to critically assess firms based on the sustainability impacts of their public policy positions. To enable such assessments, firms must become as transparent about their corporate political responsibility (CPR) as their corporate social responsibility (CSR). For their part, rating systems must demand such information from firms and include evaluations of corporate political activity in their assessments of corporate environmental responsibility.

This article explores a variety of ways employees are being engaged as social innovators in their companies or as co-creators in partnerships with other businesses, NGOs, and/or government agencies. They are engaged as intrapreneurs in company innovations contests, in partnerships with external social entrepreneurs, and in pro bono global service programs, and as members of innovation teams in organization-wide innovations. The study compares and contrasts four employee engagement platforms and assesses their impact on participating employees, companies, and communities from these efforts.

Stakeholder capitalism seeks to benefit multiple stakeholders, rather than primarily shareholders. Two increasingly popular forms are the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and the benefit corporation. But what happens when a company combines these structures? While the benefit corporation's expanded stakeholder mandate may appear to come at the expense of employee-owner wealth and the potential for shared power, in fact they can complement one another. Being a benefit corporation can strengthen the employee-owned company's ownership culture through enhanced engagement and creation of a meaningful work environment. And in turn, employee owners can add a layer of accountability to help them meet the benefit corporation's expanded stakeholder mandate.

How do incumbent firms respond over time to a potentially disruptive technology? This article documents the strategies of 12 large pharmaceutical firms over 25 years as they addressed the opportunity/threat of biotechnology. All showed awareness of biotechnology's potential, but their response profiles varied dramatically in terms of timing (early/late) and focus (external/internal). Late movers mostly made large acquisitions to "catch up," but early movers maintained their lead in terms of biotechnology-based drug sales and profitability, and those with a more "open" response profile performed better. This response involves a three-step process: building awareness (sensing), building capability (responding), and building commitment (scaling).

A corporation that employs an "outside-in" startup program needs to screen a large number of potential startups and assess each time: What is the value of the startup's offering to our business, and what resources and support will the startup need so we can actually obtain its offering? However, many startups are not very good at communicating their customer value proposition in a way that helps the customer firm making such assessments. This article recommends that startups construct two sequential value propositions. The Innovative Offering Value Proposition communicates how the startup's offering creates superior value for the customer. It answers the question: What is extraordinary about the startup's offering that will enable the customer to solve a significant problem it has or achieve a top priority it has? The Leveraging Assistance Value Proposition conveys what the customer firm will get in return for providing support and resources to the startup. It answers the question: What will make it worthwhile from the customer's perspective to support the startup to realize its innovative offering?