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In December 2019, the founder and chief executive officer of Nnergix, a struggling Barcelona-based renewable energy analytics provider, came home from work excited. He had just finished a very successful meeting with Holaluz Clidom SA about the potential of a new product idea: Sentinel Solar. Nnergix had been in business for almost seven years but had only recently become profitable. This new business idea could generate increasing recurrent revenues and make the company highly scalable. Nnergix could develop a new product that could deal with geographically dispersed and typically small assets in order to offer specialized services to new types of stakeholders. Was Sentinel Solar the right path for Nnergix to finally scale up, and if so, could the founder and his team convince investors and get the money they needed?

In December 2019, the founder and chief executive officer of Nnergix, a struggling Barcelona-based renewable energy analytics provider, came home from work excited. He had just finished a very successful meeting with Holaluz Clidom SA about the potential of a new product idea: Sentinel Solar. Nnergix had been in business for almost seven years but had only recently become profitable. This new business idea could generate increasing recurrent revenues and make the company highly scalable. Nnergix could develop a new product that could deal with geographically dispersed and typically small assets in order to offer specialized services to new types of stakeholders. Was Sentinel Solar the right path for Nnergix to finally scale up, and if so, could the founder and his team convince investors and get the money they needed?

"Scientists and technologists encounter and develop great ideas, but usually have difficulties finding a way to take them to the market. Once they decide that they want to make a business out of their technology, a wobbly path of enrolling people, developing prototypes, protecting technologies, getting funding, and launching a company starts. This case explains how an entrepreneur, Raúl Aragonés, converted an innovative technology into AEInnova, a heat harvesting company. After explaining the incorporation of AEInnova and the change of CEO to David Comellas, the case explains the development of the heat harvesting technology. Initially, they worked on an application of their technology for cooling PV-panels to improve their performance. Then, they found an interesting application in industrial waste heat recovery, what later was named as the Waste Heat Recovery Unit (WHRU). Finally, by pure serendipity, they found another application for their technology: powering IoT sensor devices (Indu-Eye). They knew that to succeed with their start-up, focusing was very important. Additionally, they did not have either the resources nor the time for developing and commercializing the three applications of their technology. Moreover, they had started to feel the pressure from investors that wanted to see some commercial results from their investments. So, they had to decide on which application to concentrate their efforts and take first to the market. Part A - Where to play, focuses on the decision to choose which application of the technology to commercialize first by analyzing the business opportunity and the associated risks.

This case explains how a researcher, Javier Marcipar, became an entrepreneur by developing a business idea on the outcome of a research project and founded BuildAir, a company of inflatable structures. However, after 7 years of selling magnificent structure to clients of the event sector, BuildAir was still not economically viable. So, Marcipar needed to look for a way to make his startup profitable. Initially, the case focuses on analyzing different alternatives for making BuildAir's business in the event sector viable. Afterwards, the case centers the attention on analyzing the opportunity of selling inflatable hangars in the aeronautical sector and on the development of a suitable business model to make this new business viable. Furthermore, the case delves into the future growth options of BuildAir.