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In 2017, the successful Canadian innovation center TEC Edmonton initiated a joint venture with TusStar, an important Chinese accelerator, and found itself in the middle of a debate about the challenges and opportunities of Chinese investment in Canada’s technology sector. Both organizations were unique collaborations among industry, academia, and government. This joint initiative had added significance because of the implications for these stakeholders. The role of government was also significant, especially regarding the role of the Chinese government in innovation. The partnership was also nationally significant because of the important roles TEC Edmonton and TusStar played in the innovation ecosystems in Canada and China. How could TEC Edmonton define its role underpinning its relationship with TusStar and the Chinese government and make a compelling case for this new cooperation to stakeholders in industry, academia, and government?

Pacari was the flagship brand of SKS Farms, a small agricultural products company in Ecuador that specialized in high quality chocolate. Carla Barbotó and Santiago Peralta were the co proprietors of this family owned and operated company, which was originally created in order to promote Ecuadorean fine aroma chocolate, while also promoting social development, and preserving biodiversity. In 2018, Carla Barbotó read through the report from her company’s recent successful bid to become a certified ‘B’ (benefits) company. While the company had easily surpassed the minimum score for certification, the report contained suggestions that were new, and in a few cases somewhat unexpected. Now Barbotó wondered how to use the thorough and very detailed feedback to prioritize initiatives in order to ensure Pacari brought even greater benefits to its many stakeholders.

In April 2016, the board of directors at an Indian housing finance company, PNB Housing Finance Limited (PNB), was considering the company’s recent organizational transformation and looking ahead to a planned initial public offering. The case examines how business process re-engineering helped PNB grow its small loan portfolio and shed its image as a minor player with little commitment to customer service to become a profitable, solid solution provider. A discussion of specific strategies and interventions that occurred at PNB explain the organizational transformation at the structural, technical, and behavioural levels. The question for the board now is whether the transformation has sufficiently matured the company and prepared it for the next step in its growth—the IPO.

In June 2018, Lena Koke, the co-founder of Axess Law Professional Corporation, a legal services enterprise in Toronto, Ontario, was examining how to take the firm to the next level of growth. Koke had to determine what legal products and services the firm could expand and diversify into, how the firm should leverage information technology to reinforce its low-cost positioning, and how the firm should finance growth. The co-founder must evaluate the road map that she chose, and develop a long-term strategic plan for the firm.

On October 15, 2019, the Doc32 office was celebrating its achievement of month-end revenue goals. Doc32 was an online management and marketing platform for dental health care based in Pune, Maharashtra, India. The company was dedicated to helping its partner dentists find clients and reduce operational costs. The Doc32 platform provided optimized solutions, innovative marketing techniques, and dentistry supplies at a discounted rate. The Doc32 founders were pleased with the online platform’s success to date and saw it as validation of their chosen business model. However, they were wondering how to replicate that success across the entire country. What growth strategies could the new venture adopt to achieve its goals for growth, diversification, product development, market penetration, and market development?

When a company is looking to expand, it is natural for the managers involved—including the CEO—to have location preferences. Ivey Professors Andreas Schotter and Paul Beamish investigated how location hassles influence foreign investment decisions and sales. They found that these hassles significantly affected individuals or small groups of employees tasked with assessing potential opportunities. Firms must overcome managerial biases and identify champions willing to tackle location hassles in difficult markets that have the potential to generate a high return on investment—especially if the hassle factors of those markets are keeping the competition away. Many characteristics that are perceived hassles for managers of firms from traditional industrialized locations like Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan are not seen as such by managers from rapidly internationalizing emerging-market firms. The authors recommend three actions to take to utilize and build on the hassle factor: 1) raise awareness of managerial biases and on-the-ground location factors, 2) raise global strategic capacity, and 3) leverage a more diverse talent pool. Firms should hire for a global mindset and not just for technical job competencies or single-location knowledge. They should also recognize that some otherwise high-performing managers may be ill-suited for roles involving high-hassle locations.

As consumers watch the global coronavirus pandemic play out in print, across digital media, and on TV, it is clear that not all brand managers are performing equally well—at least not after collectively flooding e-mail inboxes with “We are here for you” messages. The moves made by brand managers in corporate communications have been all over the map. The good moves have been made by those who understand why actions speak louder than words. However, while being creative can pay brand dividends, it also creates risk. The last thing you want is to look like you’re exploiting a crisis. There have been many brand announcements about redirecting media dollars to public services, but timing matters. As with any brand initiative, consumers tend to reward the first mover and ignore the copycats—unless they’re brilliant. A brand, of course, isn’t just influenced by how it supports the community. How a company treats employees also has a significant impact. When disaster strikes, if there is something helpful you can do, then just do it and do it quickly. If there is something helpful you can say, then say it, and feel free to say it creatively if you can do so with compassion. And if you don’t have anything to offer or your message doesn’t come naturally, then don’t waste everybody’s time trying to attract attention.

In late 2018, a social entrepreneur in Iceland realized he needed to make changes to his enterprise working with socially-isolated children and youth. His operating model was to host bicycle rides with children and youth, and to encourage them to engage fully as young people. Most of these children had not previously engaged in physical activity, and many experienced not only social difficulties, but also physical challenges as a result of being overweight or obese. The social entrepreneur was spending much of his time negotiating sponsorship and service agreements and as a result, he spent less time engaging with the focus of his initiative—at-risk children and youth. He was also funding some of the initiative himself, putting his personal financial circumstances at risk. How could this social entrepreneur develop a robust, sustainable business model that would enable him to develop financial independence, support the youths' involvement in an annual cycling ride that circumnavigated Iceland, and enable the business to expand so that it no longer relied totally on one person?

In June 2019, Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS), a leading Indian global information technology (IT) services, consulting, and business solutions provider, announced that it would increase its shareholding in Tata Consultancy Services Japan Limited (TCS Japan) from 51 per cent to 66 per cent. Established in July 2014, TCS Japan was a joint venture between TCS and Mitsubishi Corporation (MC), one of Japan’s largest integrated business enterprises. This collaboration was not TCS’s first foray into Japan’s IT industry; the company had entered the Japanese market in 1987, but with a wholly owned subsidiary. Why did TCS give up a part of its full ownership and control to MC in 2014? Was such an alliance a merger of equals or more a sale of the Japanese branch to a stronger local suitor? Why did the company reclaim its ownership in 2019 through an increase in equity holding? To penetrate the Japanese IT services market and compete with local giants, should TCS have acquired another medium-sized Japanese company instead of joint venturing with MC? Or, should it have continued operating in the Japanese market alone through the wholly owned subsidiary?

In early 2019, the senior executive partners of Mosaic Home Services Ltd. (Mosaic), a home improvement and commercial property management company in Edmonton, Alberta, needed to choose from among several potential new partnership deals. When the senior executive partners had exited a family-owned commercial construction business in 2015 to start Mosaic, their major objective had been to help improve the living spaces of homeowners and the work spaces of property managers. The new business involved partnering with entrepreneurs who were keen to develop and grow their businesses beyond the initial founders. Now, Mosaic needed to develop ongoing strategies for attracting and selecting small business owners based on the personal attributes and proposed partnership deals of the entrepreneurs. They needed to determine how to assess potential partners’ strategic and organizational fit with Mosaic and to decide what marketing methods would effectively attract local entrepreneurs with potentially saleable businesses.

An estimated 640 million online gamers participated in China’s games industry in 2019. Their pursuit included earning points or tokens that they could redeem for prizes or gifts and in-game assets. A centralized platform allowed game operators to share the administration and management of tokens and rewards, but the system was not as transparent or immutable as stakeholders desired. In January 2019, a new points redemption system was launched based on blockchain technology. The new system, involving game operators, users, custodian banks, suppliers, and tax agents was credible and more transparent, and foreshadowed China’s growing interest in legal digital currency. How policy would shift toward digital currency was unclear; however, the fact that the blockchain race between countries had intensified was clear. The application of blockchain in China’s games industry was just one of the visible examples.

The COVID-19 pandemic will eventually subside, and many businesses will recover, but in order to rebound, they must survive—which is why adjusting sales tactics to get through the outbreak is critical. This article provides six tips to those in sales on how to grow revenue. 1) Be Helpful: Businesses and service providers that lead with their hearts in this time of extreme need stand a better chance of surviving and thriving. Free consulting is typically touted as a bad thing, but offering discounted products or free resources that can help others maintain operations might be the best “selling” one can do right now. 2) Re-Evaluate Your Context: Think through who needs your help right now, and align your value proposition directly with our new shared reality. 3) Modify Products and Target New Markets: Develop new products or services that clients didn’t need yesterday—but desperately need today. 4) Add Value in New Ways: Consider helping your customers free up cash by offering more generous payment terms or more flexible purchase options. 5) Tweak Your Pitch: Consider adjusting a revenue-focused pitch to a cost-savings pitch. 6) Caring Over Content: Tell clients, “I know that the current environment makes it difficult to consider new purchases today, and I’m not expecting you to, but I wanted to reach out to see if you’d be open to having a discussion about a future solution when this calms down?”

Before 2013, Shandong Four Seasons Minghu Hotel Co. Ltd. was a high-end restaurant and food service company. In December 2012, the Chinese government implemented the Eight-Point Regulation that prohibited government officials from indulging in luxury banquets and high-end meals. The new government policy had a negative effect on many companies across the high-end food service industry, whose customer base consisted mainly of government officials. In response to the new government policy, Shandong Four Seasons Minghu Hotel Co. Ltd. made some strategic changes that eventually led the company to recover and survive. However, fierce competition created many challenges. The company had to determine whether to explore other markets and how to better satisfy the needs of consumers.

CLS Landscape Supply was an established firm facing flat sales growth and declining profitability. Founded as a student-run business by a young couple in 2009 in Cochrane, Alberta, the company had grown to 33 seasonal employees, with sales exceeding $4 million annually. It operated two locations that supplied landscape products and materials to both retail and commercial customers, as well as a landscape construction division that provided both landscape design and installation services. The local economy was highly reliant on the oil and gas sector and had been struggling for several years. Price cutting was also common in the company’s highly competitive industry. How could the co-founders address the issues of flat sales growth, declining profit margins, and the competing time commitments of running the business while starting a family? They wanted to best position the company for long-term success. How could they focus on developing a more formal human resource plan for staffing and scheduling work in addition to developing budgets and policies for managing expenses?

Before 2013, Shandong Four Seasons Minghu Hotel Co. Ltd. was a high-end restaurant and food service company. In December 2012, the Chinese government implemented the Eight-Point Regulation that prohibited government officials from indulging in luxury banquets and high-end meals. The new government policy had a negative effect on many companies across the high-end food service industry, whose customer base consisted mainly of government officials. In response to the new government policy, Shandong Four Seasons Minghu Hotel Co. Ltd. made some strategic changes that eventually led the company to recover and survive. However, fierce competition created many challenges. The company had to determine whether to explore other markets and how to better satisfy the needs of consumers.

Spreadsheet supplement for product 98E046.

In February 2020, the board of directors of the French energy utility company, Engie SA (Engie), terminated the services of the company’s chief executive officer (CEO). Before her departure, this CEO was the only female CEO among the Cotation Assistée en Continu (CAC) 40 benchmark stock market index of firms. After becoming CEO in May 2016, she divested billions of dollars’ worth of fossil-fuel assets and reinvested the proceeds in renewable and energy efficiency services. Her goal was to restructure the loss-making energy company, but the board of directors was not satisfied with her performance. Despite an improvement in the company’s financial performance during her tenure, Engie remained one of the lowest-valued energy utility companies on European stock exchanges. With a focus on renewable energy, Engie’s relative performance continued to suffer. The chair of the company’s board of directors had to determine the cause of the company’s stock market performance and find ways to improve. He also had to consider what other factors, in addition to value creation for shareholders, should be used as a performance measure for the next CEO.

In 2018, Middlebury College's board of trustees is considering a proposal called Energy2028 that would push the small, liberal arts and sciences college in Vermont to become a net zero carbon emitter, decrease energy usage by 25%, divest fossil fuels from its endowment, and build new educational programming focused on energy and climate change. Building the Energy2028 proposal was a multistakeholder process that was guided by the college's president, Laurie Patton. Patton and her team brought together student activists, faculty experts, board members, and financial experts to craft a proposal that was bold, yet achievable. Perhaps the most surprising element was the divestment pledge. Just five years earlier, the board had faced a similar decision on divestment and chose not to act. Had Patton done enough to convince the board to change their minds and support the complete package of Energy2028?

In 2006, Zita Cobb and two of her brothers, Alan Cobb and Tony Cobb, native Newfoundlanders, launched Shorefast to help grow another leg of Fogo Island's economy. Like so many rural communities, Fogo Island's fate was tied directly to one primary resource-in this case cod. For centuries, Fogo Islanders made their living by fishing and trading cod, but by 1992, the Canadian government put a moratorium on the limited stocks left, forcing many rural Newfoundlanders and Labradorians to move to larger centers in search of new employment. Shorefast is a non-profit organization that has explored ways to catalyze economic development on Fogo Island through intentional place-making. Through Shorefast's experience of launching the Fogo Island Inn, in 2019 the co-founders of Shorefast are wondering how they can use their experience to inform a global conversations about sustainability and place-based economies that can help reimagine capitalism.

Jia Yuan Company was a small Chinese business founded by two brothers in 2005. The more ambitious of the brothers worked at the front of the business, successfully transforming it from a local sales agent for foreign branded products to a contractor for government-financed construction projects. He saw new opportunities for the business and wanted to make further investment in a related company that his friend worked at. However, the conservative brother, in charge of internal management, was not convinced of the project’s potential and did not approve of making drastic changes to their company’s overall strategy. The brothers had a history of disagreement and suppressing resolution of the problems. Can the brothers manage their conflict, or should they go their separate ways?