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Companies that create new products and new business models--think of Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Xbox Live--experience much greater growth.

As the world population exceeded 7 billion by the end of 2011, various agencies working to alleviate poverty had come to a general consensus that pure charity was not a sustainable solution. In the absence of venture capital and angel investors in developing markets, Microfinance (MF) was one of the most promising tools in the fight against poverty. MF institutions tended to focus on micro-lending, providing small loans to micro-entrepreneurs from which interest could be earned. This case details the issues and challenges that Microfinance institutions faced a decade into the new millennium. The rise of mobile technology is a key theme as it promised innovative solutions. The case discusses various mobile financial services, including Safaricom's M-Pesa and M-Kesho offerings, and focuses on Experian's MicroAnalytics (EMA) unit, created to serve the financial services sector in developing countries. EMA developed an innovative system to enable financial service providers (clients) to serve their customers via a distributed, branchless, "mobile only" model. After a successful pilot study in the Philippines, EMA created a mobile banking platform that offered the potential of extending mobile money to other financial services as well as new customer and geographic segments.

Some personality assessment tools ably identify what you like to do, but they tell you very little about whether you're good at it or how to improve if you're not. Fortunately, one way of grouping people into types is based on an attribute that does predict performance: "promotion" focus or "prevention" focus. Promotion-focused people see their goals as creating a path to advancement; they are comfortable taking chances, like to work quickly, dream big, and think creatively. Prevention-focused people see their goals as responsibilities; they are vigilant, risk-averse, thorough and accurate, and like to maintain the status quo. Motivational focus affects how we approach life's challenges. It affects what we pay attention to, what we value, and how we feel when we succeed or fail. Once you know your focus, you can choose role models, frame goals, seek or give feedback, and provide incentives that will strengthen your motivation or your team's. This article details how you can create motivational fit, which enhances and sustains both the eagerness of the promotion-minded and the vigilance of the prevention-minded.

Ireland's first female president, Robinson went on to serve as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights and to launch her own foundation. In this interview with Alison Beard, she discusses wielding influence in the absence of formal authority, challenging powerful people and institutions, how women's leadership differs from men's, and more.

This case focuses on Skype in the voice-over-IP (VoIP) industry. Its offering created such exceptional utility for users around the world that Skype has become a verb - to "skype" someone means to call someone using the Skype application. Yet despite explosive growth in demand, the company was not profitable in four out of the five years prior to its acquisition by Microsoft in 2011. The case allows participants to deepen their understanding of Blue Ocean Strategy by applying first-hand the concepts and tools of the Blue Ocean strategy sequence.

This is the first part of two-case series of Zappos's blue ocean strategic move as an innovative online shoe retailer. Part A focuses on how Zappos reconstructed the existing boundaries of the online footwear retail industry. It describes Zappos's distinctive value proposition that is neither an offline nor online shoe store in the conventional sense. The case also introduces how Zappos broke the value-cost trade-off of the conventional online shoe store. The case comes with a theory-based video case, which can be obtained from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/zappos

The second part of Zappos case focuses on Zappos's people proposition, which led to high performance and raised barriers to imitation. It demonstrates the importance of Fair Process that builds deep trust and commitment in the company, making it difficult for competitors to imitate Zappos. Theory-based Movies and Lecture Slides can be obtained from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/zappos

This case study presents an example of business model innovation in the context of primary care delivery. It documents the story of Laastari, a new IT-driven retail health clinic chain based in Finland, including the process that links conceptual strategy to implementation and practice, as well as the evolving stakeholder ecosystem of the company.

Monique Leroux led a major transformation, overcoming resistance, at a large Canadian financial cooperative based in Quebec that competed with top Canadian banks. Leroux was elected in 2008 as Chairman, President, and CEO of Desjardins Group. In order to compete effectively in a demanding and changing financial services industry and survive the global financial crisis, Desjardins needed to integrate, consolidate, and determine how to preserve traditional values while preparing for the future and emerging as a less provincial financial group. In 2012 she reflected on the change efforts and the opportunities and challenges ahead.

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.

In 2012, Gazprom was widely believed to be on the verge of a steep decline. It had witnessed meteoric growth from its early days as an experiment in privatization of oil and gas following the rapid break-up of the Soviet Union. The case documents the growth strategies that the company has followed, i its global aspirations, and the impact of its political lineage, and discusses how the winds of change heralded the decline of the company. It discusses in detail the role of government policies toward national companies, the influence of politics and power, as well as the management of state-owned entities in emerging markets. The case offers a rich mix of insights into the contextual forces at work in shaping the destiny of Gazprom, the political pressures it faces as Russia's largest company and its stutter-step approach to globalization. The material in the case allows for a comprehensive analysis and discussion on central themes such as the origin of competitive advantage for NOCs (National Oil Companies), the unique governance conflicts that they have to navigate in setting strategic direction, and the viability of their globalization strategies.

In April 2012, Delta Airlines was evaluating the potential purchase of the Trainer Refinery in Philadelphia. Delta had been seriously negotiating and pursuing the purchase of Trainer, owned by Phillips 66, for nearly a year. Although Delta's management team believed that owning Trainer would allow Delta to manage its rising fuel costs, particularly in the Northeast Corridor of the United States, the analysts, markets, and press had categorically criticized the potential purchase. Delta needed to decide quickly.

The chief executive officer of eRAD Inc., a company that develops picture archiving and communications systems for the diagnostic imagery industry, is preparing for an upcoming board meeting, where he will face several challenges related to the potential sale of the company. The founder’s recent death in a plane crash has left the company struggling to meet its financial obligations. On one hand, the sale of eRAD to a larger health care technology company will provide enough money to end the ongoing struggle to keep solvent. On the other hand, the business is on the threshold of profitability, and some board members consider the sale premature. All that remains is to reach agreement on the factoring of debt and a few other financial details to satisfy the many shareholders whose votes are needed to accept the offer.

The vice-president and general manager of the Canadian operations of a multinational vehicle manufacturer learns that the plant he supervises will be shut down in 15 months. In the months leading up to the shutdown announcement and subsequent winding down, he needs to manage the communications and followup with several stakeholder groups. The vice-president and general manager needs to balance several issues, including the need to keep production high and waste down, while preparing to lay off the workers who will be contributing to the plant’s short-term success. To be used with supplemental cases (9B13M019, 9B13M020).

This is a supplement to Volvo Construction Equipment: Managing a Plant Closure (A), product 9B13M018. To be used with (9B13M018, 9B13M020).

This is a supplement to Volvo Construction Equipment: Managing a Plant Closure (A), product 9B13M018. To be used with (9B13M018, 9B13M019).

Ford Motor Company's Social Sustainability Manager, David Berdish, faces the challenge of positioning Ford on the forefront of the new global transportation industry in a sustainable way while leveraging Ford's leadership in the automotive industry. This case takes a holistic look at the global transportation industry but places emphasis on mega-cities in bustling emerging markets and their increasingly congested transportation systems. With the company's strategic mobility initiative in place and Ford's Blueprint for Mobility launched as of February 2012, the question of resource and technology allocation and strategic positioning among traditional and new (car-sharing, traffic data management) competitors becomes critical to success. Students must decide how to balance innovation, market positioning, and long-term vision with near-term strategy to better serve the next generation of customers on multiple levels - access, community, and environmental.

This case profiles the launch and growth of Tough Mudder, a startup founded by Will Dean and Guy Livingstone in the mud run/adventure challenge space. Dean, an avid triathlete and marathoner, found these solitary endurance events boring, and wanted to come up with a new concept that would bond teams of people together to complete an athletic event that would test not only their physical strengths, but their will, determination and mental grit as well. The case chronicles the meteoric rise of Tough Mudder within the rapidly growing adventure race industry. As Tough Mudder looked ahead to 2013, it faced numerous opportunities and challenges, not the least of which was a move to host events internationally. The company also faced fierce competition and was constantly having to innovate in order to stay at the head of the pack. Finally, rapid growth meant scaling challenges within the organization that would need to be addressed if the company was going to maintain the high level of operational excellence that was so critical to the success of its events.

A social enterprise organization, whose mission is to battle poverty and gender discrimination through providing access to technology, is faced with the prospect of losing some or all of its government funding in a time of global recession. Under the legal structure of a non-governmental organization, Digital Opportunity Trust has partnered with large corporations and other organizations and established a local presence in disadvantaged areas. It has worked in a partnership setting to mobilize the information technology knowledge of young people and train them to become leaders of change in their local communities, which in turn will give them the relevant skills and experience to support their own career paths. The organization’s striking success has been driven by its innovativeness and, more particularly, its noticeable efforts to reconcile the corporate and non-profit aspects of doing business, along with the challenges that come with it, without compromising the quality of the social enterprise brand that it is bringing forward.