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Annapurna Seva Sangh was a non-governmental organization (NGO) located in the civil hospital compound in the Lalitpur district of Uttar Pradesh, India. The organization’s primary objective was to assist the patients and their families at the district civil hospital. Most patients were living below the poverty line and lacked sufficient funds to cover their daily expenses while receiving treatment. Since the patients were accompanied by their family members, they were all under considerable financial pressure. To cater to the patients’ needs, Annapurna Seva Sangh managed a clothing bank, an oxygen bank (to supply oxygen concentrators and cylinders), and a dining hall that provided free lunch and dinner. The NGO also offered ambulance services and frequently organized blood donation clinics. The organization, which had grown tenfold since 2016, efficiently used its resources under limited funding opportunities. However, it was also operating with very thin cash reserves and was therefore exploring other sources of revenue so that it could provide uninterrupted services to people in need.

Bowtie Life Insurance Company Limited (Bowtie) was the first virtual insurance company licensed by the Hong Kong Insurance Authority. Since obtaining the licence in 2018 and raising two successful rounds of venture capital, Bowtie had developed into a reasonable size, of about a hundred employees, by early 2022. Bowtie was focused on developing and selling medical insurance products under the Voluntary Health Insurance Scheme (VHIS), while also selling term life insurance. The founders’ intention is to bring cheaper, more user-friendly insurance products directly to the mass market through online channels, while disrupting the traditional insurance industry by eliminating agents and brokers. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2022 brought both opportunities and risks to the virtual insurance sector. While online purchases increased significantly during this period, the overall gloomy macroeconomic outlook put downward pressure on insurtech, fintech industries, and the venture capital that funded them. With Hong Kong’s mortality rates soaring, Bowtie had to consider the effects of the pandemic on its profitability and determine its future strategy. While continuing to focus on the VHIS segment, how should Bowtie expand into other product segments? When and how should the company expand to Mainland China and/or other neighbouring markets outside of Hong Kong?

Spreadsheet to accompany product W32456.

Fibroheal Woundcare Pvt. Ltd. (Fibroheal) was the first company in India in the medical device sector to utilize the biomedical properties of silk. Launched in 2017, it focused on providing effective wound care to patients in a cost-effective manner. Fibroheal’s unique value proposition lay in its sustainable approach, ensuring balance across social, economic, and environmental dimensions. Results showed that Fibrocare's products could reduce wound-healing time by almost half. By the end of 2021, Fibroheal had about 15 products in its kit covering acute, chronic, and post-operative wounds. It had also engaged more than 1,000 farmers, as well as over 150 hospitals in more than 20 states across the country, and was affecting over 50,000 patients. However, there were challenges around building trust among stakeholders in the medical device market, where big multinational firms were already operating. Considering the challenges, how could Fibroheal expand in the medical device market under its founder’s strategic leadership? How could the company build on the existing positive customer responses? What should be the firm’s expansion strategy?

Teresa Ward, founder of Grandma Treesaw’s Bannock (GTB), had recently received positive media coverage from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and was hoping to leverage it to grow her Yukon-based bannock-mix business. She was considering two options: expand her direct to consumer offer by working with Shopify Inc. to improve GTB’s e-commerce sales or grow her product portfolio by introducing two new flavours of bannock mix. A few questions loomed in Teresa’s mind: Could she do both? Did GTB have the organizational resources to pursue this expansion plan successfully? What should her implementation timeline look like? What financial analysis would need to be done to support the decision-making process? She wanted to decide which option to pursue in the next three to four weeks.

In January 2022, Stephanie Owens, the administrative leader at StateU, an LGBTQ+-welcoming university in the United States, participated in a kick-off meeting for the pronoun project as the project lead. The goal of the project was to develop a centralized system for collecting and disseminating the personal pronouns of StateU’s students, staff, and faculty. The university embarked on the pronoun project to foster a community that recognized and celebrated the self-authorship of individual identities. It also saw personal pronoun data as useful to directing funding to initiatives that fostered justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. These goals were important for Owens, who had always been a champion of student success and an advocate for historically marginalized student communities.<br><br>At a pivotal moment after the kick-off meeting, tensions emerged around possible technical solutions: while members of the technical team supported a more efficient, secure, and reliable solution that would include a drop-down list of pronouns, the stakeholders on the team—many of whom worked directly with LGBTQ+ students, staff, and faculty and had lived experiences that had exposed them to the potentially harmful effects of predefining pronouns in a drop-down list—were strongly in favour of using a free-form text field for pronouns. Faced with escalating conflict, Owens asked both teams to prepare outlines of the advantages and disadvantages of their solutions and any other potential solutions. Owens was reviewing these materials as the next meeting approached. She had to weigh all arguments and decide for herself first: should StateU implement the drop-down list, the free-form text field, or the validation table solution?

In January 2019, Mohit Sehgal, assistant manager in the marketing team of Legrand India (Legrand), part of a global conglomerate in the electrical and digital infrastructure sector, had been asked to propose initiatives to enhance the brand’s visibility and deepen stakeholder engagement based on the chosen brand platform: Advantage Legrand. The Legrand brand, present in India since 1996, represented a vast product portfolio and was connected to multiple stakeholders with diverse needs. It had successfully grown its business in India with a focus on customer-centricity, a heavy investment in research and development, and a focus on innovation and design. While Legrand was well-respected and strongly associated with premium, ethical products, brand awareness was limited, especially among end-consumers, and the brand was perceived as distant. The Advantage Legrand brand promise was initiated as a first step in increasing the brand’s charisma. Legrand had also worked to enhance customer and stakeholder experiences, expanding brand touchpoints to include experience centres and virtual showrooms and working to deepen its engagement with end-users through social media campaigns. One year after the launch of Advantage Legrand, Sehgal needed to propose a brand-building strategy for the coming year and work out the implementation details. He was excited as he prepared for his upcoming presentation.

In the rush to develop vaccines, many strains of viruses are used in laboratories in an effort to help humanity. However, the same samples used to develop life-saving vaccines could potentially be used to develop weapons of biological warfare. This case looks at the scenario from multiple perspectives in an effort to discuss the ethics of virus usage, storage and regulatory oversight given the differing economical situations and motivations of the actors.

Mr. Dharamdas Desai was running a distribution agency in Madhopura, a town in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India. He asked his son, Paresh, to analyze the business’s financial situation. Paresh found that the business’s post COVID compound annual growth rate was around 4 per cent and the operating profits had also declined. Paresh looked at the business situation and wanted to revamp the business strategically. Paresh came out with three alternatives to revive their business, Manik Distribution Agency: diversify into new product categories distribution; adopt a hybrid model (distribution and retailing of the products); and enter into the digital/e-commerce market. Paresh wanted to keep the business, so he needed further clarification.

Hong Kong-headquartered SenseTime Group Inc. (SenseTime) was founded in 2014 to commercialize artificial intelligence (AI) and was a global leader in deep-learning AI, with applications in Smart Business (facial recognition), Smart City (property damage and theft detection), Smart Life (interacting with the Internet of Things to improve consumer experience), and Smart Auto (autonomous driving). December 10, 2021, was supposed to be the date for setting the offer price for SenseTime shares in the company’s global initial public offering. Instead, it was the date that Xu Li, co-founder and chief executive officer of SenseTime, learned from Hong Kong Clearings and Exchange Ltd. that American President Joe Biden was about to designate SenseTime a Communist Chinese Military Company—an action that prevented American investors from legally investing in SenseTime, derailing the initial public offering. How should SenseTime alter its marketing, research and development, and listing strategies in the light of the American government’s actions? How would the increased tension affect the geographic, technological, and customer aspects of SenseTime’s efforts to drive business growth?

In February 2022, Café Niloufer, based in Hyderabad, India, was contemplating transforming its product lines of Irani tea, onion samosas, and Osmania biscuits, to grow its customer base over several other competitive brands. Anumula Shashank, Café Niloufer’s managing director, wanted to update the brand by strengthening their product portfolio to meet the needs of new-age consumers. Cafes/lounges that provided a variety of beverages were projected to propel the competition in the coming years. Shashank wanted to grow the café business. He had three alternatives: add the products to the existing product line, add a new product line, or open new retail outlets. Shashank also wondered what analysis process and decision criteria he should use to make his decision.

The case highlights the courage, tenacity, and drive of a young woman pursuing her law degree part-time while working full-time in a financial role in Maryland. She applied to a posting for a government relations role in her parent company’s head office in Washington, D.C. The job involved advocacy work with members of the US Congress, which aligned with her interests even though it was intended for candidates several levels above her current role. However, given her interest in the opportunity, she reached out directly to the hiring executive, bypassing her manager and circumventing her organization’s standard human resources processes and protocols. She left the call with a request for an interview, although she thought that it could result in either a rapid climb or a painful fall from grace with reputational risk, which could impact her future career. Time would soon tell.

Student spreadsheet for Ivey product W33293.

Instructor spreadsheet for Ivey product W33294.

Continuous improvement is about shifting the focus from capital equipment to operational culture. After World War II, manufacturing responded to the need to ramp up production by buying equipment as quickly and with as much capacity as possible. Given that manufacturing is a system, mass ad hoc capital purchases created inefficiencies. Toyota was the first company to push back on the capital equipment approach and showed through lean manufacturing that there are better approaches to scaling than just buying capital equipment. This was the first appearance of continuous improvement, but similar non-capital approaches such as Six Sigma found ways to improve productivity, flexibility, and quality through focusing on coordination rather than equipment. Lean management has been credited with taking Toyota from obscurity to the top of the automotive industry in the last half of the 20th century. Competitors such as GM, Ford, and Chrysler were happy to copy specific tools in assuming they could replicate the Toyota success, but they were disappointed with their results. It is imperative for companies to understand their operations before beginning any good continuous improvement regime. There are two modes of failure for continuous improvement initiatives and the first is the mode where operations management staff’s knowledge is weak. The second failure mode in implementing continuous improvement is using the wrong metric in project selection.

In 2016, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJio), a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited, disrupted the Indian telecom sector by offering consumers access to the latest cutting-edge fourth-generation (4G) data and voice services at affordable prices. Competitors alleged that RJio had indulged in predatory pricing to acquire customers, but they lost the litigation as the anti-trust regulator held that the company should enjoy the benefits of a start-up and no predatory pricing rules were applicable. Within five years of its launch, RJio had become the top Indian telecom company. In 2023, competitors had caught up by offering better services at equitable rates. Had RJio indulged in predatory behavior to establish itself in a price sensitive market? Could the company continue at the same pace in the future? Had RJio transitioned into a new role as a technology company? What role should retailers play in ensuring customer acquisition to support RJio’s future growth strategy?

In 2023, the fast-fashion industry found itself under attack on several fronts: a growing poor reputation regarding its significant negative social and environmental impacts; the increasing prevalence of online shopping and the entrance of many new competitors who were not burdened with expensive bricks-and-mortar retail networks; and the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in helping to identify future fashion trends. Industria de Diseño Textil SA (Inditex) and its flagship brand Zara had just come off a record 2022, with industry-leading sales, gross margins, and profits. They were also ahead of the industry with 25.8 per cent of sales through their online channels. However, the challenges the fast-fashion industry faced were significant for Zara and required a long-term strategic response.

St. Gianna Healthcare (SGH) was a community health centre located in Kochi, in the southern state of Kerala, India, offering government-approved medical checkups and health certifications, specialist consulting services in obstetrics and gynecology, and dental care. SGH’s medical administrator was concerned about service management issues at the clinic in recent months. While there had been a recent increase in patient numbers, she was concerned about customer experience. In particular, she was trying to assess whether patient waiting times and service turnaround were satisfactory, given the dependencies SGH had on capacity, scheduling, and overall service management at the clinic, and was considering her options for improvements.

Amid the global shift towards remote working, Brad Merchant of Triovest uses a systems thinking approach to examine the evolving dynamics of office spaces. As corporations debate remote work, the demand for physical offices is in question. Triovest, a Canadian commercial real estate firm, is strategizing with a working investment thesis, "The Future of the Office." This approach involves buying undervalued office properties, modernizing them, and reselling them. Merchant and his team need to predict the interplay between remote and communal workspaces in their investment decisions. Would Triovest’s investment thesis affect these trends—or vice versa?

In early October 2022, the ASX-listed mineral exploration company Sheffield Resources announced its final investment decision to proceed with the Thunderbird mineral sands project, its only project under development. Olivia Montalbano’s investment banking firm had decided to provide coverage of Sheffield’s stock and asked her to determine a fair value estimate. The investor’s bankable feasibility study (BFS) provided an estimate of $1.84 per share, but the stock price was only $0.47. What troubled Montalbano was that the BFS employed a real discount rate of 8%, which seemed low, given typical mining project risk. Montalbano’s immediate task was to develop her own estimate of the project’s cost of capital.