As Shanghai MarcPoint Information Technology Co. Ltd. (MarcPoint) celebrated its fifth anniversary, its founder was quite pleased by what the company had achieved. MarcPoint was a start-up that offered marketing research services by analyzing user-generated content (UGC) with big-data technologies. The company had been successful and grown steadily since its inception in 2013. It was founded upon the realization that UGC was disrupting traditional marketing research and that big-data analytics provided the technological means to analyze the UGC efficiently and effectively. In 2018, the founder reflected on what MarcPoint’s next steps should be: What technologies should they pursue? Which markets could they target for growth in the next five years? Should they try to transport MarcPoint’s success to overseas markets? All in all, what needed to be done to sustain MarcPoint’s growth and maintain its leading position in the turbulent technical and business environment?
First appearing in China, physical platform crowdfunding is based on the basic formula used online by fundraising sites like Kickstarter, which is a symbiotic system between innovators, platforms, and investors. However, the new model combines these elements in a novel way in conjunction with the Internet and a physical business establishment, such as a café. In October 2013, 100 former students of Peking University formed the 1898 Café, the first crowdfunding café of its kind. It was established to serve the university’s entrepreneur alumni community and to stimulate the university’s entrepreneurial spirit. One of the most revolutionary features of the physical platform model is the concept of investors being members of the establishment, with each investor being a shareholder. The physical platform model emphasizes the equality of shareholders and takes advantage of the human desire to self-organize and self-manage. In this model, a physical establishment is the platform through which investors (shareholders) are sought and selected. That is, the platform, with a pre-specified focus, finds the investors—not the other way around. The second major difference is that the model is not simply about accumulating funds. The blending of investors, operators, and consumers in the business may have numerous applications beyond crowdfunding. Merging three traditionally separate business factions and pooling resources among them makes it possible to efficiently generate business results and do big things with little money. This model could prove revolutionary for existing businesses and industries looking for a different way to operate. A company that adopts it could drastically reduce its start-up risks and better ensure survival beyond the initial self-funded period.
<p style="color: rgb(197, 183, 131);"><strong> AWARD WINNER -Best case in the Entrepreneurship & Indian Family Business category, ISB-Ivey Global Case Competition</strong></p><br>An entrepreneur puts his entire lifetime into building an organization. When it comes to health care in India, it is all the more difficult as there are so many hurdles, such as a huge population that cannot afford to pay, shortage of trained manpower and increasing cost of supplies. LV Prasad Eye Institute has been successful, largely because of its founder’s dedication, hard work and innovative pyramid model of organizational structure. In spite of its success, this healthcare institution faces challenges from increased competition and the lack of a succession strategy.
This case highlights the journey of an organization that was set up in Hyderabad, in southern India, to provide affordable maternal care services to women from low-income urban families. LifeSpring Hospitals grew from a single hospital into a chain of nine hospitals, all in Hyderabad, in only five years. The chief executive officer has spent this initial period trying out new methods, continuously fine-tuning the model and learning from this process of experimentation. As the company seeks to scale the business to 200 hospitals, the chief executive officer must decide whether or not the business model is defined clearly enough to warrant the start of a rapid scaling process.<br><br><br><br>The case is unique because it juxtaposes a commitment to high-quality health care service delivery through processes and protocols with a commitment to making maternal care affordable to low-income urban women. LifeSpring Hospitals tries to achieve these seemingly disparate objectives by attempting to create a financially sustainable business model.