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Spreadsheet to accompany product no. W33834.

In July 2022, a senior data scientist for Guell Appliances was aggregating customer reviews from the company's recent appliance launch. The previous month, the company had launched a revamped product line that required a significant amount of investment in research and development. The success of the product line was paramount because it defined the success of the company. The senior data scientist wanted to apply modern analytical techniques to thousands of product reviews to thoroughly understand the preferences of customers, based on what they were saying about their new appliances.

Spreadsheet to accompany product no. W33837.

Kae Jonishi, the protagonist in the case, is a marketing analyst at Force Energy (Force). Her company has advertised with Major League Baseball (MLB) teams in the past and has gained moderate amounts of exposure from these marketing campaigns. However, Jonishi's manager wants to increase the company's exposure to MLB fans. One way to do so is to sponsor teams that are likely to advance into the MLB post-season, or playoffs. The top performing teams during the MLB regular season advance into the playoffs and increase their fan base, which results in greater marketing exposure for advertisers. Jonishi has access to a data set that contains aggregate team statistics for offence and pitching performance during all MLB seasons from 1995 to 2019. With adequate knowledge of both baseball and data science, Jonishi begins by analyzing and visualizing the data. She then builds a machine learning model that can predict whether a team will make the playoffs. Using this model, Jonishi can input future offence and defence performance predictions to determine if the team would have advanced to the playoffs in previous years.

Spreadsheet to accompany product no. W33840.

By 2015, HCF, Australia's largest not-for-profit health fund, had become a tired brand that did not appeal to younger consumers despite eighty years of success. The market was changing and the combined pressure of competitors and consumer market dynamics meant that HCF was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain its position. Yasmina Pinto, the company's head of brand, had been given the responsibility of revitalizing its tired brand so that it would once again become fresh and appealing to consumers. What was the best way forward for HCF as a brand and as a provider of high quality health care services for Australians?

The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding was a world-renowned giant panda research institution and tourism destination and had successfully attracted millions of tourists since its opening. The surge in tourists, however, had also increased pressure to provide a tourist-friendly experience, and long wait times generated more complaints than any other issue. Tourists experienced long queues at the ticket offices and at the entrances of the panda house and delivery room, which greatly impacted their experience. Moreover, long queues also created other issues, such as managing crowding and the negative impacts on the giant pandas' emotional and psychological health as a result of the noise generated by tourists waiting in lines.

The best time to have a difficult conversation is, ideally, as soon as possible. Engaging in challenging conversations early can produce beneficial results for several reasons, such as resolving issues, improving communication, preserving relationships, and increasing efficiency. This note includes best practices for difficult conversations, how to initiate conversations, steps for guiding the dialogue, methods for upholding intentions, and examples of difficult conversations.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 224007.

Research shows that innovators have a poor track record of predicting which of their own ideas will result in breakthroughs. But some ideas that appear to be incremental at first eventually prove to be blockbusters. Carrying more ideas through to incubation gives both the company and the broader market a chance to learn more about them and for unanticipated use cases to emerge.

Lego Group's crowdsourced innovation strategies have long been a model for open innovation. New research into how the company has advanced its practice of integrating customer communities into its idea-generation process yields additional lessons in how to integrate customer input into product development, and how to nurture creative customer communities.

With many knowledge workers working remotely, digital collaboration tools are more important than ever, but how do they affect creativity and innovation? The authors studied the content of communications generated through the use of these tools at a manufacturing company and found that these technologies can support the formation of both loose, open networks and tightly controlled, closed groups with different implications for creative output.

Companies are increasingly embracing the idea of helping nontechnical employees those with deep business-area expertise learn to automate mundane, repetitive, time-consuming processes through minimal training in low-code and no-code technologies. This article describes the benefits and challenges that six companies AT&T, Dentsu, Johnson & Johnson, PwC, Voya Financial, and Wesco experienced in their forays into the citizen automation movement.

Mamaearth, founded in 2016, started as a direct-to-consumer personal-care brand and carved a niche for itself as a trusted, toxin-free baby-care, skin-care, and hair-care brand in a competitive Indian personal-care market landscape that included established multinationals. In 2022, its parent company, Honasa Consumer Private Limited (HCL), raised $52 million in financing for a valuation of US $1.2 billion, becoming the first unicorn of 2022. HCL also acquired BBlunt, a hair-care and styling-products business in a ₹1.34 billion deal that was seen as a significant step toward meeting Mamaearth's growth aspirations. In a competitive personal-care market landscape, the leading companies had realized health-aware consumers' need for natural and toxin-free products and were innovating and aggressively pushing chemical-free products. Mamaearth now faced a challenge in taking the next leap forward: it needed to grow its market, retain its sustainable positioning, determine its consumer segment, and build a communication strategy around these factors as a trusted, toxin-free skin-care and hair-care company.

Fundrr was a South Africa-based alternative funding business that launched in 2018. The business's goal had been to disrupt the South African business lending landscape, specifically at the small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) level where the majority (about 71 per cent) of SMEs generated annual revenues of less than R200,000 and employed between two and five people. Reflecting on the company's journey in October 2021, the company's founders realized that Fundrr had weathered the COVID-19 storm and had grown 630 per cent between September 2020 and September 30, 2021. However, there was a discrepancy between their current client base and the founders' vision for the company as a disruptive, innovative, entrepreneurship-friendly alternative funder seeking to offer financial backing options independent of those granted by traditional banking institutions. The typical Fundrr client was usually in their fifties and male. Operating on a continent with the youngest population in the world, what did this say about their marketing and brand positioning? How could they apply the same resourcefulness and relevance to position the business into the future?

Alex Tapscott, business author and alternative investment market professional, explains why he thinks believing in a decentralized future is as deadly practical as Blaise Pascal's wager on God.

This final note in the five-part series on competitive-cost analysis introduces the concept of the experience curve, which can be analyzed with a log-log relationship between unit cost and cumulative volume.

Abraham Heifets and his co-founder, Izhar Wallach, had founded Atomwise to develop i) an AI engine to transform drug discovery by creating better medicines faster, and ii) a machine learning-based discovery engine that combined the power of convolutional neural networks with massive chemical libraries to discover new small molecule medicines. Computational chemists employed at big pharmaceutical companies were interested in trying these engines and associated tools on their projects. On the other hand, Atomwise could keep its tools for itself if it were to become a pharmaceutical company on its own. These options would chart very different courses for Atomwise. The case articulates the dilemma facing Heifets and Wallach, as they contemplated committing to a business model that would leverage the strengths of the technology to deliver value for patients and for investors.

In June 2022, Mohamed Salah, one of the world's best soccer players, and his lawyer and advisor Ramy Abbas Issa were in ongoing discussions with top English Premier League club Liverpool FC about a new playing contract for Salah. Arguably the Arab world's biggest sports superstar, Salah's contract was due to expire next summer and so this was the time to try to secure a big contract from his current club. But renegotiating with Liverpool had been a lengthy and increasingly tense process, and the two parties were still far apart. Salah for the first time had to face the possibility that his long-term future might be with another club. Were Abbas and Salah right to continue to push Liverpool for a better deal-even if Salah, who would turn 30 in a few days, already was one of the highest-paid players in the world? What was the right mix between fixed and variable compensation-specifically, was it wise for Abbas and Salah to entertain Liverpool's push for a higher share of performance-related compensation? And could and should Abbas and Salah bring his image rights to the table to try to break the deadlock?