In April 2022, Sergi (CEO) and Aureli (COO), co-founders of Worldcoo, a Catalan social impact tech startup that offers fundraising solutions for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) projects through a round-up donation system, are considering options for scalability and growth. Since the "redondeo solidario" (solidarity roundup) was launched in 2017, the startup has contributed funding to over 620 (2021) projects of local and international NGOs, making it the leader in rounding-up donations in Spain. For Worldcoo, one of its key successes has been the establishment of B2B relationships with diverse merchants and payment service providers (PSP). With constant negotiation and searching, the startup has developed partnerships with large retailers such as Condis and Eroski supermarkets, and MasterCard. In spite of the global COVID-19 pandemic crisis that affected physical retail, the company managed to increase revenues from €1.2 to €2 million in 2021. With scalability in mind, Sergi and Aureli aim to reach €5-€5.5 million in revenue by 2022, which presents challenges and opportunities for Worldcoo's strategy.
Entrepreneur Pau Bach, who has tetraplegia, built Batec Mobility with an inclusive business model in which profit and purpose are tightly integrated. A personal mobility device company, Batec was created by people with disabilities, employs people with disabilities, and that aims to revolutionize mobility for people in wheelchairs. In June of 2019, Bach is considering an offer to purchase his company. Accepting the offer is one of three available courses of action; he could also leverage the offer to speed negotiations with a pair of Spanish impact investors, or work to persuade his current investor to reinvest and sell for a higher price in the future. He must evaluate which course of action will best address his main goals: ensuring the continued growth of the business and its positive social impact, providing an acceptable exit to his current investor, and meeting his personal and family needs. Leading up to this moment, the case reviews the company's stages of development, the funding it has received, and the process Bach has undertaken to sell the company. In this way, students explore the opportunities and challenges of developing, funding, and selling an inclusive business.
Familia Torres, a Spaniard winery, had been working actively since 2008 to mitigate and adapt to climate change through its Torres & Earth program. At the beginning of 2022, when the pandemic was finally nearing its end, the challenge for Familia Torres was how to define a sustainability strategy for the future. This had led Familia Torres to search for new terroirs at higher altitudes to find the right balance of heat during the day and cold at night, in order to achieve a quality wine. Another strategy had been to recover local ancestral varieties, resilient to these new climate scenarios. The threat of water scarcity also loomed over the vineyards, as well as other ecological risks which reduced its productivity. A "beyond sustainability" strategy was presented as a hopeful one, which focused on reversing climate change from the local sphere of action and was consistent with the family motto "the more we take care of the land, the better wine we produce". However, this promising strategy involved many uncertainties. From a commercial perspective, it was not clear how it would affect production, how it would be articulated with the commercial strategy, or whether consumers would know how to appreciate this product. From an ecological perspective, it was unclear how much carbon it would absorb, and for how long. In the light of this situation, the Familia Torres management team sometimes ask themselves whether they should maintain the strategy of going "beyond sustainability" or consider strategies more con-sistent with the mainstream approach to climate resistance viticulture, such as, for example, the genetic improvement of the grapes, or intensify the strategy of transfer to colder areas.
In June 2020, with the COVID-19 crisis affecting physical retail and accelerating the trend of digitalization, the leadership team of Moltacte, a work integration social enterprise that manages a chain of clothing outlet stores in urban areas outside of Barcelona, Spain, is considering options for innovating the business model. Moltacte has a very clear purpose to support the health and well-being of its employees, more than half of whom are people with severe mental illness. It has developed a management model that puts people (not profits) at the center of the organization and ensures that its people are the driving force of the company, not passive ""beneficiaries,"" charity cases, or subordinates following orders. In its current form, this model is based largely on in-person, human-to-human interaction. This raises the question of whether it is possible and desirable to develop online activity that is compatible with its people-centered approach. Whereas cases about social enterprises are typically written from the perspective of the entrepreneur, the narrator of this case is a character with mental illness, who is a fictional composite of many real Moltacte employees. The authors made this choice because we wanted Moltacte's mentally ill employees to be at the center of the case and the discussion as students explore management models that seek to put beneficiaries at the center.
Starting in 2001, Inditex's Sustainability Department promoted with the Group's business units a unique chain that remained largely unknown to the general public: for&from. This labor inclusion project for people with mental disorders hinged on the creation of stores in collaboration with social organizations, following a franchising scheme. Inditex made an initial investment on these stores that maintained the image and quality that characterized the Group's chains. Inditex's brands sold their excess inventory at discount prices to these social enterprises, which, in turn, marketed them at outlet prices. The project intended to build an optimal support ecosystem for people with special needs, so that they would learn about retailing jobs, strengthen their self-esteem, and eventually manage to integrate themselves into society. This scheme relied on long-term partnerships with social organizations, with which Inditex built a hybrid value chain. By 2017, the program featured 13 stores in nine towns, with over 150 mentally-challenged employees, and it engaged five social organizations -namely, Fundación Privada el Molà d'en Puigvert ("Molà Foundation"), Moltacte, Cogami, APSA, and Fundación Prodis ("Prodis Foundation)- as well as five Inditex chains -Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, Pull&Bear, and Tempe (a footwear and accessory manufacturer that supplied all chains). In the ensuing years, the program grew gradually, and by 2017 Inditex realized that it needed to assess options and make critical decisions about the social venture's future. Would it prove wiser to take this program online? Should Inditex carry this scheme to other countries? Did it make more sense to expand further in Spain first? How was the program's actual impact measured? Would it be best to create multi-brand outlets? Many questions filled program heads' minds at this juncture.
In January 2016, Silvio ElÃas, co-founder and CEO of Veritas, Catalonia's leading organic supermarket chain, headed to a meeting with the company's board to present the alternative options to enter in Madrid. At that time, Madrid was thriving like no other Spanish region and stood out as an attractive market for expansion. Most of all, operating in the nation's capital accounted for an instrumental step forward on the path to accomplish ElÃas' overriding vision: turning Veritas into Spain's organic food leader. Nonetheless, Spain's organic food retailing landscape was changing very rapidly, with increased, fierce competition from a diverse range of players. Against this competitive backdrop, ElÃas wondered if Veritas should approach Madrid by opening their own stores, following the same strategy it had used to rise as industry leader in Catalonia. Eroski, a conventional supermarket chain, had also reached out to ElÃas to offer Veritas an opportunity to display some of its private label products at Eroski's stores in Madrid as they did in Catalonia. ElÃas needed to make the final decision on his recommendation to the board.
In 30 years, La Fageda had surpassed several business milestones that formed the means for attaining an ultimate aim. Its ultimate aim had always been the social and labor integration of mentally-challenged individuals placing the emphasis on each person's capabilities. From the end of 2007 to the beginning of 2013 the company underwent growth by broadening its yogurt line and diversifying into new products. This enabled La Fageda to reach the second position after Danone in the Catalonian yogurt market and at the same time, to operate in several competitive environments. Now, the social entrepreneur Cristobal Colon has to think about his succesion and if the company has to continue growing. What are their options?
FUTUR is a small nonprofit organization founded in Barcelona in 1996. Its aim is to create social and labor opportunities for potentially excluded individuals such as ex-convicts, single mothers with no income, battered women, the homeless, people over 45 years old affected by long-term unemployment, drug and alcohol addicts, and immigrants mostly from Latin America and Northern Africa with problems adapting to life in Barcelona. The type of jobs FUTUR has provided these individuals has changed over time. The organization started operating in the textile sector and later shifted its focus entirely to food services. It has also been committed to fair-trade and environmentally-friendly products. FUTUR opened several restaurants and later expanded into catering services and, more recently, to school cafeterias, the latter becoming a very successful venture. They were also ready to launch a new business to supplement these initiatives. It was based on selling organic, fair-trade products on the streets with salespeople riding specially adapted bicycles. However, the organization needed to find new facilities equipped with an industrial kitchen as it had to move from the building it was currently renting for a nominal price. With so many initiatives underway, Manuel Almirall pondered the pros and cons of diversification for an organization like FUTUR and whether it should concentrate on a single venture. Specifically, he wondered what strategy would be more effective to fulfill the organization's mission while maintaining sustainable growth and moving its central kitchen for its restaurants and catering services.
For over 25 years, Cristobal Colon, La Fageda's founder and president, had managed this cooperative that primarily produced yogurts and dairy puddings and employed a large share of La Garrotxa's mentally challenged population. Colón had been able to position these yogurts made in a small town far from Barcelona's commercial hub right next to Danone products, the undisputed dairy sector leader in Spain, on supermarket and hypermarket shelves. La Fageda had accomplished this feat by producing a quality yogurt that consumers viewed as a farm product: natural and wholesome. By late 2007, Colón's overriding concern was how to keep La Fageda's yogurts in distribution circuits. On the one hand, large food multinationals had ever-increasing leverage with retailers; on the other hand, some leading chains were prioritizing their own brands. Colón wondered if La Fageda could maintain its competitive positioning while upholding its founding spirit. For him, it was paramount to preserve the jobs that enabled La Fageda to ensure social and labor integration for people with mental disabilities.
Centers on the Inditex Group (Industria del Diseno Textil), a Spanish corporation that ranks among the world fashion industry leaders along with companies such as GAP, Nike, Benetton, and H&M. Inditex owns several brands, including Zara, Pull and Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, Zara Home, and Kiddy's Class. To respond to repeated attacks by NGOs, the company had initially pursued a reactive corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy. However, it was now actively working on the implementation of a CSR plan that spanned its whole production and sales processes, focusing on working conditions at the company's manufacture outsourcing shops. Its strategy addressed profound structural changes undergone by the industry and the company itself. While in 1980 all production operations were based in Spain, by 2003 Inditex had expanded to include production centers as well as certified suppliers in the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. On the other hand, the initially family-owned company had gone public at a world level. At the time, several NGOs had begun to look into and report on the overall textile sector in the midst of a campaign against labor exploitation, child labor, and corporate social irresponsibility at large. This situation posed new challenges for the company, especially regarding labor, and workers' social and economic conditions. In order to face these challenges, a Corporate Social Responsibility Department and a Social Council were created to ensure that corporate actions reflected the company's social responsibility and commitment and to communicate sustainability values and respect for human rights across the board.
Intermon Oxfam is a Spanish nongovernment organization that is almost 50 years old. Explains the tensions that arose during its growth--in a short time going from lending support to Jesuit missionaries in the Third World to being one of the leading development NGOs in Spain, integrated within one of the most important international NGO groups: Oxfam. Provides the opportunity to review the history of the organization, analyze its governing body (the board of trustees) and human resources and volunteer policies, and gain exposure to its mission and culture in order to choose a candidate for a position on the management team.