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Set in 2018, this case follows married couple and music industry titans Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys as they consider how best to use their platforms to achieve their goals. Since achieving professional success in the music industry early in their lives, Swizz and Keys had explored many different personal and professional pursuits. Swizz was particularly interested in the arts and had launched an initiative aimed at supporting emerging visual artists of color. Keys had taken on acting roles, written a children's book, and had become an increasingly vocal advocate for social justice causes. Anchoring their professional work, Swizz and Keys had built a loving family rooted in communication and mutual respect. As one of the music industry's most recognizable power couples, Swizz and Keys now considered how they might use their joint platform to continue to drive positive change for artists and creators of all stripes.

This case provides an update to the (A) case, which introduces students to adaptive platform trials, an ambitious, more efficient type of clinical trial that increases access to therapies. The A case centers on Dr. Brian Alexander's efforts to launch an adaptive platform trial for studying potential therapies for glioblastoma (GBM), an aggressive form of brain cancer. The (B) case provides an update and explores the strategies that Alexander is considering for sustainably financing this trial.

This case explores the life and career of Alicia Keys, the 15-time Grammy winning singer-songwriter and producer. Set in 2019, it covers the evolution of Keys's 18-year musical career and additional passions, including acting, entrepreneurship, social justice activism, and collecting art with her husband, rapper and music producer Swizz Beatz. Now a mother of two young sons and with no intentions of slowing down, Keys considers what the next phase of her life and career might hold. This case would be useful for students studying the music and entertainment industry. It also holds relevance for executives approaching the peak of their career and looking to make more deliberate decisions about time management and prioritization.

In September 2018, the executive team at Ariadne Labs (Ariadne), a Boston-based organization dedicated to improving health systems through the discovery and implementation of simple tools, faced a number of strategic decisions. Chief among them, the seven-year-old organization needed to determine how it might establish and shepherd successful partnerships with a wide range of diverse entities-ranging from major international public health organizations like the World Bank to small non-profit implementing organizations.

This case should accompany the (A) and (C) cases, "Gender and Free Speech at Google" (318085) and (319097).

This case reveals Google's response to a list of employee demands aiming to combat sexual misconduct in the workplace. This case should accompany the (A) and (B) cases, "Gender and Free Speech at Google" (318085) and (319085).

This case, set in October 2017, follows Danielle Sheer, general counsel for Carbonite, as she defends the company against claims of patent infringement. It provides a broad overview of the U.S. patent system and explores the impact that non-practicing entities (sometimes also called "patent trolls") can have on companies.

This short case, meant for pairing with HBS case 615-013 "AmazonFresh: Rekindling the Online Grocery Market," explores Amazon's rationale for acquiring Whole Foods.

In late 2019, San Francisco-based electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) maker JUUL Labs (pronounced "jewel") faced intense pressure. Sales of JUUL products exceeded $1 billion in 2018, dominating the e-cigarette category. While JUUL Labs' stated goal was to help current smokers switch from traditional cigarettes to e-cigarettes, the company's products had become popular with high school and even middle school students, among whom "vaping"-the use of e-cigarettes-was rapidly spreading. Some advocacy groups and policymakers speculated that JUUL Labs had purposefully marketed its products to minors, an allegation the company strongly denied. The debate over JUUL Labs' marketing and products had made 2019 a difficult year for the company, with a number of states and municipalities imposing bans on the sale of flavored e-liquids, and in some cases, on all e-cigarette products. Given that the company was ostensibly founded to reduce the harm of smoking, what more could JUUL Labs do to prevent misuse of its products, restore its reputation, and grow its business more successfully?

In late 2016, Russ D'Souza and Jack Groetzinger, co-founders of the online event ticketing platform SeatGeek, faced some difficult decisions. In the company's seven-year history, SeatGeek had positioned itself primarily as an aggregator, facilitating ticket transactions between sellers and buyers on the "secondary ticket market." But in early 2016, D'Souza and Groetzinger had decided to pursue the "primary ticket market"-contracting directly with the sports teams and venues that issued tickets to events, a space dominated by Ticketmaster. This move would require SeatGeek to confront Ticketmaster, an established incumbent, develop or acquire the back-end software necessary to enable primary market ticket sales, and establish partnerships with sports teams and event venues. Entering the primary market would also likely necessitate a Series D funding round.

The supplementary dataset (courseware number 619-702) provides a disguised dataset to students. At the end of the case, summary data from that dataset is mentioned. (Bottom of page 13: Rahematpura, who had been running numbers, interjected: "According to some back-of-the-envelope calculations, by not increasing wait times now, we stand to lose $1.6 million in the six launch cities. That might outweigh the data collection concerns.")

Frustrated by an inability to convince existing venture capital firms to invest in companies led by women, people of color, and LGBT founders, Arlan Hamilton started her own firm, Backstage Capital, in 2015. Hamilton understood the untapped potential of companies run by underrepresented founders, a group historically excluded from venture capital funding, and was eager to demonstrate the significant returns on investment in such companies. This case explores Hamilton's nontraditional VC background, and her mission to fund startups where at least one founder of the company identifies as a woman, person of color, or LGBT. Now, three years after its founding, Hamilton is considering launching both an accelerator and a fund that will invest exclusively in Black women.

Set in March 2018, the case follows ride-sharing company Uber as it develops and launches a new product called Express POOL. This product offers a reduced price to riders willing to carpool, walk a short distance to/from their pick-up and drop-off points, and wait a few minutes before being matched to a driver. Two weeks after the launch of Express POOL in six U.S. cities, Uber's product managers discover that if riders are made to wait five minutes to be matched to a driver-rather than the standard two minutes-rider cancellation rates increase, but Uber's costs per ride are reduced. Together with data scientists, engineers, and product operations specialists, the product managers must decide whether to keep rider wait times at two minutes or increase wait times to five minutes in the six newly launched cities. The decision is complicated by the fact that Uber's data science team normally places a five-week moratorium on changes to any new product, to allow robust data to be collected on its performance. This case is paired with a supplementary dataset from Uber (HBS No. 619-702). In advance of the class discussion, students can analyze the data and draw their own conclusions about the trade-offs of maintaining the standard wait times or increasing them.

Economist and entrepreneur Magnus Resch was on a mission to make the art market more transparent. To that end, in 2014, he began building the Magnus app, which catalogued the price and transaction history of millions of works of art. Users could download the app, take a photo of any flat artwork, and the app would display that piece's price along with other pertinent information. Resch believed that such radical transparency would grow the small, rather insular, network of serious art collectors. By May 2018, the app had garnered strong user engagement, with over 10,000 new downloads per month. But Resch was not yet generating revenue from the Magnus app, which was free for users to download. The case explores Resch's options for monetizing the app, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of each option.

Tesla's board of directors proposed an unusual compensation plan for the company's CEO Elon Musk. The plan payouts were entirely contingent on achieving very ambitious market value, sales, and EBIT targets over the next ten years. If all the targets were achieved, Tesla would be one of the most valuable companies in the world, and Musk would receive the highest compensation of any CEO in US corporate history. If the targets were not achieved, Musk would receive nothing. Proxy advisors (ISS and Glass Lewis) expressed serious reservations about the plan and urged shareholders to vote against it. Should shareholders approve or reject the plan?

In August 2017, Google fired James Damore, a 28-year-old software engineer who had been employed by the company since 2013. The move came after Damore penned an internal company memo titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," which posited that innate biological differences between men and women-as opposed to hiring biases, gender discrimination, or a hostile workforce-were at least partially responsible for the low numbers of women in tech. At the time, 20% of Google's tech workforce, and 31% of its overall staff, was female. Damore also admonished Google for silencing opinions that challenged what he viewed as the company's politically liberal belief system. Reactions to both the memo's content and Google's decision to fire Damore were swift and varied. Some praised the company for signaling intolerance of any marginalization of women. Others criticized Google for terminating an employee for a seemingly innocuous act of expression. Danielle Brown, Google's new vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, hired just a few weeks before the memo was leaked to the public, must now advise Google's top leadership team on dealing with the fallout.

It is March 2017 and TPG, a global alternative investment firm with $74 billion assets under management, has recently launched its inaugural impact investing fund-the $2 billion Rise Fund. In an effort to "take the religion out of impact investing," Mike Stone, CIO of Rise, has partnered with Chris Addy at The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consultancy, to develop an evidence-based methodology for quantifying the impact of prospective Rise investments. Together, they have come up with a framework that ultimately generates an impact multiple of money (IMM), a measure of the social value created by a company per equity dollar invested. If a company fails to meet the IMM threshold, Rise will not invest in it. The case finds Stone and Maya Chorengel (HBS MBA '97), Rise's senior partner for impact, debating whether to make Rise's first investment in EverFi, an educational technology company that offers a range of online educational programming to its K-12 school, university, and corporate clients.

It is July 2017, and Dr. Nteranya Sanginga, the director general of the Nigeria-based International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), is making progress toward two of his primary strategic objectives for the nonprofit research Institute: 1) to scale the impact and reach of some of the IITA's most commercially viable products and technologies by working with the private sector, and 2) to address Nigeria's massive youth unemployment problem by engaging young people in agribusiness. To achieve his first goal, Sanginga in 2013 established a business incubation platform (BIP), which was tasked with establishing pilot production facilities to illustrate that a select number of IITA products could be profitably manufactured and sold to an existing market. Sanginga hoped that the BIP would attract interest from private sector companies compelled by the business case for taking a particular technology to scale. To achieve his second goal, Sanginga had founded a youth "agripreneurs" program, which would train young university graduates on improved agricultural practices, food processing, and strategies for starting an agribusiness. Since its establishment in 2012, the program had enrolled four cohorts of young people in Ibadan (a total of 70 people), and expanded to four other states in Nigeria and five additional African countries. While both programs were making progress, challenges remained. Sanginga had originally hoped that the agripreneurs program would launch dozens of small businesses, but as of mid-2017, it had produced just four independent start-ups. Most of the program's agripreneurs in Ibadan (53 of the 70) remained affiliated with the IITA. Poor access to commercial loans, which carried interest rates up to 30%, was the primary issue preventing them from starting businesses. The BIP, too, faced challenges. Chief among them was a severe cash flow constraint that prevented Schreurs from properly forecasting and investing resources

In July 2017, Dr. Brian M. Alexander, president and CEO of the AGILE Research Foundation, was preparing to launch a new type of clinical trial-an adaptive platform trial-to study potential therapies for glioblastoma (GBM), an aggressive form of brain cancer. Alexander believed that the standard way in which new cancer drugs were tested-the traditional randomized controlled trial (RCT)-was limited in many ways. While statistically rigorous and still considered the "gold standard" in clinical research, traditional RCTs were time-consuming, costly, and limited to testing just one new drug at a time. Adaptive platform trials, by contrast, facilitated simultaneously studying multiple therapies for a given disease and promised a number of efficiency improvements. They also used statistical techniques to allow more patients to access promising therapies. As such, they had the potential to fundamentally change the clinical research process, making clinical trials for new cancer drugs more efficient, more accessible to patients, and more ambitious in scope. For the past three years, Alexander had been working closely with a group of like-minded oncologists, statisticians, and clinical trial strategists to design an adaptive platform trial for GBM in the hopes of identifying effective therapies more quickly. By mid-2017, Alexander and his colleagues had completed a master protocol for the trial. But now the research team faced several design and operational challenges as they prepared for the trial's launch. Most pressing, how should Alexander and his colleagues finance the trial?

Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) was a medical technology firm headquartered in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, with 43,000 employees and 2016 revenues of $12.5 billion. For several years, the company had pursued development of products that created shared value, defined as those that both generated profits and created positive social impact. One of the primary ways the company advanced such products was through establishing and maintaining public-private partnerships (PPPs) with governmental or non-governmental organizations. In June 2017, Gary Cohen, an Executive Vice President of BD, and Renuka Gadde, Vice President of BD's Global Health function, were deeply engaged in a six-year PPP to bring a new low-cost labor and delivery tool called the Odon Device to market. This device had the potential to avert hundreds of thousands of maternal and newborn deaths, primarily in low-resource settings. Although they had faced many challenges in bringing together multiple organizations to develop and launch the device, Cohen and Gadde were convinced that BD's ability to collaborate with governments and international agencies to address urgent global health needs was a source of competitive advantage for the company. Through these collaborations, BD had strengthened important external relationships and developed a distinctive corporate strategy for its expansion in emerging markets. Cohen, Gadde, and the BD Global Health team were also working to construct a framework for measuring both the social and financial impact of the company's shared value initiatives, starting with the BD Odon Device. Cohen believed that creating shared value was "fundamentally a better way to do business," but he wanted hard data to demonstrate the full economic and social benefit of BD's shared value initiatives. The competition for internal capital and the challenges of taking on new types of products meant that any shared value initiative required a rigorous business case and clear indicators