This case is the third in a series that explores how the storied Swedish media company, Bonnier News, is transforming itself to succeed in the digital era. This case picks up from 2019 and follows the Bonnier News management team as it crafts and implements a strategy to succeed in the rapidly transforming media landscape and increasingly fraught geopolitical environment. Their goals as they do so are to sustain profitable digital growth for Bonnier News; increase the reach and relevance of their papers; bring more value to more readers; and become a leader in European business media while continuing to develop a successful, sustainable, and scalable business. Success was essential, even existential-indeed, in their view, democracy itself was riding on it.
This case features a protagonist (Gen Isayama - GSB 2003) who established and runs a VC firm/incubator called World Innovation Lab (WiL) that is based in Palo Alto and focuses on Japanese companies. The case explores the state of entrepreneurship in Japan; the launch of the VC, and its novel approach to LP relationships. It provides examples of corporations who have undergone successful transformation after working with WiL and of joint ventures in which WiL has invested.
By 2022, Meta was the world's largest social media company, with around 3 billion users sharing 140 billion messages and a billion stories a day. Over 200 million businesses used Meta apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta's primary source of revenue was advertising. Its proclaimed mission was to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" and its principles were to "give people a voice; build connection and community; serve everyone; keep people safe and protect privacy; promote economic opportunity." Facebook, which was Meta's original platform and, from 2004 to 2021, the source of the company's name, had 1.97 billion daily users around the world. More than 80 percent of adult social media users in the United States reported visiting Facebook at least once a week in 2022, and the platform's global penetration was nearly 40 percent. This case focuses specifically on the use of Facebook for political speech in the United States and around the world. It covers the advent of Facebook as a political tool; the "Facebook era" in American presidential elections, including charges of Russian interference, "fake news" and disinformation, and targeted advertising; allegations of unfair censorship and double standards; the 2021 "whistleblower," Frances Haugen; and the Facebook response to all these issues. The case also considers the role of Facebook in the Myanmar genocide and the Polish political landscape.
When Afresh CEO and cofounder Matt Schwartz enrolled at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business (GSB) in 2015, he had a singular obsession-healthy food, to benefit both individuals and the planet-and an ironclad determination: to found a business by the time he graduated. His classmate and cofounder, Afresh President Nathan Fenner, had a credo-work with really cool technology, preferably in underleveraged areas-and an orientation: choose work that had positive social impact beyond creating value in the market. Together, they honed in on a thesis: that the fresh food market was wildly under penetrated by technology. This led them, through trial and error, to found Afresh, a "for-profit social impact company" focused on fresh foods in the supply chain inventory management and software business. This case explains how Schwartz and Fenner took their idea from the business school classroom to the market and built a company that, as of early 2022, was valued at $121 million and had signed deals with grocery chains with a total of 3,100 stores-and expected to be live in 4,000 to 5,000 stores by late 2022.
This case profiles Ford Foundation president Darren Walker and his goal of reimagining philanthropy in order to build a more just and fair world. Specifically, it looks at how the Ford Foundation has reorganized so as to catalyze leaders and organizations who are driving social justice and building movements across the globe.
Friends of the Children was founded by Duncan Campbell in 1991. Campbell grew up in extremely challenging circumstances and wanted to use his good fortune to make an impact on the lives of children who faced the same sort of circumstances he once had. The Friends of the Children model entailed pairing a salaried, professional mentor, called a Friend, with each child for a minimum of 12 years. It worked-83 percent of Friends of the Children youth earned a high school diploma or the equivalent GED certificate; 92 percent enrolled in post-secondary education, served the country, or entered the workforce; 93 percent remained free from juvenile justice system involvement; and 98 percent waited to become parents until out of their teen years. This case explains the Friends of the Children model as it has evolved over the years and explores its capacity to scale (even as a comparatively expensive intervention). It also highlights the organization's response to the racial equity movement.
On November 1, 2018, the Women's National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA) informed the league that it had decided to opt out of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that had been signed in 2014 and was scheduled to run through 2021. The opt-out, which was not unexpected, triggered a period of negotiation that was described by WNBPA President Nneka Ogwumike as "incredibly complex." This case takes students inside this complicated negotiation process and reveals the dynamics of its successful outcome.
In early April 2019, the executive team of San Jose-based Zoom Video Communications gathered in the company conference room to strategize about their messaging for a planned IPO, an event that only a few years earlier would have seemed improbable to many. Indeed, when Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan had first sought venture capital funding to start his company back in 2011, he was turned down countless times. "A new video conferencing entrant at this stage?" wrote Patrick Eggen, of Counterpart Ventures, describing the general response. "No commercial data points, massively saturated market, limited funding to enter the SME space (ughh) and founder with no CEO experience. Red flags galore." But Yuan was absolutely convinced that the world did, in fact, need a new video conferencing solution-one that would not merely suffice, but far surpass the "terrible" existing options and make its users downright happy. So he ignored the naysayers and refused to give up-and the rest is history. This case details the story of Zoom Video Communications from its earliest origins as an idea that came to Yuan while he was a student riding a train in China to its IPO in 2019. It includes interviews with key Zoom executives, including Eric Yuan. A forthcoming B case will continue the story.
This is a fictional roleplay based on the experiences of Daryn Dodson, the managing director of Illumen Capital, an investment firm that aims to leverage its power as an investor to deliver capital combined with evidence-based bias-reduction training and coaching for its portfolio of fund managers. Through Illumen Capital, Dodson worked to train portfolio fund managers to discern and eliminate implicit and explicit biases, thereby helping them to increase their returns by optimizing investment opportunities, hiring, and board selection. His approach included the "Illumen Impact Experience" in which Dodson linked slavery, lynching, and mass incarceration to the asset management industry to help people understand how assets became so imbalanced and created the huge disparities that contribute to suboptimal returns in investment portfolios. Dodson supported these historic linkages with current research, including a study conducted with Stanford SPARQ's Jennifer Eberhardt that revealed, counterintuitively, that the better Black, male fund managers performed, the greater the levels of bias they faced. Dodson is just wrapping up a pitch to the endowment of a university that was long ago saved from financial collapse by the sale of 272 slaves. The university had attempted several things to make amends for this, but Dodson thought they could do a lot more - and one was through management of the endowment. Should he, as a Black asset manager, bring up this history? If he brings it up, what tone should he use? What outcome would he be hoping for? How would bringing it up help, or hinder, his achieving the outcome? This is the elephant in the room. One student plays Dodson and the other plays the university investment officer in this roleplay that broaches on numerous issues related to race, justice, and the possibility of reparation.
Intel established the Emerging Growth and Incubation (EGI) Group in 2018 with a charter to build a disruptive innovation engine. The EGI Group was seen as essential-even existential-for Intel to expand beyond its core business, find new ways to add significant value to the company, and once again be perceived as an engine of growth. Given Intel's size and the perceived urgency of the need for growth, it was decided that EGI would incubate only businesses with perceived billion-dollar plus potential. By early 2021, the EGI portfolio included 14 ventures in various growth stages with a total valuation greater than $2 billion; revenue had tripled over two years, and one venture was already valued at more than $1 billion. EGI had provided a sandbox for exploration and experimentation, acted as a force multiplier, and had a tremendous impact on Intel's culture. This case documents the process, purpose, and progress of establishing and running the EGI Group.
In the pre-dawn hours of August 2, 1990, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein ordered his army to invade the neighboring, oil-rich state of Kuwait; within two days, Iraq had largely overcome organized military resistance and occupied its neighbor. A near-total financial and trade embargo imposed on Iraq failed to persuade it to leave Kuwait and in January 1991, U.S.-led coalition forces launched "Operation Desert Storm" with an air offensive against Iraq. On the night of January 18, Iraq fired ten Scud missiles at two of Israel's major cities-the first air attack on an Israeli city since 1948. Israel withheld from responding publicly but secretly began crafting and testing a plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein. This case details the planning process, the trial run, and the massive failure that led the assassination plan to be aborted.
Matt Barnard, CEO of the indoor vertical farming company Plenty, analyzed the agricultural supply chain in the United States and determined it had a four-pronged problem that people would pay to have solved: flavor, waste, environmental footprint, and nutrition. So, in 2014, Barnard and his cofounders incorporated the business that is now Plenty: a technology company that aimed to reshape the inefficient, but entrenched, agriculture sector and build a global brand by selling fresher, tastier, and more nutritious produce. By early 2020, Plenty had 300+ employees and had attracted hundreds of millions in investment from the likes of Bezos Expeditions, Innovation Endeavors, and SoftBank Vision Fund and had a valuation of $1.05 billion. This case details Plenty's journey from an idea to a path-breaking company that is disrupting the field of agriculture and valued at over a billion dollars.
THRIVE's mission was to accelerate, invest in, and work with entrepreneurs, investors, and Fortune 500 corporations to advance the future of food and agriculture through innovation. Comprised of top agriculture, food and technology corporations, universities, and investors, THRIVE had built a community of more than 2500 startups from 90 countries. With John Hartnett as CEO and Helen Hartnett as COO, THRIVE ran an accelerator, a fund, and, in partnership with Forbes, a major agricultural technology (agtech) summit. Interest in its mission and services seemed to be growing exponentially. Indeed, the sector was generating so much excitement that THRIVE was inundated with a diverse set of opportunities and calls for its founders' mindshare. Excited as they were about the opportunities before them, John and Helen were beginning to feel as if they held a rubber band that was getting increasingly stretched. "Business has grown substantially," explained John, "400 or 500 percent, and it's going really, really well. So we're sitting here in 2020 thinking: How do we expand without bringing ourselves down to our knees?" This case explores THRIVE's options as it looked to expand both domestically and around the world.
GoDaddy had long been known for polarizing television commercials that were focused on generating attention and buzz-CNBC called its brand "synonymous with controversial advertisements with scantily clad women." But the company decided that the ads did not appropriately reflect its internal culture and in 2013 undertook a transformation intended to shift its external brand to reflect its actual culture and to champion its diverse customers. In the process, GoDaddy partnered with the VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab at Stanford University and set out to make their company a top workplace for women in technology. Among the key issues it worked to address were the calibration, or talent review, sessions at which the performance of GoDaddy employees was discussed; performance ratings that resulted from these meetings impacted career trajectory, promotion, equity, and salaries. GoDaddy decided to pursue the "Holy Grail:" helping with career advancement through equal access to top performance marks.
When Anders Eriksson was appointed CEO of Bonnier News in June 2016, he took the helm of a storied Swedish media business in the midst of a momentous transformation. Bonnier News included three of Sweden's most important newspapers-Dagens Nyheter (DN), the national paper of record; Dagens Industri (DI), the top business daily; and Expressen, a tabloid that reached roughly half of the country's population-and the southern Swedish daily HD-Sydsvenskan. But the digital age had presented multiple challenges to each of these entities, and to media enterprises worldwide, and Bonnier had grappled with its response to the changing environment. It was Eriksson's task to set Bonnier News on a growth trajectory that would eventually lead to take-off. This case explores Bonnier's restructuring; group level strategic leadership; development of group-level digital competencies; and business-level strategies.
I@NS was intended to mimic the experience of founding a start-up, getting it funded, building a product, and taking it to market, with all the potential risk and reward this entailed. Except, of course, this particular start-up experience would occur within Nokia Corporation, a 150-year-old global company with 103,000 employees working in more than 100 countries-a company that described its mission as "creat[ing] the technology to connect the world." Given this rather unusual "start-up" environment, the creators of the program had no idea how it would all unfold. But, they went ahead and established it, evangelized it to Nokia Software employees around the world, judged the first round, and then launched a second round, which was still underway at the time this case was written. In the process of creating I@NS, its founders learned many important lessons about encouraging and supporting innovation and a start-up mentality within an established corporation. The case covers many elements of the design and implementation of an innovation program including: Strategic objectives of innovation processes; Defining success; Determining the scale and scope of new ventures; The staging of the innovation process; The gating and funding decision making process; The definition of the strategic objectives behind the innovation process; Communicating the process to the wide organization; Communicating (the go/no go) gating decisions; Identifying and allocation resources; Recruiting evangelists and mentors; Team formation and composition; How the process interacts with and impacts the culture in the organization; Incentives for innovation; Career development paths for innovators; Attitudes to risk.
I@NS was intended to mimic the experience of founding a start-up, getting it funded, building a product, and taking it to market, with all the potential risk and reward this entailed. Except, of course, this particular start-up experience would occur within Nokia Corporation, a 150-year-old global company with 103,000 employees working in more than 100 countries-a company that described its mission as "creat[ing] the technology to connect the world." Given this rather unusual "start-up" environment, the creators of the program had no idea how it would all unfold. But, they went ahead and established it, evangelized it to Nokia Software employees around the world, judged the first round, and then launched a second round, which was still underway at the time this case was written. In the process of creating I@NS, its founders learned many important lessons about encouraging and supporting innovation and a start-up mentality within an established corporation. The case covers many elements of the design and implementation of an innovation program including: Strategic objectives of innovation processes; Defining success; Determining the scale and scope of new ventures; The staging of the innovation process; The gating and funding decision making process; The definition of the strategic objectives behind the innovation process; Communicating the process to the wide organization; Communicating (the go/no go) gating decisions; Identifying and allocation resources; Recruiting evangelists and mentors; Team formation and composition; How the process interacts with and impacts the culture in the organization; Incentives for innovation; Career development paths for innovators; Attitudes to risk.