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At the end of 2017, the director of HY Capital, was facing an investment decision. Two years earlier, HY Capital had invested in Dalian New Vision Media Co. Ltd. (New Vision), a company working on augmented reality products for early childhood education. The investment provided New Vision with sufficient funds to enter the market. However, after a quick success, New Vision had saturated the market and could not make further significant progress. Thus, New Vision’s management team proposed to alter the company’s strategy to move into kindergarten to grade 12 after-school education. The strategic shift could be lucrative, but it was risky and would require more funds to support product development. The director was now wondering, should HY Capital support New Vision with further investments or just exit the investment?

In 2016, the founder and managing director of Smaart Home Furniture, a furniture manufacturer in southern India, faced a dilemma. Although the business remained profitable, it was facing stiff competition from local players, branded and non-branded players, and online retail stores. The founder and managing director was considering extending his manufacturing business by also offering sofa servicing, which would require changes in the company’s production, organization, and management. It would also require a rethinking of the firm’s approach and interaction with its consumers. Should he start offering services? If so, should sofa servicing be launched as a separate entity or as part of the offerings of the existing manufacturing unit?

PowerChina was an integrated construction group that provided investment and financing, planning design, engineering construction, equipment manufacturing and operations management for hydraulic and hydropower projects and infrastructure. According to the company’s data, PowerChina had over 50 per cent of the medium- and large-sized flood mitigation and water supply reservoir construction market worldwide. The aim of the company was to build a world-class comprehensive construction investment group that was globally competitive and of high quality and efficiency. However, the integration of international business and localization in certain markets combined with international and domestic development meant that PowerChina needed to remain cautious and vigilant. PowerChina’s managers were confident with the prospect of its international expansion to accelerate the company’s growth rate, but it was still necessary for them to seriously consider the strategy they should choose in the next phase of their internationalization, and how to upgrade their risk management system in these changing times.

In March 2018, Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace (OECM) was an unlikely high-growth company. From its humble origins as a collaborative experiment to create efficiencies for the education sector—an experiment that had lost money and had to be financially supported by the government—the organization had adopted the culture of a high-growth start-up. OECM facilitated the procurement by universities, colleges, and school boards of everything from pencils to computers. By pooling orders, OECM was able to provide better prices from suppliers, thereby saving taxpayer dollars. OECM aimed to become “the Amazon of education sector” procurement. The total education sector procurement market in Ontario was CA$4 billion. OECM currently facilitated CA$255 million in transactions, but it was looking to control CA$2 billion of the market. Having become profitable under the leadership of a new chief executive officer, and newly independent of government support, OECM’s management was now challenged to continue to transform the organization’s public-sector culture in order to achieve high growth. What strategy should OECM use to achieve its aggressive growth targets? How should OECM scale up?

The chairman of Fuyao Glass Industry Group Co. Ltd. was pleased with his company’s financial results for the first half of 2018. Two years earlier, the organization’s subsidiary, Fuyao Glass America Inc., had completed the construction of the largest auto glass manufacturing facility in the world, which was located in Moraine, Ohio. Its revenues in the first half of 2018 had surged 27 per cent compared with the previous year, while groupwide revenues of the organization had grown 16 per cent. Fuyao Glass America Inc. had converted its loss of ¥65 million into a profit of ¥48 million. With deteriorating relations between the governments of China and the United States (U.S.) indicating an uncertain future, some social pundits were criticizing the organization for deserting China by investing overseas. The chairman remained defiant and confident in his strategy, but how would the company’s U.S. expansion and global strategy be affected by recent developments in the relationship between China and the United States?

By the end of 2018, a recent business program graduate had found that his first social enterprise had been a success, and he wanted to start his next venture in the Kenyan agricultural market. He identified three challenges in this area—climate change, lack of market access, and ineffective education systems—and he wanted to try to address one of these with a new business. Case A explores how he needed to perform a market assessment to understand the opportunities and constraints of the Kenyan market, identify the resources and processes that would be available to him when starting the business, and form strategies for performing customer research.

With his primary research on the Kenyan agricultural market completed, the entrepreneur needed to analyze the new data using design-thinking frameworks, and then formulate a value proposition that used his resources and processes to address the large-scale improvements identified in Case A.

A management science professor had an unpleasant experience with a hotel she stayed at in New York City. Consequently, she wanted to figure out if hotel ratings were enough to recommend a hotel, or if customers’ text reviews could be used as more important and accurate indicators of customers’ hotel experiences. The exercise serves as an introduction to the topic of text analytics—specifically, sentiment analysis—and introduces the concept of text mining and the importance of dealing with unstructured datasets. Much of the exercise focuses on the method and rationale behind document indexing and the subsequent weighting of the indexed terms through term frequency–inverse document frequency. Textual data from customers’ hotel reviews are provided to apply the text mining techniques and to provide insight for a better decision-making process that would help the professor in her next hotel booking.

Spreadsheet to accompany product 8B19E019.

Spreadsheet for product 8B17N024.

A doctor in the Department of Pediatrics at Riverdale Hospital, an Australian hospital affiliated with the faculty of medicine at a leading nearby university, reported directly to the chair of the department. The doctor received funding for his research in the amount of $380,000 per year, but because he was not a tenured faculty member, he was not able to directly control the contributions. Instead, the fund was administered by the department chair, under the doctor’s supervision. While checking the accounting of the fund in December 2010, the doctor discovered an irregularity that made him doubt the chair’s administration of the donations. As more clues and irregularities emerged, the doctor became convinced that the fund was being mismanaged and that this mismanagement was being covered up. When he eventually confronted the chair, he found himself in a stressful and difficult situation, with little support. In 2018, the dean of medicine circulated an external audit that claimed there had been no wrongdoing, and the doctor found himself facing a much larger, stronger opponent. Should he take action, pursuing civil or criminal charges? Should he leave the institution and take the donations with him? Should he stay where he was and deal with the consequences?

In 2012, Griffiths Energy International Inc. had secured the land leases needed to begin drilling for oil in Chad and was preparing for an IPO. During the due diligence, the company’s lawyers found consulting contracts that appeared to be payments to a public official to gain a business advantage. While bribing officials was not uncommon in Chad, it was a criminal offence in Canada. The company’s senior executive team was new, and the founder and former chairman, who might have been able to explain the contracts, had died in a boating accident. The directors needed to decide what to do: continue with the IPO and deal with disclosure if the matter did surface at some point later or report the findings to the authorities now and bear the consequences.

Supplement for product 9B18C031.

In 2017, the German grocery chain Lidl Stiftung & Co. KG (Lidl) opened its first 20 U.S. stores in the southern states of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Key target segments of Lidl were budget-conscious customers, middle-class families with children, and elderly customers on a fixed income. Lidl offered lower prices than its competitors and quickly gained a strong advantage in the marketplace. Despite high early consumer demand, however, Lidl struggled to hit the correct target market for each of its different locations in terms of tastes and demographics. With plans for 100 U.S.-based locations by the summer of 2018, Lidl had set its sights high. What could Lidl do to meet its U.S. market goals and expand into the future?

In June 2018, the executive vice-president of Networks and Information Technology of KPN BV (KPN), Bouke Hoving, was evaluating the digital transformation of KPN, the leading telecommunications company in the Netherlands. Hoving had been an initiator of a turnaround that had started at KPN in 2014, after a financially and operationally hectic year. The entry into the market of over-the-top digital services, which used the Internet to bypass platforms the traditional telecommunications companies had once used to control access to customers, had forced KPN to act swiftly, fundamentally revisiting its strategy. By 2018, KPN was in much better shape. By working in agile ways, it had been able to respond more quickly to market and technological developments. Short-term survival seemed to have been secured. The question still to be addressed was how to accelerate KPN’s transformation with the aim of making KPN a winner in a world where digital dominated.

In 2015, in Aalborg, Denmark, the two co-founders of Better World Fashion formed their company as a social enterprise, aiming to highlight all that was wrong with the fashion industry and offer a cleaner and more ethical solution. The business was designed to focus not only on profit but also on minimizing the environmental impact of the supply chain. The founders chose to specialize in garments made from re-purposed leather, as leather had a long lifespan, and could be reused repeatedly without its qualities diminishing. Leather was also the most resource-consuming garment material to produce, and therefore was both the most environmentally damaging material and the material that was most in need of recycling. The company’s business model aimed to gain a competitive advantage through its image as a sustainable brand and its premium-quality products, which incorporated an emotional connection through the use of unique serial numbers and storytelling. However, in 2018, the co-founders wondered whether the company should continue as it had been originally positioned or whether it should change its strategies for growth and competitive advantage in international marketing.

Alfie.fit (Alfie) was a Montreal-based consumer software technology start-up that offered a virtual fitness concierge service for time-strapped people who wanted to keep fit, no matter their busy schedule. The Alfie platform helped personal trainers and trainees connect and interact with each other and supported the management of the transaction between them. However, Alfie faced several challenges, including the common chicken-or-egg problem of value-added intermediaries in their entry phase. As Alfie celebrated its one-year anniversary of being officially available to the public, the founders needed to make strategic decisions regarding the platform’s design, scope, and future direction.

On a late evening in December 2014, three co-founders of Unicommerce eSolutions Pvt. Ltd. (Unicommerce) assembled for a meeting. A couple of months earlier, Unicommerce, an India-based software-as-a-service solution provider for order- and warehouse-management activities in the e-commerce industry, had received an offer of US$10 million in series-B funding from Tiger Global Management to fund their business growth. The offer seemed fair, and the three co-founders were inclined to pursue a deal with them. However, just a few days before, they had received an unexpected offer from Snapdeal, a leading e-commerce firm in India, to buy out Unicommerce. Over the past week, the co-founders had discussed and debated their options several times without converging. However, the time for deliberations was over. By 9:00 a.m. the next day, the Unicommerce team would have to call up Snapdeal to confirm their decision.

Chunyu Yisheng (Chunyu) was the largest mobile health (m-health) application in China. Since its creation in July 2011, the application had focused on providing online medical information and consultations with professional doctors. Chunyu's business model was based on free and premium online health care services. In the first three years, Chunyu gained more experience than profits. The primary concern for the founder and chief executive officer of Chunyu was to find a profitable and value-creating business model. Two potential solutions for Chunyu were to rebuild the current online consultancy-based model or move to an alternative profitable and long-term value-creation model. How should the founder and chief executive officer choose which option to pursue?

The founders of Strider Miles (Striders), a running club headquartered in Mumbai, India, faced a dilemma. Over 14 years, they had built a business based on their love for sport and their own entrepreneurial inclination. The growth of Striders was an outcome of both a growing interest in running for fitness as well as the promoters’ efforts. The founders had, thus far, made minimal investments in fixed assets and marketing and promotion. Going forward, however, they were not sure about how to grow the business nor the implications of their current business model.