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Drop Technologies Inc. was a major success in the Toronto, Ontario, Canada technology community. Having raised its initial pre-seed funding with only a slide deck, it grew to become a popular loyalty mobile application across North America. In 2017, the company was featured in LinkedIn’s top 25 start-ups in Canada, and it closed CA$58 million in a series B funding round. In 2018, the marketing manager had to decide which marketing channel was most effective based on the goals of the company. Traditionally, Drop Technologies Inc. used paid social advertising and referrals to generate user growth. However, the rise of influencer marketing was on the marketing manager’s radar, who had previously tested this channel, but had yet to decide whether or not to allocate more of the marketing budget to it. While this channel had many potential benefits, it was still a new concept and held many potential risks.

Spreadsheet to accompany product 9B21A006.

In March 2020, the director of Shikshaa Public School (SPS), a privately owned school with 785 students, located in Chennai, India, and his wife and co-founder were reviewing the school’s performance and deciding its strategy going forward. The Indian education sector was highly regulated and competitive. Government schools, government-aided schools, and private schools all competed for new student enrolments to obtain a portion of the US$101.1 billion (in fiscal year 2019) Indian education sector. Having recently taken out a bank loan to construct a school building that increased SPS’s capacity to 3,000 students, the cofounders were considering ways to increase SPS’s revenue and profitability. The options considered were (1) more effective marketing to attract an increased enrolment of new students; (2) relocation of SPS to an upmarket location, where families had the potential to pay higher fees; and (3) acquisition of another school to expand rapidly and leverage the SPS brand.

Atal Indore City Transport Service Limited operated Indore Bus Rapid Transit System, the main public transport system in the city of Indore, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Indore Bus Rapid Transit System ran through an important section of the city, along a corridor 11.57 kilometres long with 21 bus stops. Operating the system involved meeting hourly demand for bus service—a task that required scheduling buses and their deployment to achieve the desired frequency. Indore Bus Rapid Transit System used modern technologies to identify passenger demand and the location of vehicles at all times during operation, and it used the data to plan and execute bus operations. Demand varied considerably between bus stops; therefore, management science techniques were needed for optimal planning. How could passenger service be maximized while optimizing the use of buses?

Instructor Spreadsheet to accompany product 8B21D008.

Spreadsheet to accompany product 9B21D008.

Clarke Building and Supplies Limited was a multi-generational family-owned building supply and contracting company headquartered in the western region of the island of Newfoundland, Canada. After the death of the company’s founder and chief executive officer, it fell to the founder’s son to take the helm of the company. With his engineering background, this son noticed inefficiencies and lax controls within the company. He was especially worried about the possibility of a more tightly run national store entering the market and outcompeting his family’s business. Complicating any decision to tighten operations was the community culture of the business, which included many long-time employees, friends, and family members. He could see that there were issues in the company, but he lacked the business acumen and distance to separate symptoms from causes and develop a plan to keep the company healthy and strong for generations to come. He knew he needed to achieve buy-in from the managers so he could implement any solutions he devised.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPMC), one of the world’s largest banks, was confronting the advent of open banking in its retail banking business. In late 2020, policy makers and regulators were advocating movement toward open banking with growing enthusiasm as a way to stimulate competition in the financial services sector and thus, encourage greater value creation for consumers. JPMC, however, seemed to embrace open banking while also resisting it, aggressively building out the technical infrastructure required for open banking while also blocking some third-party financial services companies from accessing customers’ Chase bank accounts, citing data security and privacy concerns. Open banking seemed fraught with risk, but might it represent new and significant opportunities for banks? In either case, what should the approach to open banking be for an established bank like JPMC?

GoSports Foundation was a non-profit venture that developed India’s emerging athletic talent through athletic scholarships and other supports that helped the athletes achieve sports excellence. The foundation had limited funding and numerous applicants, requiring that it carefully choose the athletes it would support. Nandan Kamath, a co-founder of the organization, has to choose one athlete from several applicants for support. He also has to decide whether the foundation should start supporting the development of coaches and trainers and how it should balance its support with a desire to advance the profile of athletes competing in the Paralympics.

In 2019, after completing her postgraduate work in dentistry in Mangalore, India, an entrepreneur decided to set up a chain of clinics in Bengaluru, in the Indian state of Karnataka. She was not considering any partnerships for her venture, which she planned to fund with personal capital and a bank loan. The entrepreneur consulted her long-time friend, an independent business consultant, who introduced her to the manager of the Indian government-owned Syndicate Bank. The bank agreed to review her detailed financial and marketing plans, and consider funding the venture. The independent business consultant offered to help with the task of financial forecasting for the development of a marketing plan to increase foot traffic to the proposed clinics.

Group Business Services (GBS), a shared services organization predominantly based in India, provided support services to Koninklijke DSM NV (Royal DSM), a multinational corporation headquartered in the Netherlands, which produced nutrition- and health-related products. When the COVID-19 pandemic created a set of “new normal” circumstances for business organizations, GBS India, like many businesses, introduced remote working for all of its employees during the pandemic lockdown. The company experienced a series of challenges from March to July 2020. While some employees and managers offered positive feedback, many expressed doubts and misgivings about remote working. The challenges they reported compelled the GBS leaders to debate whether or not to continue remote working in the post-lockdown period. More importantly, they had to decide how best to establish a balance between employees’ concerns related to remote working and the need to maintain business continuity in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. They needed to design the optimum working model for GBS India in this new-normal era.

In early 2021, an investor wanted to invest in Bitcoin. However, because of the high volatility of the currency, she wanted to know when to buy and sell Bitcoin to avoid the price fluctuations caused by various short-term phenomena. Her main objective was to generate the maximum profit possible based on the moving average strategy. How could she use this strategy to profit from Bitcoin’s price movement?

Spreadsheet for product 8B21E011.

In the summer of 2019, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada’s largest mental health teaching hospital, found itself at the centre of a high-profile media crisis after three patients absconded from care at its forensic mental health unit. The events had led to public concern from the community, the media, and the government, putting CAMH’s reputation at risk. Much of the concern manifested through stigmatizing statements due to a common misunderstanding and ignorance towards mental health, especially in the forensic area. CAMH’s chief executive officer, Dr. Catherine Zahn, and her team had to decide how they would address the crisis both externally with the public and internally in their own organization.

In the phygital realm, the customer experience can be enhanced using the best of the physical and digital worlds. Unfortunately, digital transformation projects are often limited to the incorporation of various digital devices at different stages of the purchase experience. As a result, many companies are failing to seize the opportunities presented by this new hybrid world. While the physical-realm experience stems from sensory interactions between individuals and a distinct form of the bricks-and-mortar environment, the digital customer experience tends to relate to the integration of technologies that help consumers control, customize, optimize, and monitor their actions. Although physical experiences generate emotions, and digital ones are mostly functional, the phygital realm engages consumers by being both emotional and functional. When the concept of phygital is recognized as a hybrid realm with both functional and emotional components, companies can break free of existing customer experience constraints. Phygital-world competition is about an enhanced customer experience, not showcasing digital bells and whistles. To ensure a successful digital transformation, companies need a consumer-centric strategy that utilizes technologies to combine valuable experiences from the physical and digital realms to create something new and superior that consumers appreciate and don’t reject because it doesn’t fit with customer needs or expectations.

During a strategic planning process in early 2018, the chief executive officer of St. Joseph’s Health Care in London, Ontario, Canada encountered various challenges that tested her values-based leadership style and innovative approach to stakeholder engagement. She had not anticipated the skepticism from the senior management team that surfaced when she attempted to finalize the strategic plan for presentation to the board of directors. Although she faced resistance to the detailed wording of the proposed aims, she was opposed to diluting the language in the strategic plan. She found it important for all engaged stakeholders to see that their input had shaped the resulting plan. However, successful implementation of the strategic plan would depend on the support of her team members, who were accountable for its implementation. Overruling a management recommendation could potentially jeopardize the good working relationship she had established, but failing to deliver a plan to stakeholders that reflected their input posed a reputational risk for the organization. The chief executive officer had to decide how to move forward.

In late January 2021, Robinhood Markets Inc. (Robinhood), the California-based start-up that had upended the securities brokerage industry with its zero-commission trades, faced legal and market challenges. The US Securities and Exchange Commission had imposed a hefty fine on the company for its inadequate disclosure of payments to market brokers. In addition, a state regulator had filed an administrative complaint about the start-up's "gamification" of investing that had arguably led unwitting customers to lose money. A huge run-up in the stock of GameStop Corp. had put the spotlight on Robinhood and its business practices. On the competitive front, both traditional brokers such as Charles Schwab Corporation and Webull Financial LLC, a China-based start-up, were challenging Robinhood for the millennial investor customer base. Robinhood’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Vladimir Tenev, and his team needed to respond to these challenges so the company could file papers in March 2021 for a mid-2021 initial public offering.

In May 2018, US-based multinational retail giant Walmart Inc. (Walmart) took control of India’s biggest e-commerce platform Flipkart Internet Private Ltd. (Flipkart). Despite being the industry leader, Flipkart had been continuously losing market share to Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon) and was looking for support from a deep-pocketed investor. This created an opportunity for Walmart to enter the Indian e-commerce industry, bypassing regulations governing foreign direct investments. However, the unprecedented growth of Amazon, new foreign direct investment rules in India, Reliance Industries Ltd.’s entry into e-commerce, and challenges due to COVID-19 all created unexpected turbulence for the new partners. How would the Walmart–Flipkart duo overcome these challenges? Would Walmart divest its investment in Flipkart and end its aspirations to become one of the largest e-commerce companies in India? Or would the duo overcome these challenges together and emerge as winners?

A 2010 global event had far-reaching effects on the Indian energy sector, when a change in Indonesian law affected the commercial viability of power plants in India that were based on imported Indonesian coal. There were serious implications for private participation in the electricity sector, which was slowly moving toward liberalization and privatization. The issue was convoluted and became all the more serious when, in 2017, a compensatory tariff allowed by regulatory bodies to provide relief for the increased coal prices was disallowed by the Supreme Court of India within the contractual framework.

In May 2020, the three cofounders of Kinsip House of Fine Spirits (Kinsip), a craft distillery located on a farm in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada, felt a great sense of accomplishment. The distillery had a varied product mix that included light and dark spirits, a broad variety of bitters, and cask-aged maple syrup. However, in March of 2020, the business had retooled to produce hand sanitizer in response to the shortages resulting from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a distillery, Kinsip already produced ethanol for its regular products, which was also a key ingredient in the composition of hand sanitizer, and in combining this with their production and bottling expertise, were able to meet the needs of the community quickly and effectively. Before long, Kinsip had added hand sanitizer to its list of products for sale to the public. Should the cofounders make hand sanitizer a regular Kinsip product offering?