個案資料

Founded in Hyderabad, India in 2019, Inkpothub is India’s first digital media platform to offer researchers, scholars, and academics a forum for sharing success and experience stories. The platform allows users to share their journeys to promote research as a career, help researchers make informed career choices, and avoid common pitfalls. Inkpothub also creates, curates, and shares content, information, and knowledge to promote management scholarship and research. The platform connects users with scholars in major Indian academic institutions through content, mentorship programs, courses, and workshops. Inkpothub facilitates high-quality research output and works closely with institutions across the country to promote their doctoral programs to prospective students.<br><br>Inkpothub’s co-founder and current sole owner is Anita Sharma, India’s first woman skydiver with a disability, who is also an entrepreneur with a doctorate from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore. Sharma has worked as professor at IIM, Amritsar and has been a keynote speaker, among other roles she has held. In April 2020, Inkpothub’s co-founder Nishan Singh left the company for personal reasons, leaving Sharma to lead the company alone and face the impact from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. With a difficult business environment for all businesses across all countries, Sharma was considering three potential options for the future: sell the business to regain her investment in the company, find a new partner to grow the business and share the risks and revenues, or continue to run the business on her own.

This case can be used in courses on organizational behaviour, human resources management, entrepreneurship, or strategic management at the undergraduate and graduate level. After completion of this case, students will be able to achieve the following objectives:<br><br><ul><li>Understand sociological theories of entrepreneurship related to the early years of a start-up’s journey.</li><li>Appreciate the decision-making dilemmas that founders face in a dynamic business environment.</li><li>Understand the cognitive perspective behind an entrepreneur’s decisions.</li><li>Understand and apply the analytical framework of strategic decision-making.</li><li>Understand the impact of the escalation phenomenon and escalation of commitment on the decisions that an entrepreneur makes when faced with a dilemma.</li></ul>

• entrepreneurship
• start up
• commitment
• decision-making