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The Hongxin Entrepreneur Incubator, located in Xiamen, Fujian Province, China, has experienced tremendous growth between 2001 and 2013. Its founder and president has received widespread acclaim as he has helped to launch and turn around more than 100 local companies, both start-ups and more developed enterprises. He now plans to develop and grow the incubator by setting it up as an online platform that would connect and support an alliance of entrepreneurs on a scale never seen before in China. As he looks forward to taking it in this new direction, he wonders how he can ensure continued success and maintain his philosophy of caring for the community of entrepreneurs while maximizing profits.

The Hongxin Entrepreneur Incubator, located in Xiamen, Fujian Province, China, has experienced tremendous growth between 2001 and 2013. Its founder and president has received widespread acclaim as he has helped to launch and turn around more than 100 local companies, both start-ups and more developed enterprises. He now plans to develop and grow the incubator by setting it up as an online platform that would connect and support an alliance of entrepreneurs on a scale never seen before in China. As he looks forward to taking it in this new direction, he wonders how he can ensure continued success and maintain his philosophy of caring for the community of entrepreneurs while maximizing profits.

This case study is set in Harvard Square in 2012-2013, and explores how a diverse group of local stakeholders (e.g. the Cambridge Police Department, city agencies, churches, nonprofit service providers, Harvard Square businesses) comes together to understand and respond to the influx of "travelers." These young homeless individuals travel from city to city in a nomadic way, and Harvard Square has become more popular on the travelers' circuit. The travelers' aggressive behavior and drug use challenge local stakeholders who have developed reasonably effective strategies to support the chronically homeless population on Cambridge streets. Better forms of collaboration and collective action are required to address this new set of challenges. This case study describes the stakeholders involved, the multiple interests at stake, and the broader context in which collaboration and collective action must take place.

China's healthcare reforms in the 1980s left the country's hospitals under-subsidized and its medical officials underpaid. Hospitals relied on profits generated from the provision of medical services to cover the funding gap, while doctors became kickback seekers to make up for their low rates. In traditional markets, global pharmaceutical companies ("pharm companies") are no strangers to wooing hospitals and doctors to favor prescriptions of their drugs. These questionable "marketing" practices were taken to the next level in the China market. Streams of financial flows, legal or not, from pharm companies to hospitals and doctors to win their favor in prescribing their drugs became a structurally embedded problem of the country's healthcare system. The Chinese government introduced a new round of reform in 2009. While it promises to spend millions more on healthcare, its action to wipe out bribery and other kickback-seeking behaviors of the industry left many players perplexed. The first to take the heat was GlaxoSmithKline Inc. ("GSK"), a large British pharm company active in the China market since 1984. In July 2013, the Chinese government launched an investigation on GSK's China operation regarding its activities that lure hospitals doctors and administers to buy GSK drugs. The alleged practice of bribery is an industry open secret common to pharm companies. Is this investigation an indication that the Chinese government is targeting multinationals in favor of local players? Despite high-voltage growth rates, this regulated industry in the market economy with Chinese characteristics only has a bare-boned distributions infrastructure, while it is filled with patient-trying administrative hurdles, has price restrictions on an expanded list of drugs, and offers weak institutional protection for companies' intellectual property. Will long-term investment in the country pay off? Should GSK continue its China business? Should it change its strategy in China?

Describes the challenges facing Dr. John Noseworthy, President and CEO, in implementing a long-term strategy for the growth of the Mayo Clinic-a leading academic medical center with a reputation for excellence in tertiary and quaternary health care. The case highlights the concurrent forces of regional and national competition and federal health care reform as factors complicating the plans of Mayo Clinic to grow through several channels. Students must ultimately decide whether Mayo Clinic should focus its future growth on its current areas of expertise (regional provision of integrated medical care and international provision of tertiary and quaternary care), new opportunities in a broader range of services and treatment channels (e.g., telemedicine, mobile health, enterprise learning and training for other health care systems), or some combination of these opportunities.

Established in 2004, Facebook had shown stupendous growth. However, faced with the evolving mobile communication industry and increasing competition, the company was on the lookout to increase its user base by acquiring WhatsApp. Was it the right decision for Facebook to acquire WhatsApp - and at the steep price of $19 billion? From WhatsApp's perspective, the company's founder wanted to continue with his vision of connecting people, irrespective of the decision involving Facebook. Should WhatsApp sell its assets to Facebook or should it insist on an equity alliance instead?

Some 40% to 80% of mergers fail to meet objectives--and new research shows that human factors, especially collective leadership capability, are a key driver of M&A success.

The former CEO of Kaiser Permanente on the benefits and pitfalls of activating "us versus them" energy.

A look at the history of railroads and the decentralized organizational structure they used to coordinate operations on an unprecedented scale.

Despite the exponential rise of social media use in external stakeholder engagement, academic research and managerial practice have paid little attention to how it can be used for open innovation across the entire innovation funnel, spanning ideation, R&D, and commercialization. As a result, there is little understanding of how companies can organize for and implement social media for open innovation. Utilizing a multiple case study design, this article examines its application across the entire innovation process. It proposes a range of organizational and technological adaptations that managers can implement to ensure they realize the innovative benefits of social media application.

J. Craig Venter made waves in 1998 when he and his for-profit company, Celera, challenged the public Human Genome Project to a DNA sequencing race. (It ended in a tie two years later.) Fired from Celera in 2002, the biologist now runs a nonprofit institute and two biotech firms, overseeing the development of synthetic cells to be used in plastics, food supplements, and vaccines.

A student must decide whether to break his promise and leave the company that sponsored his MBA when he is offered a dream job by a Silicon Valley start-up. Expert commentary comes from Carolin Oelschlegel, a principal at Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company), and J. Frank Brown, managing director and COO of General Atlantic, a global investment firm, and former dean of INSEAD.

A student must decide whether to break his promise and leave the company that sponsored his MBA when he is offered a dream job by a Silicon Valley start-up. Expert commentary comes from Carolin Oelschlegel, a principal at Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company), and J. Frank Brown, managing director and COO of General Atlantic, a global investment firm, and former dean of INSEAD.

Launched in 1956 in California's emerging wine region, Williams-Sonoma soon moved to San Francisco because so many of its customers lived there. In 1970 the founder created a catalog to serve people around the country--and that was the beginning of the company's data collection and analysis. Knowing where its catalog customers lived informed decisions about where to locate its stores. As the company grew its brick-and-mortar presence, it also built up its mail-order business, acquiring a garden products catalog, the Hold Everything catalog, and Pottery Barn. In 2000 it launched fully transactional websites for its two leading brands. Today analytics infuses and enhances all areas of the business, from personalized website content for each visiting shopper to shipping and inventory management to extremely high-touch customer care centers. Williams-Sonoma comprises seven brands and has annual revenue approaching $5 billion. It accounts for 4% of all home furnishings sales in the United States, almost half of which come through the web, making it the 21st largest online retailer in the country.

The author, a strategy and international-business professor at Harvard Business School, has come to a conclusion that may surprise you: Trying to apply management practices uniformly across geographies is a fool's errand. Best practices simply don't travel well across borders. That's because conditions not just of economic development but of institutional maturity, educational norms, language, and culture vary enormously from place to place. Students of managerial practice once thought that their technical knowledge of best manufacturing practices (to take one example) was sufficiently developed that processes simply needed to be tweaked to fit local conditions. More often, it turns out, they have to be reworked quite radically--not because the technology is wrong but because everything around it changes how it will work. There's nothing wrong with the tools we have at our disposal, but their application requires contextual intelligence: the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and to adapt that knowledge to a context different from the one in which it was acquired. Until we can better develop and apply contextual intelligence, failure rates for cross-border businesses will remain high, what we learn from experiments unfolding around the world will remain limited, and the promise of healthy growth in all parts of the world will remain unfulfilled.

At first glance, China, which is known for large, often inefficient state-owned enterprises, might appear an unlikely source of fresh management thinking. Yet Chinese companies have a lot to teach the world about today's business imperatives: responsiveness, improvisation, flexibility, and speed. To cope with their turbulent environment, the Chinese have developed those capabilities and learned to build everything--from skilled recruits to suppliers to capital sources--from scratch. They manage very differently, too: Eschewing Western-style matrix organizations, they favor flat, loose structures that allow them to jump on new opportunities and expand quickly. They roll out new products constantly and localize offerings with a vengeance. They're also adept at nonmarket strategies, particularly navigating local politics and relationships with the state. Indeed, China's entrepreneurial companies may well be the vanguard of an era in which the ability to adapt quickly, navigate messy environments, and use unproven talent yields a global competitive advantage.

Stressed out. Overcommitted. Distracted. This is how many people feel today. Everyone is struggling to have meaningful work, domestic bliss, community engagement, and a satisfying inner life. But committing to better work/life balance isn't the answer. It assumes you must make trade-offs among the four main aspects of your life: work, home, community, and self. A more realistic and gratifying goal is better integration through "four-way wins," which improve performance in all domains. Integration starts with embracing three principles: be real, be whole, and be innovative. This article outlines the skills that bring those principles to life and shows how to hone several critical skills with exercises such as: "Four circles," in which you assess the importance of each domain and then diagram the extent to which the values you pursue in them are compatible; "Talent transfer," in which you examine all your skills, from mentoring colleagues to organizing family activities, and how each might be used to achieve different ends; "Crowdsourcing," in which you gather solutions for problems from creative friends and test them out. Through these and other exercises, you can find the path to a more fulfilling and less hectic life.

A student must decide whether to break his promise and leave the company that sponsored his MBA when he is offered a dream job by a Silicon Valley start-up. Expert commentary comes from Carolin Oelschlegel, a principal at Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company), and J. Frank Brown, managing director and COO of General Atlantic, a global investment firm, and former dean of INSEAD.

The chief executive officer of Oy Moomin Characters Ltd. (Oy Moomin) had dramatically increased revenues since he joined the firm, but breaking into the major markets of the world, including the United States, was proving to be quite difficult. The firm’s long-standing relationship with its master agent, Bull’s Press of Sweden, had given the firm a dominant presence in the Nordic region and Japan but little presence elsewhere. He must consider his options for sustaining the growth of the firm, which involves developing a strategy for the character licensing industry, understanding sources of sustainable value creation, and adapting to the demands of a global marketplace.