Electrolux AB is the world's fifth-largest maker of consumer appliances. In November 2018, Electrolux launched the trial of a subscription-based business model in Sweden for the Pure i9 - a high-end robotic vacuum cleaner. Within nine months, Daniel Wentz, VP Software Products, who had spearheaded the initiative, started seeing traction in the market. Daniel was convinced that there was a much bigger opportunity for Electrolux to create value with the new hardware-as-a-service concept for small appliances. But key questions remained: How to shift the organization from a hardware-first product-push comfort zone to software-first service-pull model? How could Electrolux create more value with the hardware-as-a-service model? How to scale up the subscription-based business model? What options might be considered? What kind of investment and leadership commitment would it take to succeed?
The case illustrates how Ping An can anticipate digital trends such as cloud computing and evolve from its core business to expand to new areas. Ping An began by selling property and casualty insurance but soon expanded to banking and financial services. The firm then invested heavily in I.T. development in order to take part in the Internet economy, focusing on five verticals: financial services, healthcare, automobiles, real estate and smart cities. In the five verticals, Ping An incubated 11 independent technology affiliates that dwarfed a valuation of $70 billion. By 2020, 3 companies were publicly traded as independent entities. Ping An was no longer a financial institution, instead, it had become a "finance + technology" and a "finance + ecosystem" company. While so many financial institutions and other traditional businesses always talk about digitization and transformation, but the progress is pretty slow. Ping An is in a very different place. The Ping An case is interesting both from a Chinese and a global perspective. As a firmly rooted Chinese firm, Ping An embodies the rise of a traditional company that learned to harness new technologies and compete with China's pure technology players. From a global perspective, Ping An offers lessons in how to develop an ecosystem of technology affiliates: the firm has developed a set of best practices for incubating, funding and collaborating with spin-offs.
While Ping An is so successful to transform and reinvent itself to a tech giant, it discovered the demand of small and medium sized financial institutions to deploy technology. In December 2015, Ping An set up OneConnect, a fintech spinoff, to export its internal technology and repackage them as services to other banks and insurance companies in China. Case (B) is about how Ping An incubated OneConnect and development of OneConnect. OneConnect is in an expansion phase, growing from its Chinese client base to offer its cloud-based services across Asia. At the beginning it relied very much on Ping An in terms of technology, people and other resources, and became more and more independently later on. OneConnect turned out to be a unicorn and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2019.
Case (C) is about Autohome, which is the only unicorn Ping An acquired, rather than built from the ground up. After acquisition by Ping An, Autohome was transformed form a pure automobile website to develop four key offerings - content, transaction, finance, and lifestyle - all powered by AI, big data, and cloud technology. After the acquisition, in the span of three and a half years, Autohome's stock price quadrupled.
Founded in 2011 by the Swiss entrepreneur Viktor Calabrò, Coople operates the largest on-demand staffing platform in Europe. It has enjoyed rapid growth and is considered one of the most successful Swiss based tech start-up / platform company. The case features Viktor Calabrò, founder of Coople, and his thinking about the future of the company he founded in 2011. The case is set in 2019 where Viktor in his role as major shareholder, founder and Chairman of the board is faced with strategic choices how to continue to drive Coople's growth story and retaliate against copycats which are arising on the horizon. This strategy and business innovation case explores how innovative business models disrupt traditional industries, especially if those industries are not able to self-cannibalize. It covers the key elements of successful platform strategy (network effects, the importance of scaling and automation) as well as theplatform paradox and the strategic choices needed when growing from a start-up into an established company.
Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group, headquartered in Beijing, is the country's largest commercial property developer and the world's largest movie theatre operator. One of its core businesses is the Wanda Plazas - large complexes encompassing shopping malls, cinemas, hotels and offices. Wanda's competitive advantages include a strong culture of execution and a proprietary technology backbone that supports and automates decision making processes. With the growth of ecommerce giants such as Alibaba and JD.com, traditional retail was coming under threat. Wanda, with its background in offline retail, saw the online-to-offline space as an opportunity. But, how best to execute? This case study follows Qu Dejun, president of Wanda's newly formed Internet Technology Group, as he and his team explored ways to leverage Wanda's traditional strengths to bring an online-to-offline strategy to fruition.
Recruit Holdings, Japan's largest staffing firm and a leading marketing media company started out in the early 1960s as an advertising company publishing magazines for jobseekers. It scaled up over the following decades to add business verticals such as real estate, bridal, travel, beauty salons and restaurants. Spurred by the internet revolution in the early 2000s, Recruit launched job boards and websites for its diverse media businesses while also moving content online by digitizing many of its popular magazines. In the early 2010s, it transitioned into becoming a service provider with the launch of a number of web-based platforms that allowed SMEs to digitize several key activities, such as point-of-sale registers, reservations and payments. By 2015 Recruit's digital platforms had gained significant popularity and the company was generating enormous amounts of online data on types of transactions, end-user behaviors and SME business characteristics. It also held significant deep offline data that resided within the sales team. However, the platforms and the data was specific to individual businesses. Recruit began to push for a unified backbone platform that would cut across all businesses with vertically stacked integrated solutions. It also established an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory in Silicon Valley. The mandate was to apply the latest technologies in data analytics, machine learning and AI to achieve breakthrough innovation. At the same time, Recruit harbored global aspirations and embarked on international expansion, mainly through acquisitions. Its goal was to become the world's largest staffing firm by 2020 and the largest media company by 2030. Could Recruit replicate its business model successfully overseas? Could it leverage its people and technological platforms to transform itself into a truly global internet corporation? Could it cannibalize its existing businesses through data-driven innovations to leapfrog into the future?
Recruit Holdings, Japan's largest staffing firm and a leading marketing media company started out in the early 1960s as an advertising company publishing magazines for jobseekers. It scaled up over the following decades to add business verticals such as real estate, bridal, travel, beauty salons and restaurants. Spurred by the internet revolution in the early 2000s, Recruit launched job boards and websites for its diverse media businesses while also moving content online by digitizing many of its popular magazines. In the early 2010s, it transitioned into becoming a service provider with the launch of a number of web-based platforms that allowed SMEs to digitize several key activities, such as point-of-sale registers, reservations and payments. By 2015 Recruit's digital platforms had gained significant popularity and the company was generating enormous amounts of online data on types of transactions, end-user behaviors and SME business characteristics. It also held significant deep offline data that resided within the sales team. However, the platforms and the data was specific to individual businesses. Recruit began to push for a unified backbone platform that would cut across all businesses with vertically stacked integrated solutions. It also established an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory in Silicon Valley. The mandate was to apply the latest technologies in data analytics, machine learning and AI to achieve breakthrough innovation. At the same time, Recruit harbored global aspirations and embarked on international expansion, mainly through acquisitions. Its goal was to become the world's largest staffing firm by 2020 and the largest media company by 2030. Could Recruit replicate its business model successfully overseas? Could it leverage its people and technological platforms to transform itself into a truly global internet corporation? Could it cannibalize its existing businesses through data-driven innovations to leapfrog into the future?
The Xiaomi case explores how this Chinese startup leveraged ubiquitous connectivity and open innovation to revolutionize the mobile phone industry in the global market. In less than five years it became the world's third largest mobile phone maker and second most valuable startup. This progress is even more dazzling considering the organization's business model, which differs considerably from traditional Chinese firms. Investors saw Xiaomi as social media giant capable of mobilizing an enormous fan base in its product development, like many Silicon Valley startups. Some even saw Xiaomi as marking a new wave of Chinese companies focused on developing new capabilities rather than manufacturing. Perhaps the strongest endorsement came from a former Android executive, Hugo Barra, who left Google to join Xiaomi in October 2013 to manage the company's international expansion. Xiaomi -which means "little rice or millet in Chinese, may not be that small after all. Learning objective: The case allows students to explore how ubiquitous connectivity and open innovation may take hold in the Chinese market, and how it might impact the global market place. The material in the case offers a multitude of options for deep dives into a variety of topics, eg: understanding how industries evolve and how profits can shift from one end of the value chain to another; demonstrating the importance of open innovation; illustrating the need to be adaptable to changing market conditions; etc.
Develop its own branded line, or continue as an original design manufacturer (ODM)? Tung Lung Metal Industries Co. Ltd. is a Taiwanese maker of door lock hardware that is faced with the question of whether to continue to focus on its ODM business or start placing more emphasis on its own brand development and growth in global markets. The case explores the bumpy history of the company and raises questions around the downstream consequences of global outsourcing strategies.
ASUSTek Computer was the world's largest manufacture of PC motherboards, yet when it tried to launch its new sub-notebook Eee PC, the organization faced challenges in doing things outside of its established processes. Though many of the team members had worked together for years, they had to find new ways of working as they tried to launch the new mobile Internet device category without undermining its existing notebook PC business.