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It is September 2021, and Kalshi is a new, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)-approved trading platform for event contracts. Kalshi went online just a few months earlier, after a successful round of Series A funding. Sumer Sao, the first (and at the time the only) member of Kalshi's growth team, realizes that the key to the company's sustained success is to quickly grow the number of daily active users to increase liquidity on the trading platform. To achieve that, Kalshi needs to find the right pricing structure that can potentially attract different target segments while also encouraging trading.

A Hong Kong start-up, Senior Deli develops a wide variety of soft meal products targeted at mostly elderly patients suffering from dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing and chewing. Its patented technologies help supply softened food that retains the original taste and appearance and appeals to local palates. There is significant market potential for soft meal products amid the aging populations in Hong Kong, mainland China, and other developed countries. Yet the team has found that some patients and care homes have hesitated to adopt the products. In general, soft meal products are still new to many people and suppliers in Hong Kong. The stakeholders seem to hold up in adoption of the products. This market chasm is too costly for Senior Deli or any single start-up to overcome. Therefore, Senior Deli's major issues are educating target customers, legitimizing soft meals, and promoting its products amid such uncertainty. At the end of 2022, a localized guideline for care foods was announced in Hong Kong, but will it create an opportunity for Senior Deli to overcome the issues it has been facing?

It was the autumn of 2022, and Payal Tekchandani, cofounder and partner of The Wedding Clinic (TWC), sat down with her operations team in Pune, Maharashtra, to discuss the plan of action for the upcoming quarter. She had established TWC in 2017. It was a unique offering in medical aesthetics that enabled brides, bridegrooms, and their families to enjoy the best of skin and hair treatments. Payal's entrepreneurial journey included managing operations for diverse and unrelated businesses. She had stepped in to take charge of her family business nine years ago. Three distinct business entities-TWC, Tender Skin Products Pvt Ltd. (TSPPL), and Tender Skin International Cosmetology Academy (TSICA)-operated under the umbrella of Tender Skin International (TSI), a multispecialty skin clinic founded by her mother, Dr. Sonia Tekchandani, in 2003 in Mumbai. TSI also trained beauticians in skincare and manufactured skin care products. Using company-owned clinics, they had bootstrapped the business without external funding. Each clinic required high capital expenditure for operating and purchasing, and installing the machinery. Since Payal took over, business service revenues had quadrupled. However, given the dynamics of the changing business environment, the pandemic, and changing consumer behavior, it was time for Payal to rethink the business interlinkages. She wished to scale the clinics' operations and was facing a dilemma: should she open another center in Mumbai or focus on other cities? The latter option would mean seeking funding and adopting the franchise store model across the country.

Tina Garg, founder and CEO of a creative agency, Pink Lemonade, reflects upon her entrepreneurial journey of establishing a brand, growing the business from a small to a midsized firm, and partnering and scaling up to become a global firm. While planning for growth and expansion, she was at the critical juncture of rethinking her strategy. Garg faced the dilemma of positioning her firm differently while scaling up consistently across pricing, people, processes, and operations. Case A discusses how Pink Lemonade transitioned from a boutique communication agency to a strategic brand partner. It delves into the decision-making dilemmas that Garg faced while growing the firm and the actions needed to reposition the organization during the pandemic. Having worked on prestigious projects, she aimed to grow the ticket size of business engagements with existing clients. Garg confronted several challenges in scaling the business, as well as the risk of diluting the distinct organizational culture she had created over the years.

Tina Garg, founder and CEO of a creative agency, Pink Lemonade, reflects upon her entrepreneurial journey of establishing a brand, growing the business from a small to a midsized firm, and partnering and scaling up to become a global firm. While planning for growth and expansion, she was at the critical juncture of rethinking her strategy. Garg faced the dilemma of positioning her firm differently while scaling up consistently across pricing, people, processes, and operations. Case B discusses how Pink Lemonade grew its business model and transformed its organizational structure. Strategy became a part of each vertical and each engagement with clients. Pink Lemonade adhered to the new normal of working with a hybrid workforce. The case discusses the changes introduced by Garg in pivoting the organization and taking business overseas, leaving the reader wondering if this would be a sustainable business model for Garg in the future.

This case focused on rapid prototyping in a startup company. Two students, Isaac Lewis and Nathaniel Herring, both suffered should injuries and had difficulty finding the right equipment for their rehab stints. As part of the Master's in Entrepreneurial Leadership degree program at Babson College, the two went into an extensive discovery and prototyping process to create a product to assist in that rehab. The case describes their process and ends with them having to make a launch decision.

The Germany-based startup Vytal operated the largest digital-native reusable packaging-as-a-service network globally, having raised nearly €15 million, established a large network of restaurant partners, and prevented the use of millions of single-use take-out food containers. However, Vytal's growth was slower than expected, challenging its unique pay-per-use model and environmental goals. This case highlights Vytal's growth trajectory in the years leading up to 2023, outlining its business model, utilization of digital technology, strategies for acquiring partners and customers, and regulatory developments within Europe. It also presents several options that the founders are considering to reach profitability, prepare for a Series B financing round, and expand internationally, such as charging partners for unused containers, implementing consumer fees on single-use containers, launching a loyalty program, and franchising to expand more rapidly.

Tianlala is a Chinese new-style tea drink brand that has been developing, producing, and selling fresh ice cream, tea, and coffee since 2015. By 2021, the brand covered twenty-eight provinces, 105 cities, and three municipalities across China. It had opened more than one hundred directly operated stores and more than six thousand franchised stores nationwide, served more than two hundred million customers, and sold an average of 1.5 million cups of milk tea every day.<br><br>It had taken only six years for Tianlala, a small, unknown milk-tea brand, to become one of the representative brands in the low-tier city market, going from being unknown to being accepted and appreciated by consumers, especially young ones. Despite this quick growth, the question for Wang Wei, the founder of Tianlala, was, How should the company reinforce its brand to grow further?

Andrew Kress (CEO and founder) and his team had built a promising marketplace business at HealthVerity serving its core market in healthcare, with a focus on pharmaceutical R&D and services. Thus far, HealthVerity's products had been unique to the pharma and pharma services customer segment. However, there was a real opportunity to apply the underlying technology across multiple industries, for which some investors strongly advocated. The company was grappling with questions of whether to increase revenues by expanding to other verticals beyond healthcare or by going deep with its current customer base and providing end-user analytics-based applications on top of their marketplace offerings. The company believed they had a unique understanding of a technically-challenging market in healthcare, and wondered how the model would scale. Kress wondered if there were ways in which the company could focus on specific analytics solutions or end-user applications (and which ones, specifically?), and if so, would that be worth the effort and risk, or did the approach need to be all or nothing? And was he limiting his thinking about the risk and opportunity to enter adjacent markets solely because of lack of familiarity or was there a real chance to serve other customer segments well if better understood and resourced, and how quickly could the company figure out the answer to that question without risking excessive time and capital?

Tianlala is a Chinese new-style tea drink brand that has been developing, producing, and selling fresh ice cream, tea, and coffee since 2015. By 2021, the brand covered twenty-eight provinces, 105 cities, and three municipalities across China. It had opened more than one hundred directly operated stores and more than six thousand franchised stores nationwide, served more than two hundred million customers, and sold an average of 1.5 million cups of milk tea every day. It had taken only six years for Tianlala, a small, unknown milk-tea brand, to become one of the representative brands in the low-tier city market, going from being unknown to being accepted and appreciated by consumers, especially young ones. Despite this quick growth, the question for Wang Wei, the founder of Tianlala, was, How should the company reinforce its brand to grow further?

Women's empowerment means empowering women on multiple dimensions: economically, psychologically, socially, and politically. Historically, women have suffered from disproportionately reduced access to resources and opportunities. Financial literacy and inclusion are especially important to overcome the dependence of women on their husbands. This aspect is more important in situations where the husband-wife relationship was strained for a variety of reasons. Shikha Mittal founded Be.artsy to empower women to speak up and manage their finances, with financial literacy and consequent empowerment acting as the impetus for overall women's empowerment. Experiences of sexual harassment at the workplace and domestic violence prompted Mittal to design and offer programs to corporates. These programs aimed to address the above problems through customized training programs for employees of these companies, which comprised Be.artsy's business to business (B2B) markets. Although these programs were supplemented with street plays and interventions in colleges, the B2B channel was the primary channel Be.artsy used to reach out to women; it generated revenue and created an impact. Be.artsy chose financial literacy as the key pillar for women's empowerment and drove its programs through tie-ups with institutions. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mittal launched an online program, Be Your Own Lakshmi (BYOL), that imparted financial literacy education. With free initial sessions that demonstrated the importance of financial planning and promotions through social media, BYOL had garnered some traction, with many people wanting to sign up for the paid BYOL offering. However, Mittal's desire to use BYOL as a vehicle to speed up the achievement of her vision of empowering millions of women remained unfulfilled. She needed to choose the right approach to scale BYOL, but the dilemma remained: Should she scale BYOL using the B2B or business to consumer (B2C) route?

Sandie Beauchamp, was the chief experience officer at the social enterprise and Certified B Corporation hybrid organization Clean the World (CTW), located in Orlando, Florida. Beauchamp finds herself in survival mode as she struggles to keep the organization from closings its doors while simultaneously keeping herself, employees, and volunteers safe during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Through a focus on CTW’s mission as well as trial and error, Beauchamp and her team innovate a product and process to meet the hygiene needs of CTW beneficiaries while generating income.

Despite our reliance on entrepreneurs to kindle the fire of capitalism, we still know little about what motivates them and why. That’s concerning, since the data suggest most new job growth depends on the enterprise of entrepreneurs who build new solutions for old (and new) problems. For over 200 years, scholars have sought in vain to clarify the definition of entrepreneurship and reach consensus on its meaning. According to French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who coined the term “entrepreneur” around the dawn of the 19th century, “The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.” For economist Joseph Schumpeter, an entrepreneur is a “wild spirit,” driven to disrupt norms and build new commodities of enduring value. But this leads to more questions: Can this creative wildness be developed? Or are entrepreneurs, as Steve Jobs put it, born primed to put “a dent in” the universe? Starting around 2002, written use of the word “entrepreneur” kept rising, and much public discussion of entrepreneurs now fixates on the fast-falling fortunes of flashy tech founders with dubious business practices. Ultimately, not all founders fit the label “entrepreneur”—it is only the tenacious ones with the skill to manage their wild spirit that dramatically boost productivity and yield and thereby lift up whole industries, sometimes entire economies, from ruin.

Sandie Beauchamp, was the chief experience officer at the social enterprise and Certified B Corporation hybrid organization Clean the World (CTW), located in Orlando, Florida. Beauchamp finds herself in survival mode as she struggles to keep the organization from closings its doors while simultaneously keeping herself, employees, and volunteers safe during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Through a focus on CTW's mission as well as trial and error, Beauchamp and her team innovate a product and process to meet the hygiene needs of CTW beneficiaries while generating income.

This case features a protagonist (Gen Isayama - GSB 2003) who established and runs a VC firm/incubator called World Innovation Lab (WiL) that is based in Palo Alto and focuses on Japanese companies. The case explores the state of entrepreneurship in Japan; the launch of the VC, and its novel approach to LP relationships. It provides examples of corporations who have undergone successful transformation after working with WiL and of joint ventures in which WiL has invested.

Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, Moderna was riding the successes of developing a vaccine in record time and helping stem the tide of the crisis. However, the company had grown at an incredible rate, more than doubled its number of employees, and had to put on hold desired projects to push the company to continue to innovate and push the boundaries as a digital-first biotech company. The retirement of CTO and Moderna's digital architect, Marcello Damiano, prompted the company to reevaluate how best to proceed. The choice for who would replace him loomed large over many aspects of the company's strategy moving forward, and could potentially reshape its future.

After importing three hundred bags of ground sacha inchi, a seed with promising nutritional benefits, from Peru, Kayla Gray has important decisions to make. Her new venture, Sachi Superfoods, is ready to launch; however, she does not have a clear plan on how to best market her product. Gray must decide on the best market segment to pursue in addition to the most effective marketing channel for her product.

In March 2021, the wholesale distributor of home décor products SBO Distributors Ltd. (or SWISSBO), based in Vancouver, Canada, was considering an opportunity for strategic analysis. The firm was at a crossroads in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic had led to a setback in the company’s revenues and margins—seemingly, a temporary setback. The wholesaler was now facing a make-or-break dilemma that involved a new growth opportunity to move up the value chain toward retailing.

Franck-Erik Flegbo and Cyril Le Terrien were already successful executives in a major multinational when they decided that it was time to dream, and to build their own company, with a culture that delivered performance, created a culture where everyone wanted to work, used the latest technologies, and did its part to save the planet. The opportunity to acquire 40-year-old Drinkotec came to them, and with it, they saw the vehicle for their dreams

The deal is closed; Franck-Erik Flegbo and Cyril Le Terrien become the owners of Drinkotec but discover that the existing team doesn't really have the capabilities or culture to innovate. The Covid-19 pandemic hits, and they discover that their customers need Drinkotec's help.