In December 2019, Scoot, the low-cost carrier (LCC) launched by Singapore Airlines Limited in 2011, had successfully established itself in the Asian market, having flown over 65 million passengers to 68 destinations with a fleet of 48 aircraft. Scoot accounted for 14 percent of seat capacity in Singapore, and 43 percent of LCC capacity out of the country. In 2016, SIA fully acquired and integrated the local LCC Tigerair into Scoot. Scoot's growth, along with the integration of Tigerair, enabled SIA to compete for price-sensitive leisure travelers on short- and medium-haul routes, particularly within Asia, and premium passengers on medium- and long-haul routes. Scoot had been essential to building network connectivity within Asia and allowing SIA to compete effectively with competitors entering the market. Reflecting on Scoot's evolution from 2011 to 2019, Goh Choon Phong, CEO of Singapore Airlines Limited felt that the SIA Group had succeeded in fulfilling its strategic intent of being invested and a market leader in both the full-service and low-cost markets. He contemplated the opportunities and challenges ahead for SIA. Because Scoot operated many places where the full-service airline did not fly, Goh thought that SIA could gain tremendously by making connections between flights by Singapore Airlines, Scoot, and SilkAir-the airline's short-to-medium haul premium subsidiary-as seamless as possible. But there were challenges as well, since Scoot provided different service levels and had been established and run with a high level of autonomy. Goh explained, "There are different expectations between the full service and the LCC if there are any delays. But when you are connecting the two of them, how do you manage the expectations? These are all things that we are still learning. But we are determined, and we think it can be resolved. We are just right at the front of the learning curve."
The topic of mindfulness seemed ubiquitous in the health and business sectors in 2018. Both live and virtual mindfulness trainings in the workplace proliferated, becoming an accepted part of employee well-being activities in many organizations. This case profiles how four organizations incorporated meditation-based mindfulness programs into the workplace: LinkedIn, Aetna, Intuit, and the U.S. Forest Service. The case discusses the origins and leadership of the programs, how the companies define mindfulness, how they measure results, the progress they had made, and how they intended to grow. The case also covers the challenges these programs faced and how mindfulness leaders looked to address those challenges. The case asks students to consider some fundamental questions about mindfulness in the workplace: What kinds of mindfulness trainings are valuable, and what are the best ways to implement these programs in the workplace to maximize impact and efficiency? Who should lead these programs, and where might there be employee resistance? What might be unintended negative consequences?
Talking Points is a U.S. not-for-profit 501c3 organization that provides a multilingual platform to help teachers communicate with families. The idea was first created in 2014 at a Startup Weekend as a translation-embedded SMS tool, inspired by the evidence of a strong connection between parental engagement and student outcomes. By 2019 the organization was reaching 500,000 families, exclusively via word of mouth. They had plenty of internally-collected data and anecdotes about their positive effects on students, families and teachers. MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab was assisting them to conduct a randomized control trial (RCT, the "gold standard" in measuring efficacy) in the 20-21 school year. The product, which uses a combination of AI and human translation, had grown to include versions for schools and districts. The company was earning subscription revenue and strong customer retention. They also faced competition from several venture-backed for-profit start-ups. At the time of the case, the organization has just received a sizable grant from google.org, which would enable it to transition from a small start-up to a more established entity.
Despite its overall prosperity and booming economy, King County in Washington state faced persistent inequities in poverty, homelessness, and unemployment based on race and place. This case covers the period 2014 to 2019, during which the county developed and implemented new equity- and outcome-driven approaches to address these problems. Starting in 2014, the county began shifting its orientation and operations to focus more on preventive social service programs. The county shifted from a traditional procurement model for social services, in which it assessed contract service providers' performance at the end of a contract, to "active contract management," in which the county worked closely with service providers throughout the contract period to achieve specific outcomes that both parties agreed upon in advance. Renewal of a provider's contract depended on whether the service provider met those outcomes. The case highlights how public organizations, such as county governments, develop and implement innovations. This process includes leadership and operational risks; creating theories of change; evaluating outcomes; effective use of data; relationships with outside organizations like service contractors; and resource requirements and constraints. The county's first and flagship innovative initiative was Best Starts for Kids (BSK), a comprehensive suite of programs that focused on early childhood and youth development. In 2016, the county funded BSK via a $65 million annual voter-approved tax levy. The first BSK initiative, launched in 2017, was the Youth and Family Homelessness Prevention Initiative (YFHPI). It was novel because the county was contracting with 25 smaller community organizations to reach communities with persistent rates of poverty and higher likelihoods of entering homelessness. The case, set in 2019, details the opportunities, successes, and challenges of both YFHPI and the county's cultural and operational shifts so far.
The (B) case starts with PMC-Sierra's decision to acquire for $100 million a solid state drive controller business, which included a prototype and a team of 50 people. The company also acquired intellectual property required to build PCIe switches-a related product family that was newer and cutting edge, but riskier to develop. After the acquisition, PMC-Sierra created a new, isolated business, the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG), and protected NSG's resources. To encourage rapid decision making, PMC-Sierra rolled marketing, R&D, and technical support under NSG's leader. NSG was indeed able to move quickly to produce a new product. At the same time, carving out this dedicated business meant that PMC-Sierra lost some efficiencies in the company as a whole. The acquisition and formation of NSG also put some burden on other parts of PMC-Sierra, as NSG required dedicated attention and resources during its start-up phase. A few months after the acquisition, PMC-Sierra leadership shut down the existing internal group working on the solid state drive controller, because the company had two teams and two sets of products. This proved to be one of the company's biggest tradeoffs-and an unpopular decision. Along with that decision, the company opted to develop the newer, riskier product that it had acquired the intellectual property for, PCIe switches.
This case details how semiconductor company PMC-Sierra implemented different corporate entrepreneurship strategies to take advantage of two major industry disruptions: 1) the transition from hard disk drives to solid state drives; and 2) the rise of cloud computing. The core business of PMC-Sierra's enterprise storage business was developing products called controllers that interfaced directly with hard disk drives. The company sold these controllers to the world's largest storage equipment manufacturers, including HP, Dell, and IBM. The case focuses on the years 2010-2012, during which the company strove to develop a new type of controller optimized for solid state drives-while maintaining the strength of its existing core hard disk drive business. With the rise of cloud computing, PMC-Sierra added a major new customer base: giant cloud service providers like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. As these cloud service providers grew in strength, they upended the industry supply chain, negatively impacting PMC-Sierra's traditional core customers such as Dell and HP. The big challenge, and opportunity, for PMC-Sierra was to retain its current large customers while capturing new growth opportunities. The case ends in 2012 at a decision point for PMC-Sierra. Should the company continue building solid state drive products internally, given that it was emerging from two major setbacks-or look for an acquisition possibility, which would be very expensive? Either way, the company had to decide how to organize its next development effort, drawing from corporate entrepreneurship lessons it had learned in the previous few years. Additionally, the company had to decide whether to develop a newer, but riskier, technology on the horizon. Could PMC-Sierra launch and maintain development of two new technologies, or would it have to choose one or the other?
In this 2019 case, Ed Rapp, retired group president and CFO of Caterpillar, recounts the positive impact that using a type of "self-talk" called an affirmation has had on his life and career. Affirmations are simple, positive, carefully crafted statements declaring specific goals in their completed state. A foundational belief behind an affirmation is that self-image is shaped by self-talk and daily performance reality. Affirmations should be personal, positive, accurate and balanced, allowing a person to assess who they are now and who they want to be in the future. The gaps that emerge between "now" and "the future" lead to making goals for change, supporting the goals with affirmations, and then creating the positive change. Affirmations are powerful because they create self-awareness, which is critical for leaders. Rapp credits affirmations with helping him succeed in his career; balance his personal and professional life; and become more of the person he wanted to be. In 2015, Rapp was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's disease. He was diagnosed on November 5th and rewrote his affirmations on November 7th to reflect his new reality, while maintaining the goal of affirmations: continually making positive change.
This case discusses how the leaders of the Royal Bank of Canada infused the 80,000-employee company with a new emphasis on People Analytics. This supported the bank's business strategies for its wide range of business units. The bank's new People Analytics group, led at the top by the vice president of human resources, collected and analyzed huge volumes of data about the bank's employees, customers, and business unit performance to help the company achieve its strategic goals. Companies across industries had long talked about using data analysis to help them improve employee and organizational performance, but the advent of big data created a step change in the ability to make that happen. With the abundance of data available, and many potential ways to use it, the Royal Bank of Canada, referred to as RBC, was choosing projects that had the greatest potential ROI. The People Strategy and People Analytics teams worked together to add clear business value to business units to help them achieve performance objectives. The case details two of RBC's major People Analytics projects. The first project used data to identify empirically the traits of great managers and subsequently identify who might or might not be a great manager. This enabled RBC to help those managers who could benefit from coaching or other types of interventions. The second project used both internal and customer data to diagnose whether any specific branch, region, or product innovation was not doing as well as it could be-and why not.
Rachio, a small Denver-based company, developed and sold a disruptive technology that digitized home sprinkler systems. Rachio's "Smart Sprinkler Controller" enabled homeowners to reduce water usage by up to 50 percent by using detailed weather reports to auto-adjust watering. Homeowners could also easily control their irrigation systems from their smartphones through the Rachio app. Rachio had seen strong early adoption, but in 2018 the percentage of homes with smart sprinkler controllers was still quite small. Although the Internet of Things (IoT) market was growing rapidly, the market was still relatively new and expensive. Rachio was similar to many other IoT companies in that the majority of the value of the product was in the software-but the revenue came from one-time sales of a piece of hardware, which Rachio sold as a premium product. Rachio's large incumbent competitors were a step behind Rachio in smart controllers, but they were starting to copy Rachio's product, feature for feature. To stay ahead of the competition and continue to grow, Rachio needed to convert more homeowners into the B2C channel or move to extend its early B2C wins into B2B markets. In B2B markets, professional landscapers chose the controller type and brand for homeowners.
It is a major global health challenge to get life-saving vaccines to children in hard-to-reach parts of Africa and Asia. These vaccines must stay cool during transport, yet it is not always possible to prevent heat exposure. Historically, health workers had no means of determining whether such heat exposure had damaged the vaccines and caused them to lose potency. But Vaccine Vial Monitors, or VVMs, changed that. A VVM is a small temperature monitor, no bigger than a dime, that adheres to a vaccine vial to indicate whether the vaccine has been rendered ineffective by excessive heat exposure. The benefits of using VVMs are two-fold: children only receive viable vaccines, and health workers do not discard viable vaccines because they are uncertain about heat exposure damage. VVMs were first developed in 1990, and by 2017, over 6.6 billion VVMs had been used. However, VVMs had a long and uncertain journey that spanned almost 30 years between 1979, when the World Health Organization (WHO) put out a call for such a technology to be invented, and 2007, when there was mass adoption by vaccine manufacturers. This case focuses on the efforts made, and challenges faced, by the many public, social, and private sector partners who collaborated to take this relatively simple social innovation to global scale. These partners included international governmental health bodies such as WHO and UNICEF; the non-governmental organization PATH, which spearheaded and guided the efforts; and TempTime, the private company that invented the technology. Though sometimes at odds with each other, the partners had to convince the many different vaccine manufacturers to buy and use the VVM product. This required continually adapting technology design, reshaping business partnerships, and rethinking cost/pricing models. VVMs had saved over 160,000 children's lives by 2012 alone, but success had in no way been a sure thing.
In 2016, Deutsche Telekom's CEO Tim Hottges was steering the 69 billion euro telecom incumbent in new directions and seeking to disrupt the industry from within. The company's tagline was "Life is For Sharing." Its goal was to be Europe's leading digital communication services company that was most trusted by consumers and business customers for safely sharing content. Hottges wanted to achieve this by having the best network, the best service, the best products, and the best customer experience. The company also aimed to be the preferred provider for business customers. A major part of Deutsche Telekom's strategy involved building up the company's core business-its network-by increasing infrastructure investment 20 percent. Hottges described this as his "big bet," saying the network was the basis for everything the company did. Even as it built out the network, an ongoing challenge was finding the right software talent to support the growing software IT components of the network infrastructure. With that in mind, Deutsche Telekom was also developing capabilities on top of network connectivity, such as security, device management, privacy, and global reach capability. While focusing its innovation on advanced network capabilities, Deutsche Telekom was shifting resources away from efforts to internally innovate in competition with Internet-based players. Instead, it was now intent on winning by partnering with companies like Microsoft, Spotify, and BMW to bring new capabilities, innovations, and services to customers. European and German regulations created significant constraints, and external competition remained fierce from both telecommunications companies and so-called "Over the Top" companies such as Google, Facebook, and WhatsApp. These companies had diverted billions of dollars away from traditional telecommunications companies, enabled by telco companies' infrastructures. To counter that, Deutsche Telekom needed to strongly align strategy and execution.
Orb, a tiny Silicon Valley start-up, came up with a breakthrough technology. Before anyone else was doing it, Orb developed software that enabled every type of media on a PC (including music, photos, and videos) to be streamed remotely to any mobile device for free. Orb also enabled users to stream live TV onto their PCs and mobile devices. This was a significant technological feat in the days before the iPhone and other smartphones. When it launched the product in 2005, Orb won the "Next Big Thing" award from an influential technology publication. Orb had developed a sophisticated technology that generated positive press, yet the product did not immediately go viral, as the company had hoped. So Orb carried out several marketing, technological, and strategic pivots-and faced a lot of disappointment until it hit on what seemed to be a winning combination. The case, set in 2007, details these pivots and addresses the following topics: new product and feature development; customer acquisition; customer usage and retention; and marketing opportunities and challenges. The case ends with a decision about what the company should do next.
In 2003, the tiny start-up Orb came up with a breakthrough technology. Through its software, every type of media on a PC (including music, photos, and videos) could be streamed remotely to any mobile device for free. Orb also enabled users to stream live TV onto their PCs and mobile devices. This was a technological feat in the days before the iPhone and other smartphones. When Orb launched in 2005, it won the "Next Big Thing" award from the influential tech publication CNET. It had been a challenging technology to develop, and with such positive press, Orb watched and waited for the technology to go viral. This case is divided into three parts. Part (A) covers the early challenges Orb had with user adoption, unexpected technology challenges, and its realization that it was not going to go viral - at least not as the company and product existed at that time. At the end of 2005, Orb had about 300,000 users, and it needed to decide its next move. It could keep pushing the product to consumers - either on its own or through partners; try to find partners in the B2B space and supply streaming architecture; or maybe call it a day and try to sell the company for the technology. Parts (B) and (C) cover Orb in 2006 and 2007. Topics include: 1) New product and feature development, 2) Strategy and product pivots, 3) Customer acquisition versus product usage, 4) Marketing opportunities and challenges, and 5) decisions about selling a company. Part (B) and (C) of the case are for instructor use only.
In 2016, the €75 billion French multinational energy conglomerate ENGIE was massively transforming its strategic and operational imperatives toward renewable energy. The 200-year old company owned Europe's biggest natural gas pipeline and was a major global producer and supplier of natural gas and other energy sources. ENGIE had announced the transformation in 2014-following a sharp drop in global fossil fuel prices-viewing it as the beginning of a new era in energy. ENGIE set goals to double renewable power capacity for Europe over the next decade, rapidly expand its renewable footprint in high growth regions such as India and China, slash its lines of businesses based on commodities, and reduce exploration of oil and gas. CEO Isabelle Kocher's vision followed her belief that "the name of the game was to take the lead in the new energy world." The case is set in mid-2015, when top management, convinced that ENGIE needed to build a strong global portfolio quickly, acquired nine-year old French energy company Solairedirect for €200 million. The acquisition made ENGIE the number one solar company in France and gave it an international presence and product pipeline. Solairedirect had a profitable business model-different from ENGIE's-that enabled it to rapidly build utility scale solar photovoltaic installations at competitive prices. ENGIE believed that buying the smaller company would bring an entrepreneurial spirit and new way of thinking to the company. However, ENGIE had just reorganized along mostly geographical business units, and Solairedirect did not fit into that organizational structure. Also, when ENGIE acquired Solairedirect, the solar company had just experienced an unsuccessful IPO attempt. The questions arose as to whether a company in that situation was a good acquisition target; whether ENGIE paid the right price for it; and how, and to what extent, Solairedirect could or should be integrated into the larger organization.
Between 2000 and 2016 Apple introduced a number of new products and services that dramatically expanded the company's scope well beyond its traditional market position in computers. Over that period, the direction of the company changed and evolved almost as dramatically. This note summarizes the major events along the way and how the Apple leadership spoke of these changes. Apple's new products and services included the launches of iTunes, the iPod, the iTunes Store, iTunes for Microsoft Windows, the iPhone, Apple Watch, and Apple Music. The company also changed its name from Apple Computer to Apple in 2007, reflecting the company's growth and evolution.
In June 2009, the online gaming company Zynga launched the free social game Farmville on Facebook, which set a new record by reaching one million Daily Active Users four days after launch, skyrocketing to 30 million in six months. The case takes an inside look at how Zynga created FarmVille in just six weeks, including the important strategic and technical decisions Zynga made, the sometimes tense team dynamics, and the challenges Zynga's founder and CEO Mark Pincus faced within Zynga. The company's experienced game developers had strongly resisted his idea to develop a farm game because farm games performed poorly on traditional game consoles and were considered an inferior gaming category. But Pincus believed they afforded access to new audiences and wanted to seize the strategic opportunity offered by the convergence of advances in technology and the meteoric rise of Facebook. These combined well with Zynga's advanced data analytics capabilities, which allowed the company to aggressively advance a new business model "Games as a Service," in which developers continuously added features to make a social game consistently compelling. Post launch, FarmVille was continually evolving and adding new features. But after a few months, the quality of the code and the ideas for new features were getting worse, more bugs and quality assurance problems arose, and users were complaining that new features were late and the game was getting rote. This case is set in late December 2009 as user numbers started to drop, and Pincus and the FarmVille team tried to figure out how to turn this trend around. Zynga's leadership team had to figure out how to reinvigorate FarmVille so that it would continue to be the goose that laid the golden eggs.
In 2016, Santa Clara County was launching a six-year project aimed at reducing the enormous costs of treating its most acute mental health care patients − $45 million a year − while improving their treatment and quality of life. For the project, the county chose a new model called "Pay for Success" (PFS), in which governments only pay service providers if their efforts are successful. By contrast, in the traditional payment model, providers bill the government on a regular basis for activities and outputs, such as the number of hours spent counseling clients. To provide service providers with working capital during multi-year projects, Pay for Success programs may be paired with Social Innovation Financing, under which commercial investors, foundations and high net worth philanthropists fund the organization's ongoing operations. They are then repaid to the extent that service providers meet their promised outcomes. The PFS model was growing, with $200 million in play in 45 projects around the world. But its detractors raised questions about issues such as 1) using private funds for services for vulnerable people being served, 2) the high government transaction costs of the projects, and 3) potential incentives for service providers to game the system by cherry picking clients or providing inferior services to reduce government costs. Santa Clara County was doing the first PFS project in the mental healthcare space, and had chosen the for-profit service provider Telecare. Butmany decisions still had to be made: How could the county attract Social Innovation Financing partners and negotiate a repayment structure that worked for all parties − while making sure that incentives and motivations were aligned? How should the county measure the success of this project? Which were the right metrics to assess - and which should be linked to payment?
This 2015 case is about the internal organizational transformation of the Hewlett Packard (HP) Enterprise Group (EG), which brought in $28 billion in annual revenue and had 50,000 employees. "EG Ignite," led by a small team of 10 people who reported directly to the head of EG, was designed to be the catalyst for the transformation and provide both a framework and problem-solving support for the most critical transformation initiatives. These included: 1) accelerating growth, 2) simplifying company processes, 3) becoming more customer-centric, 4) driving down costs, and 5) driving go-to-market changes. EG's leadership was especially focused on transforming the front line sales force. The EG Ignite team served as the interlock point between functions, business units, and regions, and it helped with the execution of the initiatives. At the same time EG Ignite was in full swing (18 months in), Hewlett Packard was in the process of splitting the $111 billion, 75-year-old company into two independent, publicly traded companies: HPI (Personal Systems and Printing business segments), and HPE (Enterprise Group, Enterprise Services, Enterprise Software, and Financial Services). The split came out of HP's desire to act with greater speed and agility so it could better compete in an environment in which technology, market, and customer expectations were rapidly changing. As a critical part of HPE, the Enterprise Group had to be sure its transformation was speedy, successful, and aligned with the imperatives of the company as a whole.