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In January 2016, two entrepreneurial brothers attended an academic conference on small business and entrepreneurship to sell their product, the Online Venture Challenge, a web-based software-as-a-service retail simulation system. The brothers also hoped to demonstrate their second product idea, Launchboard, an interactive product that enabled users to make development plans and record their progress. Both products were intended as tools for entrepreneurship educators. The brothers did not have much success selling their first product during the conference, but two professors wanted to use Launchboard that semester. The brothers needed to decide how to position their product line. Should the Online Venture Challenge be promoted as one primary product that offered multiple complementary features? Or should their two products be positioned as two separate but complementary products? Or was it better to have two stand-alone products and two corresponding businesses? The brothers needed to better understand their own business ideas to determine the approach they should take. Fittingly, Launchboard, the new tool they had created, might actually help them to do just that.

Supplement for product 9B17M050.

Wuxi Suntech was founded in 2001 by Dr. Shi Zhengrong, an internationally recognized scholar in the photovoltaic (PV) and renewable energy engineering. Suntech, the first private Chinese company to list on the New York Stock Exchange, was the largest solar PV manufacturer in China and the world's third largest. Its story was once recognized as a 'perfect match' of the promising new energy industry with the technical know-how and the comparative advantage of Chinese manufactured exports as well as the financial power of global capital markets. The bankruptcy of such a successful company was hence a puzzle to the business society in China and the world. How did the company rapidly emerge as an industry leader in the booming solar PV market but suddenly fail during the global financial crisis period? The case of Wuxi Suntech's bankruptcy under Dr. Shi's leadership provides rich material for the analysis of business strategy, industry structure, entrepreneurship, emerging markets and finance.

In May 2015, the new director at Schneider Electric’s plant in Rudrapur, India, faced a challenging situation. The company had an ongoing struggle with quality issues and consistently missed its production targets. From a human relations perspective, employee engagement and morale were low and the shop-floor workers had very little respect for the plant’s management team. The new director quickly launched a program of human resource initiatives aimed to turn the plant around, but in the midst of his efforts, a sister plant submitted a high-volume order that seemed well beyond Rudrapur’s production capabilities. Against the advice of his superiors, and in the face of some resistance from his staff at the plant, the plant director accepted the order and used an adaptive leadership approach to implement several plant-level changes in the production processes at Rudrapur. While the team had made a lot of progress in improving the overall function of the Rudrapur plant, there was still a long way to go and a huge production hurdle to be crossed. Were the director’s interventions likely to succeed? Should he adopt a different approach to meet the challenges?

A college entrepreneur named Emily Levy founded MightyWellâ„¢ when she faced a personal challenge following her diagnosis with chronic, or more properly called, Post-treatment Lyme disease. Emily identified the need for an improved fabric cover to protect and fashionably hide a Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter (PICC) line that was inserted in her arm to deliver antibiotics to her heart. Over the course of two years, while completing her undergraduate degree, Emily designed, developed, manufactured, and sold her product while bootstrapping[1] her venture. She competed in 17 business competitions and won prizes in 15, before being awarded $250,000 as the 2016 winner of the Babson Breakaway Challenge. Emily is now rebranding and pursuing a product expansion initiative to transform her company from a single product to a brand of wellness wear[2] and products attractive to a larger base of medical patients.

Bestsellers like The Lean Startup and Business Model Generation have suggested that ideation-the generation and selection of ideas-is important to new venture creation; yet little empirical research on the topic has been conducted. Using a creative problem solving approach, we developed and tested a new scale that found imaginativeness predicts new venture ideation over and above the effects of the usual suspects of attitude, knowledge, and evaluation. Imaginativeness is an ideational skill that combines task-relevant knowledge in three distinct domains-creative, social, and practical-with the latent ability of imagination. In the article, we explain why a new scale was needed, why imaginativeness appears to be especially useful to individuals who lack entrepreneurial experience, and how imaginativeness enables just about anyone to generate and select new venture ideas with the proficiency of a habitual entrepreneur.

This work presents REPITA (Research-Ecosystem-People-Intellectual Property-Transfer-Alignment), a prescriptive and repeatable model for successful technology-based academic entrepreneurship, synthesized from research of academic entrepreneurship in developing economy conditions. In this work, we identify three deficiencies in Mexico's entrepreneurship ecosystem: research skills, high technology, and technology transfer. We then present a solution that has been recognized by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for fueling high-tech university spin-offs with science and technology doctoral research. Lessons from 48 spin-off projects are synthesized in the newly proposed REPITA model, which prescribes connecting a basic research platform to applications, catalyzing the entrepreneurship ecosystem with resources and incentives, combining highly specialized people in entrepreneurial teams, setting generous and flexible intellectual property policies for the knowledge economy, transferring technology per entry and exit strategies, and aligning technology and business incubation. Finally, we propose a tool that presents academic entrepreneurship theories in an actionable format for university administrators and entrepreneurs. These results are not a theoretical framework on their own, but rather a real-world organizational model based on theory for impelling technology-based, academic spin-offs with economic impact. Taken together, this contribution may be useful to practitioners and provocative for researchers.

Audio Advice was a brick-and-mortar audio specialty retailer with two stores in North Carolina. Traditionally, audiophile components were only sold through specialty stores. However, this practice was shifting, with a growing portion of sales occurring online. Audio Advice wanted to capture a portion of this growing channel, so started online as an Amazon Marketplace seller. Though this channel resulted in quick revenue growth without a great deal of initial investment, it was not suitable long term. Audio Advice’s management had a bigger vision. In planning their transition to their own e-commerce site, Audio Advice needed to consider branding: should they extend their existing brand, use a sub-brand, or develop a new one? How would each option affect in-store sales, Audio Advice’s reputation, and the willingness of audiophile brands to allow online sales of their products?

In December 2016, Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon), the largest online retailer, entered the offline retailing industry by launching its first Amazon Go store in Seattle. Previously, the company had entered the food, diaper, and housekeeping product manufacturing industries with its Amazon Elements brand. The company had not been profitable until 2001 and was still facing some financial difficulties, but it was named the fourth most valuable public company in the United States in 2016. In 2015, it surpassed Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (Walmart) as the most valuable online retailer in the country. Given its current competitive advantages in the online retail business, could Amazon reproduce this success in offline markets? Did Amazon’s diversification into offline retailing make sense considering its existing resources and capabilities, the presence of established traditional retailers such as Walmart, and a market trend that was increasingly moving toward online stores?

<h4>bKash: Financial Technology Innovation for Emerging Markets Case Study Description:</h4><p>The founder of bKash Limited (bKash), a successful mobile financial services (MFS) model pioneered in Bangladesh, built the company from scratch, targeting services at the lower socioeconomic segment of society and eventually acquiring 26 million customers. bKash has had a positive impact on the lives of countless poor people and has gained worldwide recognition for its innovative business model. The model required close collaboration with telecommunications operators, banks, non-governmental organizations, and regulators. In particular, the Bangladesh central bank supported the venture, allowing experimentation in MFS to address poverty through financial inclusion. By the end of 2016, the founder was concerned about future regulations and looking to strengthen the foundation of his disruptive business to make it more robust. This bKash case study asks: How could the company continue to grow while maintaining its financial inclusion objective?</p>

The owner and operator of two stores that sold organic groceries and fair-trade goods in Edmonton, Alberta was proud of what he had built; however he was worried about the financial sustainability of his downtown location. Since its opening in 2014, the downtown store had constantly struggled to remain profitable in the face of extremely high overhead costs. The original Whyte Avenue location of Earth’s General Store, highly popular with its loyal patrons, had been subsidizing the downtown store just to keep its doors open. This practice was certainly not a long-term solution, and in early 2016, the owner needed to create a new business strategy that would balance his company’s financial needs with its social and environmental missions.

In 2016, Hong Kong-based Maxim's Group hired a store manager to run its high-end French bakery, Paper Stone, located in mainland China. The company's aim was to eventually expand Paper Stone to additional cities throughout China. The store manager was preparing to present his vision for Paper Stone to a senior executive from Maxim's Group but needed to determine his position on some key questions: What kind of employees should he hire, and how should he go about managing the employees? What management structure should he recommend? How should he market the Paper Stone brand?

In 2016, the founder of Enigma Escape Rooms Ltd. (Enigma) was investigating an opportunity to expand his business to a second location. A new location would offer three additional escape rooms, and Enigma would enter the horror-based genre of the market. Enigma had strong demand for its adventure-themed escape rooms during its first year of operations. With escape room popularity at an all-time high and new competitors in or entering the market, the owner wondered if this was the best time to grow his business. He planned to complete a business size-up, assess the competition, and then project the costs and benefits of opening a second location before making a final decision.

Sunrise Power, a first-generation mid-sized power and mining company in India, was considering geographical diversification in the African continent. While many African nations were rich in resources, they often lagged in economic indicators, and global companies hesitated to invest in infrastructure due to limited risk appetite. However, this left an opportunity for mid-sized firms such as Sunrise Power, so long as they could attain regulatory support and ensure high returns. Sunrise Power needed to evaluate the complexities in identifying the right market in Southern Africa. This included examining indicators like population, gross domestic product, energy demand forecasts, and electrification capacity. The firm also had to identify the critical success factors and assess the risks in the strategy planning process. Finally, it needed to design an organizational structure for its African venture so as to realize the benefits of diversification.

mySugr is a mobile health startup which allows us to explore several interlinked trends. One trend is the proliferation of health related applications, and an understanding of factors which seem to be related to success in the digital health space. Another trend is the role of patients in managing their own health, an issue of increasing importance as chronic diseases touch the lives of a growing number of individuals and consume an increasing part of the health budget. A third related concept is that of asset based approaches for health, a concept which seems to be linked to the success of a number of health apps.

In 2014, Jiangsu Huabo Industrial Group Co. Ltd. brought together offline logistics services and an online platform to create Jiangsu PhoneWin Logistics Management Co. Ltd. (PhoneWin). PhoneWin’s purpose was to exploit e-commerce opportunities for phones and related services in small towns and villages in China. Although competition was fierce from several large e-commerce companies in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, PhoneWin achieved some success. By November 2015, it had expanded into 13 provinces across China and built partnerships with over 300 suppliers. However, two Chinese e-business giants had started to expand their penetration in rural markets, becoming an inevitable threat to PhoneWin. As an early entrant in this market, how could PhoneWin compete against such powerful giants? Could it sustain its revenue and profit growth in the coming years?

In 2010, three friends created Fruits of Sherbrooke as a way to rescue local fruit that would otherwise be wasted. The founders knew their efforts would be beneficial for the environment and for people in need of food. In February 2016, having grown their business into a successful social enterprise entirely through the help of volunteers, they faced important decisions. Realistically, they would not always be able to run the organization, which meant facing issues of succession. Additionally, they needed to decide how to balance growth strategies with their commitment to the social good. Should the organization focus on maximizing profitability or should decisions for growth be based only on providing the greatest benefit possible to the community and environment?

In 2010, three friends created Fruits of Sherbrooke as a way to rescue local fruit that would otherwise be wasted. The founders knew their efforts would be beneficial for the environment and for people in need of food. In February 2016, having grown their business into a successful social enterprise entirely through the help of volunteers, they faced important decisions. Realistically, they would not always be able to run the organization, which meant facing issues of succession. Additionally, they needed to decide how to balance growth strategies with their commitment to the social good. Should the organization focus on maximizing profitability or should decisions for growth be based only on providing the greatest benefit possible to the community and environment?

In 2014, Jiangsu Huabo Industrial Group Co. Ltd. brought together offline logistics services and an online platform to create Jiangsu PhoneWin Logistics Management Co. Ltd. (PhoneWin). PhoneWin's purpose was to exploit e-commerce opportunities for phones and related services in small towns and villages in China. Although competition was fierce from several large e-commerce companies in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, PhoneWin achieved some success. By November 2015, it had expanded into 13 provinces across China and built partnerships with over 300 suppliers. However, two Chinese e-business giants had started to expand their penetration in rural markets, becoming an inevitable threat to PhoneWin. As an early entrant in this market, how could PhoneWin compete against such powerful giants? Could it sustain its revenue and profit growth in the coming years?

Ferrero Group (Ferrero) operated in the chocolate confectionery industry. The industry was facing challenges with changes in consumer needs, and price volatility and scarcity of raw ingredients. To achieve its ambitious economic goals in this environment, Ferrero integrated various sustainability initiatives in its supply chain and grew the company through vertical and horizontal integration. Advocating a vision of “sharing values to create value,” the company set sustainability goals for 2020, which included controlling and being able to trace the supply of raw ingredients. Could Ferrero maintain its leading position in the industry and achieve its sustainability goals? To what extent could the sustainability goals strengthen the company’s competitive position and move it toward achieving its financial goals?