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Driverless cars - once the stuff of science fiction - are fast becoming reality. Indeed, some automotive companies have said they expect to sell autonomous vehicles to the public by 2020. The advent of such self-driving vehicles raises numerous ethical and legal questions that will need to be addressed before such cars can hit the road in significant numbers. This case traces the history and evolution of auto safety in the United States, beginning with the very first automotive-related fatality on September 13, 1899 and ending with a coming era in which, some predict, humans will be banned from driving their own vehicles and machines will be obliged to have ethical systems.

Simon Caufield and Bob Phillips had just put the finishing touches on the business plan for Nomis Solutions, a start-up company that planned to offer price-optimization solutions to financial service firms. Nomis aimed to use advanced analytic techniques to help its clients to set prices for consumer loans and deposits. Was there a market for the products and services that Nomis planned to offer? If so, how large was the market? What would persuade potential clients that Nomis's product and services would add value?

Shanghai NSE Electric Co. Ltd. (NSE), a medium-sized manufacturer of marine switch panels, had entered into a joint venture with Schneider Electric under which NSE was Schneider's sole technology licensee in China. NSE felt fortunate because the world shipbuilding market was strong and orders were often full. With comprehensive and close cooperation, NSE was confident in Schneider. Nevertheless, Schneider announced that it would issue a second license to NSE's outsourcing manufacturer, SaierNico Electric & Automation. This meant that a competitor that produced and sold products of the same brand would emerge in the Chinese market. What was worse, this competitor had been cultivated by NSE. The CEO of NSE believed that NSE had three options: (1) continue to cooperate with Schneider; (2) broaden its business and cooperate with other powerful companies; or (3) invest more in local innovation to develop its own brand.

In early January 2013, a product manager with one of the leading insurance companies in Delhi, India, sat in his home office and pondered the strategy he had followed for his personal investment portfolio over the last three years. He was worried that talk of tapering off the U.S. Federal Reserve's Quantitative Easing Program, undertaken in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and the Indian general elections in May 2014 might affect the value of his investments. In order to achieve higher risk-adjusted returns, he was considering diversifying his all-equity portfolio by adding gold. Before he went ahead, he needed to test the data by using past returns, standard deviations and correlations and then use the Sharpe Ratio to compare the risk-adjusted returns of the diversified portfolio (comprising gold and equity) vis-à-vis an all-equity portfolio.

The chief executive officer (CEO) of GENICON is at a crossroads. The private medical device manufacturing business he started over 15 years ago has several acquisition offers as the industry starts to consolidate ahead of changes to the U.S. healthcare system. He can sell it now and make millions for himself and his investors or he can grow the business for a couple more years and, assuming a constant multiple of acquisition price to revenue, make millions more since his business is in fact growing. However, the business needs capital to grow and the CEO does not want to take on more debt. Should he sell the whole company and start his next venture? Or sell it and continue to help the acquirer grow the business? Or sell a part of the company and lose some autonomy and control? The CEO knows he is in a fortunate position but he still has to make a decision and soon.

On Monday, 19 November 2012, during a speech at the Investment Forum in London, Carson Block, the founder and research director of Muddy Waters LLC (MW), challenged Olam International (Olam), a major agricultural trading company on the Singapore Exchange. He questioned the company's huge debts and accounting practices and indicated that he was short selling the stock. Following this news, trading on Olam's stock was immediately suspended at Singapore Exchange. In less than ten minutes after trading resumed, the stock price plummeted by 11%, creating the largest single-day drop in six months. One week later, on Tuesday, 27 November 2012, MW released a 133-page-long research report on Olam, challenging its solvency, business model, accounting practices and capital expenditure. On December 17, Olam's stock price closed at S$1.395. It was the first time since March 2009 that the stock price had fallen below S$1.40. In the month following Block's critique, Olam's stock price fell nearly 20%. The case examines the reasons for the highly negative response to Block's analysis and reviews Olam's responses to the crisis aiming to uncover insights and lessons from the episode.

SNA Educa (previously known as Codesser) is a non-profit organization which was created by the National Association of Farmers (Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura, SNA) in Chile. Its mission included improving the living conditions of people associated with rural activities. One way of doing this was by offering agricultural and technical education to low-income students in rural areas. SNA Educa currently manages around 20 high schools in different regions of Chile. In the early 2000, SNA Educa made a major decision: to buy a school to provide primary and secondary scientific humanistic education, a field in which the organization had neither previous educational experience nor managing skills. Even though the investment decision had proven financially convenient, several issues cast some doubts about the suitability of the decision: inadequate mission fit, low educational test scores of the school, the troublesome political environment related to school reform, child abuse in the school, , among others. After ten years of the acquisition, the board is now debating whether it should reverse its previous decision and sell the school.

This case describes the introduction of a regression analysis model for forecasting guest arrivals to Caesars Palace hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. The company will use the forecast to staff the front desk in the hotel. The staff is unionized and the company has little flexibility to change staffing levels on a short-term basis. The case is set in the context of industry overcapacity and lower customer demand. The case describes several models that could be used to forecast guest arrivals, including a moving average technique and a multiple regression model. The multiple regression model includes over 40 independent variables, including dummy variables (e.g., to represent day of week, month, year, holidays, paydays) as well as continuous variables to represent customer segment and average daily room rate. The case contains tables showing the output of the regression model, and compares the fit of the moving average and regression models. The case allows students to understand how such a model is developed within an organization and to evaluate the models presented. Students may work with a data file with several years of historical data or they may work with the model description and output results in the case.

Can social enterprises scale and remain sustainable? Many social enterprises, or enterprises in general, face difficulties when scaling due to two competing agendas: social mission and profitability. The Mondragon Corporation is one of the most significant challengers to this status quo. Founded in 1956, the Mondragon Corporation is currently the tenth largest company in Spain, employing 83,000 workers and having nearly 36-billion euros in consolidated assets. Its strategy for growth has been in the development of cooperative groups to attain economies of scale and the creation of support cooperatives to finance growth and provide technical assistance. Its diverse set of cooperatives spans a significant array of product and services, from supermarkets to appliance manufacturers to a polytechnic university to a cooperative bank. However, the Mondragon Corporation is not immune to gravity and the difficult tradeoffs that occur in the social enterprise space. The financial insolvency of Fagor Electrodomésticos (Fagor), its oldest cooperative member, presents the most challenging dilemma in Mondragon's long history. Since 2008, the Mondragon Corporation (through its cooperative members) has injected 300-million euros of debt financing to assist Fagor. However, Fagor has made another financial request for 180-million euros. Txema Gisasola, the President of the Mondragon Corporation needs to decide whether he should recommend financing Fagor's debt or deny the cooperative's request for assistance. While most Mondragon cooperatives in the past have decided on their own to file bankruptcy and reallocate workers, it is a tougher scenario for Fagor, which currently employs 5,600 workers.

Anime News Network (ANN) is a Montreal-based news website that provides information and news about anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese comics). The site's primary readership and target audience is North American fans of anime and manga, but it is known and read by fans worldwide as "the world's leading destination for news and information about manga and anime." Under its founder and chief executive officer, ANN has grown from a hobby, staffed entirely by volunteers, to a profitable business with 3.3 million readers, annual sales of US$1 million, seven full-time and five part-time employees, and sister ANN websites in Australia and the United Kingdom. The critical question facing ANN is whether the company has reached its growth potential, given the niche nature of its readership base and a steady decline in the monetary value of the North American anime market.

The Change Foundation is an independent charitable foundation founded in 1996 by the Ontario Hospital Association with the mandate to promote, support and improve health and the delivery of health care in Ontario. In 2006, its board of directors undertook a renewal process to evaluate its strategic directions and measure the value-add of progress to date. A planning session with a variety of key stakeholders had resulted in the development of a draft plan for going forward, which included hiring a new chief executive officer. When she began assessing the plan in January 2007, she faced several major issues and concerns about how the foundation should refocus its activities and transform itself. Before she could start to rebuild, however, she had to decide what its future direction should be.

The world's second largest home appliances company has introduced a change in its global organization structure. Electrolux AB has consolidated its research and development, marketing and design functions at the top to form what is known as the "Innovation Triangle." This change is in tune with the pursuit of innovation as a source of differentiation in a competitive industry. The concept has been tested in Electrolux Brazil for four years before being scaled up globally. The amplified version of the Innovation Triangle has a singular objective: to facilitate innovation enterprise-wide by leveraging cross-functional, cross-geographical and cross-business synergies. The ultimate goal is to launch new products faster, better and in greater number. The unveiling of the new organizational structure presents an opportunity for the company's Innovation team to review the company's ongoing innovation initiatives. The four-member team grapples with issues around improving the company's innovation pipeline.

This case is used in Darden's "Economics of Water" course elective. Suzanne Apple, senior vice president of private sector engagement at World Wildlife Fund-United States (WWF), was preparing for an important meeting with her counterpart at The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC). The two companies had formed a tremendously successful partnership several years earlier that focused on freshwater conservation and other environmental issues. With the original agreement set to expire, Apple needed to draft recommendations for a new agreement, ensuring that WWF's priorities aligned with TCCC's, and vice versa. But what should the scope and goals of the new partnership be? This case is supported by a teaching note for instructors.

Yamato Transport Co., Ltd. innovatively used the field cast model of housewives as part-time employees to meet the increasing delivery demands of morning peak-load hours. The housewives provided Yamato with a cost-efficient source of human resources and the nimbleness to adjust its staff deployment to respond reliably and quickly to customers' needs. A series of recruitment, training, and compensation and appraisal processes was designed for the field cast model.<br><br>The case outlines the challenges with the implementation of the field cast model and the decision facing Yamato's managers of whether to expand it throughout the company's Japanese operations. Yamato's managers were largely satisfied with the progress of the field cast model; although field casts made up less than 2 per cent of the delivery manpower at Yamato, they played a crucial role in improving customer satisfaction levels and lowering parcel delivery costs. However, the implications of the expansion plan were multi-dimensional. At an operational level, the inconsistency in the field casts' performance could be magnified as the number of field casts continued to increase over the coming months. As well, the sales drivers might struggle to cope with the additional responsibility to train and supervise field casts. More broadly, the sustainability of the field cast model was unknown because of Japan's changing social structure. In addition, with the improvement of the global economy since 2010, the supply of part-time employees was threatened by competition from alternative employment opportunities.

This note considers common legal pitfalls associated with the launch of new products. A series of questions are presented that companies poised to launch a product should keep in mind. Questions about advertising, pricing, and branding are explored, as well as who in a product's supply chain might bear liability if the product is faulty.

SCHSA is a self-financing social enterprise and charitable organisation in Hong Kong that provides quality self-funding services at a low cost to empower the elderly to live independent, healthier and rewarding lives and with dignity, in their communities. It accomplishes this through the smart use of partnerships and information technology. But is this a tenable model to meet Hong Kong's ageing needs, and if so, could it be replicated elsewhere?

Anna Amphlett, a financial analyst with Southern Cross Capital LLC, spent the first days in her new job gathering information about ADT Corporation, a company whose shares Southern Cross was considering acquiring for its Business Services portfolio. Amphlett graduated with an MBA in accounting and finance, and had spent a summer as an intern with Southern Cross specializing in the service sector before joining the company. On September 28, 2012, ADT became an independent publicly traded company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, after Tyco (TYC) split itself into three independent companies. ADT generated revenues by charging customers monthly subscription fees for commercial and home security services. Southern Cross's portfolio manager had asked Amphlett to pay close attention to the company's accounting methods, and particularly to its policy of capitalizing and amortizing cash outlays on sales commissions, instead of expensing them immediately. Southern Cross had become wary of companies such as Pre-Paid Legal Services, PolyMedica, and Excel Communications, which experienced significant stock price declines after popular press articles discussed their policy of boosting earnings by capitalizing and amortizing indirect costs. Such companies also experienced significant stock price declines when it was disclosed they were under investigation by the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC).

This case describes the entrepreneurial process of an Argentinean Canadian who created a new international venture based on the demand of Vancouver firms for international human resource management services and of Argentinean nationals for overseas internships and vocational training. Students will learn about the entrepreneur's background and how it influenced his opportunity recognition and organization of resources. They will also learn about business model evaluation and financial, personal, and social changes driven by entrepreneurship.