Lilium is a German company focused on developing electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOLs) that can be used to offer air taxi services. The company went public in September 2021 through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deal, raising more than $800 million. While Daniel Wiegand (the co-founder and CEO) is confident about the design of the company's latest seven-seater aircraft, he is still struggling with the business model. Lilium has three main options. First, it can offer air mobility services to passengers, i.e., become a full-service B2C company. Second, it can become an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), selling its jets to other companies that offer mobility services (B2B option). Third, Lilium can choose a hybrid option, offering air mobility to end-users in certain markets while selling its jets to other air mobility service providers.
Nora Khaldi had built a technology "to unlock the power of nature" in the service of extending human lifespan and improving health, and now in April 2020 was debating telling her Board of Directors she wanted to put on ice some of her discoveries. Nuritas, the company she founded in 2014, leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) to find specific peptides―short chains of amino acids―among the trillions that exist in nature and target them for preventing or treating the onset of disease and preserving health for longer. Khaldi worried that getting certain products to market was taking too long and about the potential distraction caused by doing too many projects to serve very distinct industries. Underlying this was her concern that cash would run short if they tried to do it all. She weighed shutting down Nuritas's promising early-stage pharmaceutical projects―including one aimed at treating Glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer―to focus on consumer-oriented approaches, like a supplement to improve muscle health and reduce the physical signs of aging. Khaldi contemplated telling her team to cease most of their pharmaceutical work, at least for the time being, and eliminate roles linked to that part of the business.
After succeeding long-time CEO Maurice Levy as top leader of the world's third largest advertising, marketing, and communications company, headquartered in France, Arthur Sadoun accelerates digital transformation through a new platform drawing on talent from any of the formerly autonomous agencies and completes a reorganization to integrate the company by geography rather than brand. With Levy's mentoring, Sadoun must maintain morale during the COVID-19 pandemic and continue navigating change. This is the latest in a series of cases tracking milestones in the building of Publicis Groupe.
This case is a complement to CIAM: Home-Grown Shareholder Activism in France (A) and describes the events after CIAM learned about a potential misuse of corporate assets at Altice/SFR.
In 2018, Swedish furniture maker IKEA was undergoing a significant transformation. Challenged by the rise of online shopping and changing consumer behavior, and mourning the death of its founder, the Company's top executives knew they had to step out of their comfort zones and embrace new strategic initiatives to stay relevant. But which initiatives, executed where, when and how, would enable IKEA to achieve its goals in a way that was profitable while creating an IKEA they would want to pass on to the next generation of co-workers and customers?
The case discusses the strategy of CIAM, a French activist investment firm, involved in a case of a buy-out of minority shareholders in the telecommunications sector. Altice NV, an international telecommunications company based in the Netherlands that owned more than 77% of SFR Group shares, made a bid for the remaining shares of France's second largest mobile operator. Believing that the offer was woefully inadequate and constituted an abuse of power, CIAM had been fighting for a better offer as one of SFR's vocal minority shareholders with a series of action plans-leveraging legal, communications, and public relations tactics. CIAM had just received a new piece of information, divulging a potential misuse of SFR corporate assets by Altice, and was discussing next steps.
In November 2019, Ilham Kadri, CEO of Solvay, a Belgian specialty chemicals and advanced materials group, with annual revenues of more than €10 billion in 2018, announced the group's mid-term strategy, eight months after she took the helm as Solvay's 11th CEO. The case describes what options Solvay had to operate a business transformation to follow a growth path while aiming to be a leading environmental solutions company. Solvay had developed a sustainability tool called Sustainability Product Management to identify promising business applications. How effective was the tool? What business lines should Solvay promote to grow and at the same time be more sustainable?
In 2018, Henri Seydoux, CEO and Founder of Parrot, believed that his company was at an inflection point in its history. Parrot had been a European leader in consumer electronics since the 1990s, first developing Bluetooth kits for cars before moving on to electronic toys and, significantly, the AR Drone in 2010 - a remote-controlled quadcopter that was way ahead of its time. In the years that followed, Parrot's sales volumes and popularity quickly increased. But new players were entering the market. Giant Chinese rival DJI, in particular, aggressively lowered its prices, forcing weaker companies out of the market. If Parrot was to survive the shakeout, Seydoux would have to figure out how to compete in an industry where even well-capitalized companies were collapsing. The questions that he faced were both strategic and urgent. Where to compete and how to win?
As 2016 was approaching its end, Rakesh Kapoor, CEO of RB, one of the world's major fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies, envisioned the prospect of a major acquisition that would add a line of health-related products that promised growth in the developing markets of Asia. The acquisition would also move RB closer in size to its better-known rivals, such as Unilever or P&G. RB, formerly Reckitt Benckiser, produced health, hygiene and home products and its strategy revolved around 19 top-selling global brands known as Powerbrands, such as antiseptic Dettol or sore throat medicine Strepsils, and cold remedy Mucinex. In 2016, the company recorded sales of $13.4 billion and a market capitalization of $62 billion. Kapoor wondered whether the moment was ripe for a major acquisition or if the organization needed more time to adapt to its new health and hygiene oriented strategy and some key organizational changes. Could Kapoor keep what made RB so unique among its FMCG peers intact through this transformation, and would an acquisition advance or jeopardize what distinguished RB?
In 2016, BASF's Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer reflected on the co-creation innovation program started almost 18 months ago as part of BASF's 150th anniversary celebration. 500 project ideas had been created, of which 100 had already moved to the company's conventional R&D funnel. 34 had been short-listed for further consideration. At least 10, if not more of these projects would receive "landmark" funding running at an average of 1 million Euro each. Beyond selecting the right projects, how could the CEO and CTO ensure that a complex organization such as BASF would encourage such fresh ideas to be developed and nurtured in the future? Was this experiment something that BASF should do again in the future?
In December 2014, the City of Amsterdam and Airbnb announced an MOU to promote responsible home-sharing and to simplify the payment of tourist tax for hosts in the City. It was the most comprehensive agreement that Airbnb had with any city in the world. It's final provision read, "The parties trust that theirs will be a fruitful cooperation." However, both sides were uncertain about how the agreement would be received. Molly Turner, Airbnb's Global Head of Civic Partnership and Tanja de Coster, an Airbnb lawyer in Europe, were unsure how Airbnb's hosts would react. As were their Airbnb colleagues. Laila Frank, who had been an advisor to the Deputy Mayor in Amsterdam, heralded the reputational gains from the agreement for the city, "We were worldwide news. In that way it worked out really well." But she acknowledged that there were also skeptical points of view. "The only immediate result was the tax agreement, which we were really happy about. But the rest had to be proven."
In February 2014, Amsterdam became the first city to issue new regulations specifically to allow home-sharing. Airbnb's Molly Turner, Global Head of Civic Partnerships; her colleagues at the San Francisco based home-sharing platform; and her counterparts in Amsterdam's city leadership now had to make the new rules function well. By the summer of 2014, the question of how exactly to do that remained unsettled. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that Airbnb was negotiating with Amsterdam officials to supplement the new home-sharing rules was not materializing. Turner was hearing that the company's proposed commitments that spanned education on regulations, enforcement-assistance, and tax collection might not be enough to secure what would be Airbnb's broadest partnership with any city anywhere. Nanette Schippers was Amsterdam's Advisor on the Sharing Economy in its Innovation Office, and its lead at the negotiating table that summer. She was worried by the stand-still, too. A primary reason for the impasse in the negotiations was that Amsterdam wanted access to Airbnb's data in order to enforce the new laws more easily, while Airbnb sought to protect user privacy. For Airbnb, privacy, precedents and platform principles were at stake. For Amsterdam, it was a matter of making sure that the historic city did not become "Venice, or Florence, or 'Disneyland'"; that it wasn't overrun by visitors and that locals weren't crowded out. Could the two parties now find dry land?
An in-house venture capital fund for affordable private schools at the base of the pyramid established by Pearson, the world's largest education company, PALF sought to invest in business models providing superior educational outcomes in emerging markets on a profitable and scalable basis. With Pearson's overall strategy shifting from the developed to the developing world and from a supplier of books to a host of other learning products and services, the company thought PALF's lessons might be applicable to Pearson's core businesses. By 2014, Katelyn Donnelly, the Managing Director of PALF, and her team had made seven investments in Africa and Asia and were close to fully committing the $15 million earmarked for the initiative. In the upcoming meeting of PALF's Investment Committee, Donnelly must present a recommendation: should Pearson allocate more internal money to the fund or should they open it up to third party investors?
In 2014, Chiara Ferragni, a globe-trotting founder of the world's most popular fashion blog The Blonde Salad, and Riccardo Pozzoli, her co-founder and business partner, had to decide how to best monetize her blog as well as her shoe line called the "Chiara Ferragni Collection". A year earlier, Ferragni and Pozzoli had already made a decision to transform her blog into an online lifestyle magazine and to build its positioning as a high-end brand. It meant that The Blonde Salad envisaged to only cooperate with a limited number of luxury fashion advertisers, inevitably reducing the blog's revenues. Ferragni and Pozzoli considered changing the revenue-generating model by incorporating an online market place within The Blonde Salad, but which strategy and timeline would she need to achieve her aim? Should Ferragni's shoe line, a separate company with a different ownership structure, be merged with The Blonde Salad or was it desirable to keep the two apart?
By 2014, IKEA Group was the largest home furnishing company, with EUR28.5 billion of sales, and planned to reach EUR50 billion by 2020, mainly from emerging markets. At the same time, IKEA Group had adopted in 2012 a new sustainability strategy that focused the company's efforts on its entire value chain from its raw materials sourcing to the lifestyle of its end consumers. The plan especially centered on wood, which represented 60% of IKEA Group's total procurement in volume and constituted a key lever for the company to increase its positive impact on sustainability. IKEA Group Management therefore had to decide how to manage its portfolio of wood sustainability initiatives, especially in the context of the company's aggressive growth plan.
In 2012, Sanofi Pasteur was racing to develop a vaccine against dengue, a mosquito-borne disease, and was evaluating this product in a Phase IIb trial conducted with school children in Thailand. But while the candidate vaccine met the high safety expectations and a good balanced immune answer, it had a proof of efficacy of only 30%, far below the 70% mark the company had targeted. Guillaume Leroy, vice president of the Dengue Company at Sanofi Pasteur, reflected on the Phase IIb trial's surprising outcome and the way forward. He had to decide whether to go ahead with the vaccine trials and production, and if so, needed to develop a strategic plan on how to price and deliver the vaccine for a rapid roll-out.