In March 2006, Iftekhar Enayetullah and Abu Hasnat Md. Maqsood Sinha, the cofounders of Waste Concern, a social enterprise based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and focused on developing innovative waste management solutions for cities in emerging Asia, faced their biggest challenge yet: scaling up their organization's activities and impact. The previous fall, working with a Dutch recycling firm, Waste Concern had secured approval from the United Nations and the Bangladeshi government for two projects under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, a policy program designed to spur infrastructure investments in emerging countries that would help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. To move forward with the projects, Waste Concern also required access to the Matuail landfill, which was owned and operated by the Dhaka City Corporation, the city government of Bangladesh's capital. But despite the projects' obvious benefits to Dhaka and Waste Concern's lobbying of key local officials for months, the DCC still had not granted its permission, and it was unclear whether the DCC ever would. The clock was ticking for Enayetullah and Sinha. Was there a way to persuade the DCC to provide access to the landfill so that Waste Concern could pursue the two CDM projects at Matuail as planned? Or would the social entrepreneurs be better off taking a different path to scale Waste Concern's efforts to address urban waste management and global climate change?

The main purpose of the Venus Medtech case is to give students a greater appreciation for the scale, sophistication, and competitiveness of the innovation landscape outside of Silicon Valley, with particular focus on China. Through a dramatized account of the June 2013 Series A fundraising experience of Venus Medtech, a Chinese medical device start-up, the case forms the basis of a rich, in-class discussion about the similarities and differences between the entrepreneurship and venture capital ecosystems in China and the U.S. Considerable attention is given in the case to the factors that influence a Chinese entrepreneur's decision to build a business and raise capital at home or abroad. The case also compares and contrasts the business practices of VC investors in China and the U.S., as well as the types of deal terms that they typically seek from start-ups.

This case considers the state of telehealth, or the remote delivery of healthcare services via telecommunications technology, in 2019. Doctor On Demand, a promising start-up in the space, sought to solve the four main challenges that the telehealth industry had faced historically. First, although most Americans who had health insurance coverage through their employers also received telehealth benefits, very few knew about these services, and an even smaller number had tried them. Second, the right incentives for payors, such as health plans and large self-insured enterprises, were not in place, a situation that kept utilization rates for telehealth services at stubbornly low levels. Third, Doctor On Demand and its peers needed to add more providers and offer a broader range of healthcare services to patients if they hoped to drive the next leg of growth for their platforms. And fourth, the regulatory environment in which the platforms operated was incredibly complex, and if history were any indicator, other stakeholders in the U.S. healthcare system who felt threatened by telehealth would do whatever they could to impede its rise. The stakes were high, and not just for Doctor On Demand. If CEO Hill Ferguson and his team could address the industry's four major issues, they could unlock the potential of telehealth to deliver better medical care for more people at lower cost.

This note examines the corporate venture capital (CVC) industry, which has played an increasingly large role in the global innovation ecosystem, especially in Silicon Valley, over the last decade. The contents of the note include: a history of CVC beginning in the early 1960s; a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the industry in the late 2010s; a summary of the primary reasons why large corporations establish CVC arms; a framework for balancing strategic and financial value; profiles of three prominent CVC arms; a discussion of the challenges to realizing strategic value; and a process model to improve strategic collaboration.

Since its founding in the late 1990s, JetBlue Airways has been known as an innovator in the U.S. airline industry. This case explores how in the mid- to late-2010s, JetBlue sought to drive further innovation by setting up a corporate venture capital arm. Led by Bonny Simi, a long-time JetBlue executive, commercial airline pilot, former U.S. Olympian, and Stanford alumna, JetBlue Technology Ventures (JTV) seeks to bring external innovation in house. The case relates the history of JTV's establishment, details its investment decision-making criteria and processes, and examines the governance structures put in place to ensure strategic alignment with its corporate parent. Considerable attention is also paid to the ways in which JTV helps integrate into JetBlue Airways new technologies developed by the start-ups it invests in. Overall, the case assesses how JTV tries to achieve both financial and strategic objectives, which has historically been a challenge for corporate venture capital arms set up by other large companies across a variety of industries.

David Bladow and Matthew Schwab, close friends and former college roommates, left their jobs and moved to San Francisco to start a new venture together. After exploring the gifting industry, they ultimately focused on floral delivery. They launched BloomThat, an on-demand service that made sending flowers as easy as sending a text message and gained initial traction over Valentine's Day in 2013. On the back of this success, the team was accepted into Y Combinator for the summer of 2013, raised $3.6 million of seed funding over the next year, and in December 2014, secured $4 million of Series A financing. Problems arose soon after BloomThat expanded to Los Angeles in early 2015, and by the summer, the company teetered on the brink of collapse. Aggressive restructuring saved BloomThat, and existing investors provided bridge financing in late 2015. In the end, however, the turnaround was not enough to attract new investors. When the case picks up in May 2017, Bladow and Schwab must decide what to do next. One option is to shut down BloomThat and move on. The other is to search to sell the start-up to one of the large companies in the industry, with the cofounders knowing that the process will take multiple months, would yield a low valuation and require them to go work for the incumbent for a meaningful period of time. Given their position in the capitalization table, the co-founders are unclear how the value from such a transaction will be divided with the venture capital and venture debt investors. With this uncertainty, the co-founders need to decide how to proceed.

MedAvante, a provider of clinical trial services and technology solutions to the pharmaceutical industry, struggled to find product/market fit for many years, because its innovative service offering met fierce resistance from other stakeholders in the ecosystem. A strategic pivot to work with the ecosystem, not against it, saved the company and brought its co-founders to the brink of a successful exit. This case explores the difficulties of bringing innovation to a deeply conservative, highly regulated industry. It also analyzes the role that other stakeholders in a market ecosystem can play in encouraging, or blocking, the adoption of a startup's products/services.