The Sackler family and their 100%-owned company, Purdue Pharma, produced OxyContin pills by the millions, amassing a vast family fortune in the process. Those painkillers were responsible for a devastating opioid epidemic in the United States. For a business family, the "Oxy-Sacklers" are distinguished by their greed and lack of moral compass. Their donations to cultural, academic and medical institutions (mainly in the US and the UK) named after the family, sparked controversy about the role of corporate philanthropy worldwide.

Founded in 578 AD, Kongo Gumi was a family-owned business until 2006, when the firm went into liquidation to pay its creditors. While its demise is briefly covered, the case study is focused on its longevity. A renowned builder of traditional temples, in a country where these are major tourist attractions, Kongo Gumi has left an indelible mark on Japanese culture and history. Many of the temples built by its carpenters are listed and some are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The case is about the Hoshi Ryokan, a hot springs hotel in Japan established more than 1,300 years ago, that is among the world's oldest family enterprises. Owned and managed by a descendant (or adopted son) of the founder for 46 generations, it is a popular with domestic and international tourists alike. The current owner will almost certainly pass the baton to his daughter, thus making her the first female to own the legendary inn. This gender re-balancing act, coming after 1,305 years of male ownership, coincides with efforts by the prime minister of Japan to create a more balanced and diverse business climate. The case also covers the intangible assets that have ensured the longevity of this unique family-owned hotel.

The case is about Birkenstock, the renowned German shoemaker, and two turning points in its 248-year history: the owner's decision to bring in a professional CEO in 2012, and the sale of a majority stake to a French-American investment firm in 2021. Founded by German cobbler Johann Adam Birkenstock in 1774, the company had always been 100% owned by the same family and managed by a single descendant, a tradition upended in 2002 when Carl Birkenstock, the CEO and owner, handed over his shares and job to his three sons. Ten years later, unable to agree on strategy and with tensions rising in the family, the brothers decided to bring in a professional CEO to put the struggling shoemaker back on its feet. Under the new manager, sales of Birkenstock sandals increased to such an extent that the company attracted the interest of investors. Meanwhile, one of the sons sold his shares to his two brothers, who then instructed the CEO to find a buyer. Offered the opportunity to become billionaires overnight, they sold the company to a private equity firm backed by the world's largest fortune and owner of LVMH, Bernard Arnault.

The case study is about the Japanese carmaker Suzuki. The 100-year company was founded at the peak of Japan's silk-production industry in the early 20th century. Michio Suzuki (1887-1982), a gifted inventor, started tinkering with weaving looms and in 1920 founded the Suzuki Loom Manufacturing Company in the coastal village of Hamamatsu. The case is an example of dynastic control - where the family control its strategic direction but own an insignificant number of shares - as well as an illustration of the role played by adult adoption in family businesses in Japan. When adopted son-in-law Osamu Suzuki retired in 2021 and his son took over as chairman, it was the first time the top job had gone to a natural heir since 1957, when the founder retired. The narrative follows the transformation of the small car company into a global player via a partnership strategy. Osamu was able to expand sales in North America following a tie-up with GM in 1981 (that lasted until 2008). Even more significant was his decision to enter the Indian car market in partnership with Maruti, a poorly performing state-owned carmaker, which would ultimately make Maruti Suzuki the biggest brand in India.

The case is an example of how a family can control a large conglomerate - TECO Electric & Machinery, a Taiwanese engineering business - yet with almost no ownership stake. Founded by five prominent business families in 1956, TECO has been run by Mao-Hsiung "Theodore" Huang for the past 50 years, the son in law of the former CEO and co-founder, who married into the dominant founding family and rose up the ranks. Theodore's eldest son, Eugene, is impatient take over the reins. However, he makes a discovery just before the Annual General Meeting in 2021 and reaches the conclusion that at 83, his father simply does not want his son to take over the leadership, and will control the company from behind the scenes via non-family professionals he has installed in the executive suite. The case highlights a dilemma facing many Asian family-owned companies dominated by octogenarians who don't know how to retire gracefully. It also addresses some of the ambiguities of bringing in non-family professionals when perhaps the ulterior motive is to avoid a change of leadership.

The case is about the future of Dyson's foray into wearable technology with the planned introduction of the Dyson Zone that enable speople to breathe purified air while tuning out unwanted noise. Since no other device like it yet exists on the wearables market, its inventor Jake Dyson is stepping into unknown waters - another risk for a company that has taken several, including James Dyson's failed attempt to diversify into the automobile market with the introduction of an electric vehicle in 2017. Will the Dyson Zone be different? The case does not pretend to answer this question but rather looks at the business strategy of a firm that has a reputation for developing innovative products.

There is a pressing need for global reform of inheritance taxation systems. On average, only 0.5% of total tax revenues are sourced from inheritance taxes across the 24 OECD countries that levy them. If designed properly, inheritance taxes could play a greater role in raising revenues for cash-strapped authorities seeking to overcome mounting public deficits. A new equity-based approach to inheritance taxes could also prevent wealth inequality from becoming even more concentrated as the baby-boomers transfer intergenerational wealth. The case explores the challenges facing public policy makers as they seek to balance variables like tax exemption thresholds designed to ensure heirs receive a fair share of wealth tax-free, the operative word being fair. The case also explains the tools used to avoid paying a fair share of inhertance tax, such as trusts and tax havens. Extra teaching materials are available at https://publishing.insead.edu/case/inheritance-tax

In a historic agreement on 8 October 2021, 136 countries approved the OECD two-pillar solution in a major overhaul of the century-old international taxation system. At the G20 Summit in Rome on 30 October 2021, the leaders of the world's biggest economies endorsed the two-pillar solution, decades in the making but which will be implemented in 2023. The new agreement will overcome the tax challenges arising from the digital economy and will ensure that big businesses pay a fair share of taxes on profits from market jurisdictions where they operate. The case explores the two parts, placing a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15% on the profits of the world's largest businesses; and shifting tax revenues to market jurisdictions where large businesses have their customers and sell their products. Protagonist Janet Yellen, Secretary of the US Treasury, played an instrumental role in getting reluctant finance ministers on board. President Joe Biden supported the OECD plan in part because it will stop growing tensions between G20 countries over digital service taxes.

The case explores the journey of Marek Claassen, a German art lover who transformed a passion for building databases for local art galleries into a commercial venture that ranks artists worldwide. Artfacts seeks to rank all artists as transparently as the facts allow. Instead of focusing on transactions, which are often shrouded in secrecy, rankings are weighted according to the attention artists received from experts in the art world such as curators, art historians, art critics, gallery owners and collectors. Generated by an algorithm that is updated on a weekly basis, rankings capture the entire spectrum of art from the intellectual to the psychological, the spiritual to the aesthetic. Twenty years after starting Artfacts, Claassen hired a CEO, Jonas Almgren, and CMO Andrew Antoniades to launch an online mobile app. 'Limna' takes advantage of Artfact's world-class database to estimate the value of artwork coming onto the market. Buyers and gallery owners can use it to assess and negotiate the price of an artwork.

The case provides an alternative view of the antitrust dilemma facing Lina Khan, newly appointed commissioner of the US Federal Trade Commission. Her nomination to the FTC by President Biden sent a clear signal to tech giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google that their enormous power would be reined in by his administration. Khan takes up an antitrust complaint filed against Facebook by her predecessor that its acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014 violated antitrust regulations. This offers an opportunity to review current thinking about the acquisition of start-ups by large technology platforms and discuss the controversy over the privacy practices of social networking platforms. Beyond the legal dimensions, the case examines the growing competitive forces that could pose a threat to WhatsApp and its longstanding domination of the instant messaging market.

The director of the INSEAD Virtual Reality Immersive Learning Initiative, Daniel Landau, must decide what brand of VR headsets to buy for the school and its four campuses. It comes down to a choice between VR devices made by Oculus or PICO Interactive: which is better suited for his small team to create content and deploy it from their hub? Since each brand is embedded in a unique ecosystem, Daniel must evaluate their respective roles and contributions to the goal of delivering an optimal immersive learning experience.

What has been the impact of the Affordable Care Act (2010) on healthcare coverage in the United States? While this significant piece of legislation put America's healthcare system on a long-awaited path towards universal healthcare coverage, the struggle to provide coverage to millions of uninsured people is far from over. The case examines aspects of the national healthcare system including Medicaid and Medicare, employer-based insurance and healthcare exchanges. It also examines what the ACA left undone and how legislative changes in 2017 and the COVID pandemic highlighted the fragility of health care provision in the US.

On 30 August 2016, Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, ordered Ireland to recover €13 billion in illegal state aid (plus interest) that Ireland was alleged to have granted Apple over a decade from 2003. Within months of the ruling, both Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, and Enda Kenny, the Irish Prime Minister, appealed the Commission's judgment to the European General Court in Luxembourg, the EU's second highest court. In mid-July 2020, the General Court returned its verdict and annulled the Commission's ruling giving Commissioner Vestager two months and 10 days to appeal. At the very last minute, the Commissioner announced that she would seek an appeal before the EU's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, citing "errors of law" committed by the lower court. No date has been set for the CJEU to decide on the merits of the appeal. The case explores these events from five analytical pillars: 1) the role of Ireland's low corporate tax rate in attracting FDI; 2) Apple's decision to allocate its earnings to a paper company in Ireland with no physical presence in the country; 3) the repatriation of foreign earnings to the United States; 4) the transfer payments that Apple makes to the USA to pay for R&D; 5) the Commissioner's decision to impose a retroactive tax penalty on a foreign company that acted in accordance with the tax arrangements granted by its host country.

The case covers the ongoing Wang family dispute over the inheritance of YC Wang, the billionaire founder of Formosa Plastics Group, one of Taiwan's most prominent industrial conglomerates, who died in 2008 at the age of 91 without leaving a will. Within six months of his father's death, his eldest son Winston Wong filed a lawsuit in the US to uncover the whereabouts of his father's hidden assets, most of which he believed were unaccounted for in the inheritance settlement in Taiwan in 2009. He discovered that his father had transferred huge blocks of FPG shares to offshore trusts in Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands (where they remain to this day). Having three wives and nine children, YC Wang took pains to maintain the family's control over FPG after his death and to protect his vast fortune from inheritance taxes in Taiwan. He also went to great lengths to ensure that his philantrophic activities in education and healthcare would endure. The case explores these and other options open to founders who plan ahead to ensure their wealth is not squandered by succeeding generations.

The case provides a strategic overview of one of the UK's fastest-growing household goods companies, Dyson Ltd. Starting out in the early 1990s as sole vendor of bagless vacuum cleaners in the UK market, Dyson would ultimately become the market leader before its competitors finally woke up. The case tracks founder James Dyson's global ambitions over an 18-year period until his entry into the electric vehicle market, and a move of corporate headquarters to Singapore (2019), with Asia now accounting for the majority of revenues. It offers insights into the multi-faceted vision of the founder, who combines inventiveness and a love of engineering and design with a rigid respect for lawful business practice.

The case accounts for the gender pay gap in companies and industries around the world. In Europe, women earn on average 84 cents per hour for every euro men make. In the United States, they earn between 80 and 82 cents per hour for every dollar made by a man. The gap widens further after women have children. Iceland is a rare exception; companies in Iceland are under a legal obligation to prove that they offer equal pay. Elsewhere, the under-representation of women in leadership roles in government, industry, the boardroom and c-suite means a dearth of role models for girls. The case shines a spotlight on ingrained behaviours and perceptions that condone the gender pay gap on the grounds that men have more responsible jobs and hold more senior positions.

The case follows the career path of Megha Malagatti, from her humble Indian origins as a member of the Dalit caste (known as "untouchables") to a senior management position in a French luxury goods company - an improbable journey that speaks to her personal strengths, skills and qualifications, as well as the possibilities open to young women to make a career in the luxury goods industry irrespective of their background. It opens a window on gender diversity in the executive suite, highlighting the company culture of S.T.Dupont and the CEO who mentored her.

The case looks at the enormous disruption affecting the entire automotive industry through the eyes of a recently hired CRM expert at the British premium car maker Jaguar Land Rover who keeps the marketing team grounded by taking a customer-centric approach. The case provides a clear sense of purpose about the typical customer journey and the touchpoints where the car maker can reach out to the customer with relevant and timely information. The case reveals the way in which JLR collects data and customer intelligence during the product lifecycle in clear and easy-to-understand terms. One of the highlights of the case is the use of ethnographic research to strengthen the relationship between the target customer and the brand. The case also examines the creative use of smart-data analytics for decision making and the innovative deployment of conjoint analysis for simulating output volumes against price points.

The case goes back in time to the 'golden age' of Absolut when contemporary artists like Andy Warhol and Keith Haring painted the unusual bottle to the amazement of the global arts community. The nearly accidental collaboration with artists in the glorious years turned the brand into a must-have aspirational drink to be consumed at chic bars and art fairs. Based on the vivid recollections of Vadim Grigorian (INSEAD MBA '00J), the case uncovers the awakening of new paradigm, the brand as acultural agent of contemporary art in consumer society. In his retelling of these events, hitherto unknown, the marketing executive recaptures the essence of Absolut during its hey day from the mid-1980s to 2011 in an exquisitely told and unusual account of cultural engagement.