Historically, organizations have viewed exploration and exploitation as two distinct paths to innovation. But in our digital-driven era, this view is outdated. They describe recent research showing that some companies are working together to invent innovations further from the customer and compete on activities closer to the customer. They call the amalgamation of these two approaches coopetition. In this article they show that to succeed in the digital era, both digital and legacy incumbents must practice 'innovation ambidexterity,' refining existing competencies while exploring new avenues. By embedding coopetition into their DNA, companies can leverage both digital technologies and strategic partnerships.
Capitalizing on the digitalization trend, Logy.AI captures a substantial market in the Indian and Nigerian oral healthcare space, earning a revenue of US$110,000 in FY 2023. The company's international and domestic adoption, which exceeds 200,000 within a year, demonstrates its significant influence and growth potential, while the anticipated 173% growth in FY 2024 signals a clear path to profitability, steering toward financial sustainability while expanding its market presence. Priyanjit Ghosh, Co-founder and CEO of Logy.AI, recalls the path to building Logy.AI. While driving home from a party to celebrate his team's efforts and the impact their solution had made, the exchange of ideas between the founders sparks a profound thought about Logy.AI's way forward. How do they revolutionize the oral healthcare market for their growth journey? Should Logy.AI look beyond oral care to explore AI solutions for other healthcare problems? Should they penetrate new markets with the AI-based oral detection solution they already have? What should be their growth strategy and operating model?
Several firms worldwide that attempted to penetrate the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) with digital service innovations have encountered disappointing returns. This article explores what capabilities firms should develop and how they should nourish them for value creation at the BOP. Using the multiple-case method, this study inductively derives persuasion, co-creation, adaptation, and self-sustainability as essential capabilities. Cumulative maneuvering of these capabilities resulted in a sand cone model. Both established incumbents and digital natives benefit from this model, which enables them to safeguard their digital offerings while penetrating or expanding within BOP markets.
Wat-a-Burger, a quick service restaurant chain, was incorporated by Rajat Jaiswal and Farman Beig on February 14, 2016. Their burgers, customized to suit the Indian palate, were their unique selling proposition. As envisioned by the founders, from 2016 to 2019 the brand quickly expanded and grew to over 60 outlets in 21 cities and 11 states. In mid-2019, they formulated a plan to expand to 150 outlets and aimed to serve more than 25,000 orders per day by mid-July 2021. The company was in general growing according to the founders' plan until the COVID-19 pandemic hit India and the lockdown was imposed in March 2020. The COVID-19 crisis caused a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) environment. Due to multiple waves of the pandemic, lockdowns, and the associated government regulations, the revenue of the company in the financial year 2020-21 declined by almost 56% relative to that in FY 2019-20. The following questions troubled the founders: Adopt an aggressive expansion strategy as initially envisaged or go slow and survive the VUCA environment for now? See the VUCA environment as an opportunity? How can a win-win value proposition be created at this point so that potential partners continue to get added to the network?
This case study underscores the complex problem-solving using digital transformation and associated change management. The case was set at the beginning of 2022 when the Chief Executive Officer of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) reflected on the digital transformation enabled by the implementation of Aadhaar, a unique 12-digit identity number every Indian resident can apply for. The case study describes the various phases of the implementation and its consequent multiplier effect on the country. Given the immense success of Aadhaar (deployed across about 1.3 billion residents) and its pivotal role in India's digital journey, implying benefits for the public and private sectors, it is important to contemplate on the next steps for its future.
The fictional case is set in 2023 when Blue Bank, a rural retail bank, was set up to respond to the economic distress surfacing in the U.S. state of Mississippi. The motivation was to reduce the proportion of unbanked adults in the rural parts of the state and thereby create a primary credit supplier to businesses for economic development. The case, which focuses on solving the higher turnaround time (TAT) problem of the account opening process at Blue Bank, is presented in two parts, with Part A focusing on the process lens and Part B on the data lens. In Part A of the case, Jim Chenault reviewed the progress of the bank's performance in June 2022. The start was successful, with 40 branches opened in the rural parts of the state. However, the 48 hour promise that the bank made to customers for account opening was often violated, as the decision-making steps, handoffs, and transactional activities associated with account opening concealed process deficiencies. Chenault wondered if he could map the process to understand it end to end.
The fictional case is set in 2023 when Blue Bank, a rural retail bank, was set up to respond to the economic distress surfacing in the U.S. state of Mississippi. The motivation was to reduce the proportion of unbanked adults in the rural parts of the state and thereby create a primary credit supplier to businesses for economic development. The case, which focuses on solving the higher turnaround time (TAT) problem of the account opening process at Blue Bank, is presented in two parts, with Part A focusing on the process lens and Part B on the data lens. In Part A of the case, Jim Chenault reviewed the progress of the bank's performance in June 2022. The start was successful, with 40 branches opened in the rural parts of the state. However, the 48 hour promise that the bank made to customers for account opening was often violated, as the decision-making steps, handoffs, and transactional activities associated with account opening concealed process deficiencies. Chenault wondered if he could map the process to understand it end to end.
This case examines the vital social problem of the rising incidence of cataracts in India, especially in the elderly population. It describes the design and deployment of e-Paarvai, an AI-based digital health solution in more than 30 districts of rural Tamil Nadu, India, which helped screen about 25,000 cataract patients within ten months of its launch. It describes how design thinking and digital intervention could lead to effective health service delivery for social good. Specifically, this case focuses on: (1) elements of a service ecosystem, (2) the characterization of various personas and customer journey maps using design thinking (3) the application of emerging digital technologies like AI to solve challenging, complex social problems.
During the summer of 2021, Sumana G., Chief Technology Officer of South Central Railway, was reviewing the annual productivity reports of field employees. This was an annual exercise that was crucial to central planning as it helped identify potential weaknesses and possibilities for improvement. Sumana knew that evaluating the productivity of store personnel would be the most challenging task because Indian Railways (IR) managed over 280,000 items stocked in 215 depots across the country. While reviewing the time sheets, Sumana quickly realized that field officers were spending a significant time amount of time on materials purchase, especially items purchased locally by field offices. On further inquiry, field officers revealed that retrieving data from the stores database based on item descriptions posed considerable challenges, and in most cases, the search results were not very useful. Sumana was quick to realize that an artificial intelligence (AI)-based search engine could solve this problem.
The case is centered around the 2021 Telangana Member of the Legislative Council (MLC) elections, held against the backdrop of a known unknown: the COVID-19 pandemic. While the project planning was diligent, the team faced several unknown unknowns during the execution of the project. The case study enables readers to create a framework for risk management and associated strategies within the project management context.
The case is designed to be used in courses on Nonprofit Operations Management, Data Analytics, Six Sigma, and Business Process Excellence/Improvement in MBA or Executive MBA programs. It is suitable for teaching students about the common problem of lower rates of volunteerism in nonprofit organizations. Further, the case study helps present the importance and application of inferential statistics (data analytics) to identify the impact of various factors on the problem (effect). The case is set in early 2021 when Shefali Sharma, the Strategy and Learning Manager with Teach For India (TFI), faced a few challenging questions from a professor at the Indian School of Business (ISB) during her presentation at an industry gathering in Hyderabad, India. Sharma was concerned about the low matriculation rate of TFI fellows, despite the rigorous recruitment, selection, and matriculation (RSM) process. A mere 50-60% matriculation rate was not a commensurate return for an investment of INR 6.5 million and the massive effort put into the RSM process. In 2017, Sharma organized focused informative and experiential events to motivate candidates to join the fellowship, but it was not very clear if these events impacted the TFI matriculation rate. After the industry gathering at ISB, Sharma followed up with the professor to seek his guidance in performing data analytics on the matriculation data. Sharma wondered if inferential data analysis could help her understand which demographic factors and events impact the matriculation rate.
In response to the uncontrollable second wave of COVID-19 in the south Indian state of Telangana in April 2021, a few like-minded social activists in the capital city of Hyderabad came together to establish a 100-bed medical care center to treat COVID-19 patients. The project was named Ashray. Dr. Chinnababu Sunkavalli (popularly known as Chinna) was the project manager of Project Ashray. In addition to the inherent inadequacy of hospital beds to accommodate the growing number of COVID- 19 patients till March 2021, the city faced a sudden spike of infections in April that worsened the situation. Consequently, the occupancy in government and private hospitals in Hyderabad increased by 485% and 311%, respectively, from March to April. According to a prediction model, Chinna knew that hospital beds would be exhausted in several parts of the city in the next few days. The Project Ashray team was concerned about the situation. The team met on April 26, 2021, to schedule the project to establish the medical care center within the next 10 days. The case is suitable for teaching students how to approach the scheduling problem of a time- constrained project systematically. It helps as a pedagogical aid in teaching management concepts such as project visualization, estimating project duration, float, and project laddering or activity splitting, and tools such as network diagrams, critical path method, and crashing. The case exposes students to a real-time problem-solving approach under uncertainty and crises and the critical role of NGOs in supporting the governments. Alongside the Project Management and Operations Management courses, other courses like Managerial decision-making in nonprofit organizations, Health care delivery, and healthcare operations could also find support from this case.
The case is set in 2021 and follows the journey of Dr. Shailesh Jhawar, an intensivist trained in the United Kingdom, who returned to India to join his father, Dr. Shiv Bhagwan Jhawar, at Apex Hospitals in Jaipur, Rajasthan, which his father had founded in 1994. The case describes Jhawar's efforts to improve patient outcomes in critical care with the tele-intensive care unit (tele-ICU) model. It takes the reader through Jhawar's journey from the time he discovered the need for tele-ICU and understood the various facets of its implementation to the establishment of Hopes Critical Care (HCC) as a tele-ICU provider and the induction of the first few ""spoke"" hospitals into the tele-ICU network. The case then describes the dilemmas confronting Jhawar as he sought to scale up HCC. Students are encouraged to use their critical thinking skills to design a strategic framework for identifying domains with the greatest potential for adopting and growing the tele-ICU model. First, the case acts as a resource for classroom discussion on what Jhawar should do differently during the next implementation, given the failure of the pilot at the Sky Lifeline Multispecialty Hospital. Second, the case enables the instructor to introduce the concept of the business model canvas, a strategic management tool used to present a business plan in a straightforward and structured way. By developing the business model canvas for the tele-ICU business, students can gain insights into the customers, value proposition, channels, revenue, cost streams, etc., of the business. This case will also introduce students to quantitative (using the net present value, or NPV) and qualitative tools to evaluate the revenue model used in the associated business model.
The case is set in 2022 when Creative Chocolates, a popular United States based chocolate manufacturer, plans to enter the African market. Known in the United States for its unique "warm freshbaked" chocolates, Creative Chocolates expanded to over 100 countries with 26,000 outlets worldwide since its inception in the late 1980s. However, all their outlets were either their own stores or franchisees. Attracted by the market research data on the population growth and economic success of Nigeria and other African countries, Alan Rickman, the new chief executive officer of Creative Chocolates, plans a growth strategy based on penetrating the African market. The case presents Rickman's dilemma-whether to conduct test marketing or not-and builds on it to discuss his next step.
The objective of this case study (in two parts, A and B) is to provide a systematic methodology for capturing metrics crucial for patient experience and hospital performance, defining a framework to design an enterprise technology strategy map, and examining the readiness, deployment, and sustainability of technology solutions to help achieve superior patient satisfaction. Part B (Tech Strategy Design and Implementation ) of this two-part case study is a follow-up to Part A, and it takes the reader through Avantika Raghu's journey of solving the problems identified in Part A. Part B of the case study describes her efforts to address prioritized metrics by identifying technology solutions (both in-house and external vendors). It follows her as she assesses candidate solutions on a host of parameters: need, desired outcome from the implementation, staff awareness, availability of technology, investment opportunity, ease of implementation, product features, vendor engagement, time to market, end-user experience, and barriers to adoption. The case study closes with an unexpected twist, as her grandfather challenges her robust proposals with a series of pointed questions on how an enterprise technology strategy and an effective change management framework for championing organizational and individual change should be designed.
The objective of this case study (in two parts, A and B) is to provide a systematic methodology for capturing metrics crucial for patient experience and hospital performance, defining a framework to design an enterprise technology strategy map, and examining the readiness, deployment, and sustainability of technology solutions to help achieve superior patient satisfaction. Part A (Identification and Prioritization of Key Focus Areas) of this two-part case study takes the reader through the exploration of Avantika Raghu, Chief Experience and Technology Officer at the KG hospital, where she uncovers various pain points. It describes Raghu's observations during her Gemba walks covering key departments at the hospital, learnings from her focus group meetings with stakeholders, and insights from examining the hospital's quality and performance parameters. The case concludes with Raghu identifying patient satisfaction as a core challenge in the current setup and considering technological solutions that can help improve patient satisfaction while enabling hospital expansion to meet the goals of Vision 2025.
The case goes on to describe the enormous challenges involved in building the 4.94 km long Bogibeel Bridge in the North Eastern Region (NER) of India. When it was finally commissioned in 2018, it was hailed as a marvel of engineering. With two rail lines and a two-lane road over it, the bridge spanned the mighty Brahmaputra river. The Bogibeel Bridge was India's longest and Asia's second-longest road and rail bridge with fully-welded bridge technology that met European codes and welding standards. The interstate connectivity provided by the bridge enabled important socio-economic developments in the NER that included improved logistics and transportation, the growth of medical and educational facilities, higher employment, and the rise of international trade and tourism. While the outcomes of the project were significant, the efforts that went into constructing the Bogibeel Bridge were equally so. This case study is designed to teach the importance of effective risk planning in project management. Further, the case introduces students to earned value analysis and project oversight in managing large projects. The case centers on Indian Railways' need to quickly discover why the Bogibeel project was not going according to plan. The case also serves as a resource to teach public operations management where the focus is on projects and operations that result in socio-economic outcomes.