Mary Gadams, founder and CEO of RacingThePlanet, has managed to stage sporting events in some of the world's most inhospitable locations for the last 20 years. New challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic, have arisen. How can this small company navigate the global racing market, international regulations, COVID responses, and more?

On June 12, 2018, 29-year old PlayDate founder and CEO Amanda Raposo and advisor Michael Ryan-Southern considered an offer from "celebrity mom" and founder of a fashion brand Daphne Decoates to combine their independent playdate app start-ups and split the equity 50-50. Raposo, had been running PlayDate in various formats since 2010 but Decoates' app was still in the conceptual phase. The decision was urgent, as Raposo had committed to investors that she would launch PlayDate's online application by July 31, in six weeks. Raposo also had internal issues: her lead app developer had been hospitalized the day before, and she needed to finalize the equity split with her co-founder and part-time chief marketing officer, Courtney Bernabei. Lastly, conversations with senior executives in larger parental outsourcing firms brought to light challenges with the complexity and expense of simultaneous vetting of multiple caregivers and multiple families. Raposo considered her best path forward with respect to company ownership, strategic partnerships, and delivering on a compelling, differentiated value proposition. This case asks students to consider the multitude of issues that an entrepreneurial leader must manage as they move towards launching their venture.

Alvogen is a young Icelandic generic pharmaceutical company, whose CEO believes that his global strategy will give them an edge in this competitive industry. Robert Wessman, Alvogen's CEO, was also previously the CEO of Actavis, another Icelandic generics company, which he built from 90 people in 1999 to 11,000 people and €1.6 billion in revenues by 2007. Wessman has supreme confidence in his abilities to succeed, and a knack for convincing other people of the same and bringing them onboard his ventures. In 2009, after losing most of his net worth in the 2008 financial crisis, he used his last $2 million to found Alvogen, which he hoped to build into one of the top 5 generics companies in the world. Despite going up against the big players in the generics industry (where 50% of world sales is controlled by just 10 firms), Wessman believes that his plan for Alvogen, involving difficult-to-make drugs, biosimilar drugs, and strategies targeted to individual markets, will enable them to be competitive. He quickly recruited a team, with little more than a business plan written on a napkin, and began operations in 35 countries almost simultaneously. The company grew quickly, despite some close calls with funding, and by 2014 it has almost $650 million in sales. Currently, Wessman, top management, and some of Alvogen's investors are entertaining offers from two different groups. One option is to merge Alvogen into SuperPharm, a large, publicly-traded U.S. pharmaceutical company. The other is to be acquired by CVC, a U.K. private equity firm, and Temasek, a Singapore investment company, who are offering to buy out all Alvogen's shareholders. Or, Wessman and his team can reject both offers and continue on as an independent company.

The 2010 Harvard Business Review (HBR) article made the term "entrepreneurship ecosystem" prominent for the first time, reflecting this dynamic and largely self-regulating system. The SE (formerly, Southern Energy) case enriches this dialog on engaging larger corporations in fostering entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship ecosystems and helps the discussion transcend polemic prescription and overly simplistic stereotypes of what larger corporations should or should not do. The case also highlights the potential benefits for larger corporations by engaging with entrepreneurial ventures. The case describes SE's development from a small local utility located on the far western coastline of Denmark to an increasingly global player in electricity distribution and sales, telecommunications, including broad band internet, cable TV, renewable energy, and related fields. Although admittedly lacking a coherent strategy, SE has launched several entrepreneurial programs. The most prominent and visible activity is the Next Step Challenge, a new-as of the time of the case-global startup competition initially targeted to startup ventures in fields closely related to energy and telecommunications. Eight ventures from Denmark, the United States, Chile, and Serbia participated in the first three-month long program, which took place in Esbjerg, Denmark. The case outlines the program details, and participants' views of the benefits and drawbacks of the program. SE is committed to, and has budgeted for, three iterations of the Next Step Challenge. Whereas most discussions of how corporations may programmatically engage entrepreneurship would focus entirely on this startup competition, the case also describes two additional programs with later stage entrepreneurial ventures. One is SE Blue Equity, a DKK 640 million, about $120 million, private equity fund managed by SE and three large Danish corporations and funds.