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In the summer of 2016, the general manager of IXSIR Winery of Lebanon (IXSIR)-a young winery in Lebanon that offered customers a new level of quality by producing wine from a mixture of grapes harvested from different terroirs-received news of a bomb striking Beirut. IXSIR had been facing challenges competing in the unstable and risky local market, and the general manager realized that the bombing signalled rougher economic times ahead and likely a decrease in wine consumption. He was concerned about how the political unrest in the country could negatively impact wine sales and started thinking about different ways to tackle the threat of an ongoing economic downturn. He also wondered how to mitigate a potential decrease in revenue. Should IXSIR pursue revenue-generating activities such as oenotourism or diversify into different products?

Nest Wealth Asset Management Inc. (Nest) was a new Canadian robo-adviser based in Toronto. The company competed not only against large incumbents such as Canadian banks but also against other financial technology start-ups. In April 2015, Nest's main competitor had just aligned with a significant partner that had abundant financial resources and broad market access. Nest's chief executive officer needed to consider the best option for the company's future: Should he maintain the current business-to-consumer model by maintaining a focus on scaling and expanding Nest's consumer base, or should he explore a business-to-business model by leveraging Nest's technological capability and offering technology to human advisers?

In early 2013, three young Nepalese entrepreneurs were deciding whether to launch Kaffeine, the first of a large chain of coffee shops, in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal. As experienced entrepreneurs, the partners were interested in a recently vacated location near Durbar Marg, a major street and shopping destination in Kathmandu that represented a unique opportunity to build a highly successful coffee chain. Coupled with the increasing trend in Nepal toward coffee drinking rather than tea, this was an opportunity the trio felt they could not pass up. The entrepreneurs had many things to consider, such as location, competition, target market, and how to measure the feasibility of this new venture.

In 2015, the Indian retail industry contributed around 10 per cent to India's gross domestic product, and online retail had a growth rate of 85 per cent. In the same year, food and grocery made up 60 per cent of the Indian retail market, and the online grocery segment was estimated at US$600,000. To capture its share of this market, Amazon India launched its own online grocery arm, KiranaNow, with a marketplace model. As it set out to carve out a space for itself in the online grocery market, KiranaNow faced challenges related to merchandising, managing human resources, customer perceptions, and technology hurdles, including the question of whether its chosen business model was sustainable. The company needed to overcome these challenges to find success in the Indian online grocery market.

Anyone who has recently travelled, gone shopping, or tried to have a problem solved may have little recollection of the experience. Worse yet, some are frustrated by the lack of responsiveness or empathy that they encountered. The reality is that most customer experiences are mediocre, forgettable and some are plain awful. But once in a blue moon, an experience is so great that it leaves positive memories for years. Why do some product or service experiences have that undeniable "wow" factor, while others lack that pizzazz, relegating them to either being loathed or erased from memory? This case prepares participants for an in-class exercise in which they discover design principles that make experiences great. The exercise uses two methodologies: LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) and Storytelling. It requires the purchase of special purpose LEGO® elements.

Student spreadsheet for case W17138.

Canadian Arrow Mines Limited (CRO) had a promising nickel property, the Kenbridge deposit, located 70 kilometres southeast of Kenora, Ontario. The spot had been the site of significant exploration in the past. Further exploration by CRO had indicated that it could be profitable. CRO had spent close to CA$10 million on redevelopment, and needed a further $3 million for the final feasibility study before going into full operation. In 2007, nickel hit a high of $27 per pound, but by 2009, prices had dipped to under $8 per pound, which severely curtailed the firm's ability to raise the final $3 million. CRO turned its attention to other projects to raise money in the hope of a recovery, but the trend had been negative until mid-2016. To save the property, CRO had laid off all of its employees and reduced expenses to the minimum required. With a small recovery evident, CRO management wondered if CRO should hang on further and wait for nickel prices to rise enough to support the final feasibility study. The team wanted to know what nickel price was required to run a profitable operation. Were there any indicators about which direction this price would take in the future?

On January 18, 2016, the chief executive officer and chief technology officer of Geosoft Inc. (Geosoft) met in Toronto, Canada, with the company’s executive team and regional directors for a critical three-day strategic planning session. Geosoft was a privately held, employee-owned, mid-sized global company that worked to help earth scientists and explorers make discoveries through innovative data solutions and services. The focus of the meeting—a new technology strategy to protect Geosoft from the impact of a global economic downturn affecting its primary markets—was pivotal to Geosoft’s current and future growth. This new strategy, known within Geosoft as the digital intimacy strategy, would radically change the way the company communicated with its customers. Geosoft’s customers were located in five major geographic regions: Latin America, Africa, Australia (including Asia), Europe, and North America. Rolling out the strategy demanded seamless communication of change to multiple stakeholders in vastly differing cultures across five continents. The new digital intimacy strategy was planned for rollout in September 2016 with implementation in 2017. For the new strategy to work, communication was crucial.

Navas Meeran, the Chairman and Managing Director of Eastern Condiments Private Limited (ECPL) had been instrumental in the growth and professionalization of ECPL by bringing in non-family professionals, introducing state-of-the-art systems and processes in manufacturing, and nurturing the values of compassion and loyalty that his father had instilled across the organization. In 2014 he had taken a sabbatical and handed over the company operations to his younger brother Firoz. ECPL, the flagship company of the INR 8 billion, family managed Eastern Group headquartered in Kochi, India, was engaged in manufacturing and marketing spices, blended spice powders, pickles, breakfast staples and beverages in both domestic and international markets. The company began as a small shop set up by their father M.E. Meeran in 1961. It had grown to record revenues of INR 5.60 billion in 2014. Though Navas was pleased with the company's 2015 business performance under Firoz's leadership he was uncomfortable with the pace and execution of major organizational changes brought in by Firoz. He was worried about Firoz's aggressive approach; the speed of the internal changes Firoz had made to tap external market opportunities had resulted in 10 -15% attrition at all levels in the organization. Was it right for a traditional family run business bred on a culture of compassion and loyalty to make a sudden shift to a metrics-based performance culture? Would Firoz's efforts to transform the company into a professional organization ultimately sustain the growth of the business? Was there a need to both cultivate professionalism and reward loyalty across the ECPL value chain? Could a company based out of a Tier 2 city such as Kochi be able to attract high-quality talent easily? These were some of the questions that worried Navas.

In this article, we consider crowdsourcing from the consumer perspective. Specifically, we examine the identity value (i.e., sense of self) that consumers accrue by participating in creative crowds. How can managers structure crowdsourcing initiatives to maximize value for participants through identity creation and expression? We strive to answer this question first by examining the different types of crowdsourcing initiatives from a value co-creation perspective. Then, we evaluate how consumers construct identities through consumption and review the literature on identity theory. Finally, we link the identity type-personal, extended, or social-to the management of crowdsourcing ventures and offer suggestions for practitioners.

Civic challenges such as urban mobility and energy problems offer new corporate innovation opportunities. However, such challenges are wicked and difficult to tame. They require novel solutions that account for and integrate contradictory perspectives within the local innovation ecosystem of firms, governments, and citizens. This article presents a successful civic innovation crowdsourcing project case study, in which multinational firm Bombardier encouraged a global civic crowd to co-create visionary solutions to the challenge of future mobility in crowded cities around the world. Bombardier recruited a global crowd of 900 individuals and facilitated the citizen development of more than 215 solutions of unique firm value. We explore the process and outcome of this crowdsourcing project and derive actionable design principles for a three-phased civic innovation crowdsourcing process including: (1) crowd construction, (2) crowd knowledge acquisition, and (3) crowd knowledge assimilation. This process enables the crowd to integrate members' diverse and contradictory knowledge proactively at both the team and individual levels. Additionally, the crowd is able to balance extension of existing local solutions and exploration of path-breaking technologies and solution concepts.

Tapping into the creativity of a crowd can provide a highly efficient and effective means of acquiring ideas, work, and content to solve problems. But crowdsourcing solutions can also come with risks, including the legal risks associated with intellectual property. Therefore, we raise and address a two-part question: Why-and how-should organizations deal with intellectual property issues when engaging in the crowdsourcing of solutions? The answers lie in understanding the approaches for acquiring sufficient intellectual property from a crowd and limiting the risks of using that intellectual property. Herein, we discuss the hazards of not considering these legal issues and explain how managers can use appropriate terms and conditions to balance and mitigate the risks associated with soliciting solutions from a crowd. Based on differences in how organizations acquire intellectual property and limit associated risks, we identify and illustrate with examples four approaches for managing intellectual property (passive, possessive, persuasive, and prudent) when crowdsourcing solutions. We conclude with recommendations for how organizations should use and tailor the approaches in our framework to source intellectual property from a crowd.

When managers are unable to use quantifiable time series data to make forecasts or decide on uncertainties, they can either rely on their own intuition and judgment or resort to the insights of others. The Delphi technique is a well-known forecasting technique that relies on the pooled perspectives of experts to predict uncertain quantities or the outcomes of events. This relies on polling the opinions of experts, aggregating these opinions, feeding them back to the responding experts along with their own estimates, and having them repeat their judgment calls until some level of consensus is reached. More recently, however, the opinions of many others who are not experts have been sought on a range of topics in a loose assembly of similar techniques bundled under the title of crowdsourcing. This article compares Delphi and crowdsourcing as prediction and estimation tools for managers. It notes their differences and similarities, and provides a simple tool for executives to use in deciding whether or not to use these tools, and if so, which tool or combination of them will work best in a given situation.

Advances in digital technologies have increased the possibilities for outsourcing business activities to crowds of independent contributors. Using the collective intelligence of a crowd opens a new range of business opportunities. In fact, crowdsourcing has led to the emergence of entirely new business models. Such crowd-based business models (CBBMs) can lead to an important competitive advantage while simultaneously presenting new challenges to entrepreneurs and executives. The author identifies and discusses three key challenges in designing and managing CBBMs: determining (1) the crowd's value to the firm, (2) how to create superior value for the crowd, and (3) how to capture value from the crowd effectively. Building on the crowd capital perspective and an analysis of the tactics and practices of successful CBBMs, this article offers propositions on how to overcome these challenges and manage such business models effectively. The identified practices can inspire decision makers when designing innovative CBBMs for their industries. Finally, the article concludes with a framework with the key decisions and tactics for effectively managing CBBMs.

Crowdsourcing can test a company's willingness to relinquish control to key stakeholders. Using past examples of four failed crowdsourcing initiatives, we explore the negative and unintended consequences of crowdsourcing in an age when stakeholders are empowered to speak their minds, make a mockery of organizational initiatives, and direct initiatives as it suits their own agenda. The concepts of crowdthink and crowd hijacking are introduced, and advice is given on how managers can avoid or anticipate some of the potential issues that arise during crowdsourcing endeavors. With these considerations, managers can harness the power of crowds effectively to achieve organizational goals with limited negative consequences.

Although CEOs are charged with recognizing when their firms need a major change in direction, their power and privilege often insulate them from information that would help them perceive looming opportunities or threats. No one in the company wants to tell the CEO of problems, much less that he or she is mistaken. In interviews with 200 executives, Gregersen came across hardly any who didn't recognize this challenge. But he also saw that a few innovative leaders, like Walt Bettinger of Charles Schwab and Marc Benioff of Salesforce, have found a way to overcome it. Such executives take pains to get honest feedback from a broad range of constituents. They also venture off the beaten path, regularly putting themselves into situations where they are unusually uncomfortable, unexpectedly wrong, and uncharacteristically quiet. This helps them ask the right questions, discover new insights, and detect early weak signals of impending market shifts.

For years, Walmart's unrivaled customer research capabilities helped it dominate retailing. Then along came the internet, and Walmart suddenly found itself playing catchup to e-commerce pioneers like Amazon. In 2014 the board appointed Doug McMillon as CEO and gave him an imperative: Bring Walmart into the future--without sacrificing its longtime strengths. McMillon, who began his career unloading trucks at a neighborhood Walmart, respects tradition but is impatient for change. In this interview with HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius, he describes the ups and downs of transforming America's largest company. Going digital is a top priority--which is why Walmart recently paid $3 billion to acquire e-tailer Jet.com. But the company also wants to strengthen the in-store experience. "The reality," notes McMillon, "is that customers want everything"--low prices, convenience, and seamless interactions online and in person. In this new world, all employees, including those on the sales floor, will need to be tech savvy. And the management team can no longer make strategic decisions on an annual or even quarterly basis; "strategy is happening on a much faster cycle time," says the CEO.

In many industries today--including aerospace, electronics, chemicals, software, global construction, global investment and commercial banking, and international manufacturing--even simple product or service innovations can become complicated, because so many companies now operate in ecosystems made up of powerful and highly interconnected stakeholders. That means you can't focus exclusively on the customer and yourself: You need value propositions that stakeholders in your ecosystem can also buy into, which vastly complicates the process of identifying innovation opportunities. The authors have developed a tool-based ideation process that a major pharmaceutical company has rolled out worldwide. They describe the six steps in the process: (1) Identify key stakeholders and their most pressing needs; (2) outline stakeholder consumption chains; (3) categorize features of the current offer and build offer profiles; (4) create growth opportunity profiles; (5) map stakeholder tensions; and (6) choose your best opportunity.

Early-stage research is expensive, risky, and unpredictable--so corporations generally shy away from it, leaving many opportunities unexplored. They could revitalize their research operations by adopting the approach taken by Bob Langer, a chemical engineer whose lab at MIT is one of the most productive and profitable research facilities in the world. HBR senior editor Steven Prokesch reports in depth on Langer Lab's proven formula for accelerating the pace of discoveries and getting them into the world as products. It includes: (1) a focus on high-impact projects--ones that could make a major difference to society; (2) a process for crossing the proverbial "valley of death" between research and commercial development; (3) methods for facilitating multidisciplinary collaboration; (4) ways to make the constant turnover of researchers and the limited duration of project funding a plus; and (5) a leadership style that balances freedom and support. By drawing on the Langer Lab values and model, companies could make the world a better place--and make lots of money in the process.

If your company is undergoing a merger or acquisition, you're apt to feel anxious. Roughly 30% of employees are deemed redundant when firms in the same industry merge. But you needn't dread the outcome, say the authors, who draw on their experience as academics and consultants. They've found that employees usually reap great rewards if they embrace the M&A process as a chance for introspection and growth. Your first step should be to figure out where you stand. The authors recommend conducting a SWOT analysis: Assess your strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities and threats that the deal presents. Then get involved in the integration effort--in a way that lets you showcase or sharpen your skills. Executing transition plans, innovating, and collaborating with new colleagues are all postmerger opportunities for personal growth. If you prove adept, you will be well positioned for success in the hybrid organization--or at another company. The authors suggest specific questions to ask yourself as you take stock of the situation. They provide tips on how to make sure you have a role in the integration work. And they present brief case studies of four professionals who followed the recommended approach and emerged from their companies' M&A deals as "winners."