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Why would busy executives participate in business case studies? The relationship that develops between executives and faculty through the case writing process is a powerful example of sharing and trust. And because a number of executives are unaware of what exactly the process entails, they ask for a description of it. This note describing the process may be customized to suit the needs of all case writers.

Logical conditions that link different elements of a business decision are very common in managerial practice. For example, a firm can ship only to and from warehouses that are open; patients needing MRIs can only get service in clinics that have MRI equipment; regarding an old power plant, one can decide to close it or retrofit it, but one obviously cannot retrofit a closed plant. The list goes on. In quantitative modeling of such situations, a natural step is to use IF statements such as IF(a warehouse in city N is open, then we can ship to/from it; otherwise no shipments can be made in/out of a warehouse in N). In optimization models, however, IF statements lead to non-linearity with all the associated challenges. Fortunately, nearly all logical conditions can be modeled linearly using binary variables. This note describes some helpful modeling techniques for doing that.

St. Mary Maternity Hospital, a nonprofit organization, had a mission to deliver healthy babies at normal weight and to offer medical care to expectant mothers regardless of their financial situation. This case demonstrates the value of staying focused on achieving a mission statement. To achieve the hospital’s mission, it was important to identify factors that could affect the weight and health of babies. This case demonstrates how a few factors related to birth could result in insightful and actionable recommendations for doctors, administrators, and policy makers.

The case focuses on succession planning for a successful family business that has reached a crossroads in which different family members have different stakes in the outcome of the business. The president of Goodwin Sporting Goods is 66 years old, has health concerns, and is concerned about how to finance his retirement. He also has three children who rely on the business for financial support. He must make some tough decisions that will affect both the business and his family.

The case updates events since the Court's ruling against Myriad Genetics on March 29, 2010 and should be used in conjunction with Gene Patents (A). On July 29, 2011, a US Appeals Court reversed the prior ruling against Myriad. On September 16, 2011, the first major overhaul of US Patent law in nearly 60 years was signed into law. Among other provisions, the law moved the US to a first• to-file priority when granting patents, as was the practice in most of the rest of the world. Many felt this change would help to reduce the amount of patent litigation. The case ends with the Supreme Court's 9-to 0 on March 29, 2012 ruling against another company in a case similar to Myriad's. Within five days of that decision, the Supreme Court remanded the Myriad case back down to the Court of Appeals for reconsideration.

Since its founding in 2004, INRIX, a leading global provider of traffic information and driver services, had received four rounds of financing from leading venture capital (VC) firms and by 2012 had been cash flow positive for the past six quarters. Its founder, Bryan Mistele, was looking to pivot into high growth and faced several intriguing options. However, competition in the sector was rapidly shifting, and Mistele also knew that while INRIX's industry-leading technology platform and customized services had set the firm apart, large location-based services companies could more easily enter the sector, posing a significant threat. In recent years, due to the proliferation of smartphones, large firms such as Google and Apple had increased access to location data, potentially threatening to enter the real-time traffic information (RTTI) space. Current competitors Navteq and Tele Atlas were also looking to grow through global expansion. Mistele also knew that the VC firms that held controlling stakes in his company were looking to cash out soon, either with a sale or by taking the company public through an IPO. He pondered both options and surveyed the challenges that each presented. If Mistele and INRIX decided to go public, Mistele would need to be confident that INRIX's strategic position and capabilities differentiated the company from other competitors and potential entrants. INRIX's "exit" options-sale or IPO-also implied different organizational decisions across the firm; Mistele wondered how best to organize INRIX to defend its current position and achieve growth as it continued to operate in a larger and more complex environment.

Ayojak was an online event management product solution offered by Signure Technologies Limited, a firm established in 2007 in India and the United Kingdom that had product development and business development centres in Pune and Bangalore, India. As of May 2011, Ayojak had two operational products and two more products in the development stage. Ayojak provided an end-to-end solution to any event organizer, including such activities as the creation of an event web page, ticket sales, collation of attendee information, event promotion on social media, and customer support for booking tickets online. <br><br><br><br>To promote its clients’ events, Ayojak made extensive use of such social media platforms as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. It engaged in few offline marketing activities and hence depended solely on word-of-mouth through its social media presence. However, in April 2011, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Signure realized that Ayojak’s social media content strategy had been focusing on promoting its clients’ events. Now, with two more products soon to be launched, the CEO needed to rethink Ayojak’s content strategy. He wanted to build Ayojak’s brand among its stakeholders by leveraging its social media presence, instead of using this presence merely as a promotion platform for its clients’ events.

In the winter of 2010 in Shanghai, Dr. Zeb Feng, procurement director for Asia at British Petroleum (BP), was acutely aware of the growing burden that quality control imposed over his company’s global operations. Chinese suppliers were masters of cost-cutting, but quality often suffered as a result, which led in turn to an increased need for inspection and development efforts. Almost five years ago, Feng’s company had established an international procurement office (IPO) in Shanghai, which served as a shared service centre for internal customers throughout BP worldwide. Since that time, the IPO had been mainly sourcing non-hydrocarbon goods and services. <br><br><br><br>After a corporate board meeting with Christina De Luca, the vice president of procurement and supply chain management for BP’s downstream operations, it had been decided that the company would start to enhance its global competitive sourcing. As the number-one supplier market in the world, China was a high priority for further oil exploration. The pressing point that concerned Feng was whether Chinese suppliers were sufficiently ready to supply mission-critical supplies for oil drilling, extraction, and refining. During a recent conference call, De Luca had reiterated, “Zeb, our competitors are way ahead of us in their sourcing operations, and they have achieved much lower costs. We’ve got to do something!” Feng had to gather his team for a planning meeting. He knew that supply quality was the key issue, but how could it be resolved?

The owner of a small Ontario-based textiles manufacturer must decide whether to bid on two government tenders and, if so, at what prices. The owner must analyze each bid by calculating its direct, absorption, and full costs, consider the impact of adding each bid’s volume to the company’s current capacity level, and determine the differences between a one-time and multi-year tender contract. The owner also wants to look at the overall “fit” of the contracts with the company’s current operations and direction.

This six-part video case series features social entrepreneur Craig Kielburger as he faces pivotal moments in his life and the remarkable evolution of his organization. The primary dilemmas are strategic in nature and their solutions rely on leadership and social entrepreneurship. Students assume the role of Craig Kielburger in each case, which begins with a video set-up, followed by a short one- or two-page case and a discussion, and concludes with Craig describing what happened in a video clip. (This product consists of one of the six cases. Use product #9B12M031B to order the remaining five cases.)

In May 2009, High-Tech Metal Components (HTMC) inaugurated its brand new production plant of forgings and castings for automotive supplies in Suzhou, a city of 13 million close to Shanghai, China. After the successful installation of machinery and placement of workers, the company was prepared to begin production. A month later, the general manager of the Chinese division of HTMC received a phone call from the chief operating officer of its German headquarters; it was decided that it was necessary to cut costs for 2009 by more than five per cent. The cost structure was way too high, with many components imported from Europe. How could cost-cutting be done with the existing supply chain design in China? What long-term measures could be taken to realize the goal?

The case is about the San Francisco-based law firm, Paragon Legal, founded by lawyer and entrepreneur Mae O'Malley. Paragon Legal gave high-level attorneys the opportunity to have a flexible schedule and work 10 to 40 hours a week. This was in the context of an industry that typically required very long hours and had inflexible schedules and serious penalties for stepping out of the field for any length of time. Eighty-five percent of Paragon Legal attorneys were women with children, but the firm also attracted women and men without children who wanted to find a work/life balance. Paragon Legal lawyers were contract workers and received competitive compensation. In addition to discussing Paragon Legal, the case details the landscape of the legal industry, including challenges and pressures on all attorneys and the additional challenges for women. By the summer of 2010, Paragon Legal had become successful in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the question posed in the (A) case is whether the company should scale within the region and/or geographically. And if so, what would that look like? Other topics of discussion in the case include: the nature of contract work, entrepreneurship (and female entrepreneurship), and redesigning work for a better work/life balance.

Dialogue in the Dark Hong Kong Limited (DiD HK) is a social enterprise founded in August 2008 that uses exhibitions and workshops to raise the public’s awareness of the disadvantaged and provide jobs for the blind. It also aims to achieve financial success and sustainability, and provide dividend payouts to investors. In the first two years of operation, DiD HK’s innovations attracted many participants and created jobs for visually impaired employees. It made progress toward a breakeven in 2010 through its unique ownership and business models; the start-up team invented many new programs unheard of in other franchises.<br><br>Although DiD has franchises all over the world, none of them are sustainable and successful. Geared toward expanding to other parts of Asia, DiD HK is not without its problems. Its product range and market have room for improvement, and there is a lack of repeat visits to the exhibition. DiD HK also needs further financial capital, human resources, and other resources. Thus, it is imperative for management to review its strategies, and find ways to sustain its expansion and financial performance. If DiD HK can overcome these challenges, it may serve as a role-model social enterprise not just in Hong Kong, but also in other parts of the world.

Clarke, a mosquito abatement company seen as having a core business that is environmentally harmful by its very nature — selling pesticides — faces unique challenges in its transformation into a sustainable enterprise. Should it shift its focus entirely towards offering “green” pesticides and risk losing some of its customers, or should it keep offering its less expensive, more toxic products? This case shows how even when innovation leads to new green products, processes, technologies, and business models, the leadership of a company must cope with the daunting task of engaging employees and customers in the idea that green can be effective and profitable.

Part (A) of this case series presents the situation of a multinational brewer, InBev, having acquired several breweries in Germany, and wishing to proceed with operational integration and the closure of smaller, less efficient plants. This move triggers resistance not only from the local workforce, but the local community. For InBev, this is a case of corporate restructuring and strategy implementation. Yet for a group of local entrepreneurs, this is an opportunity to plot a management buy-out (MBO) and to recreate a historical local brewery. The case is designed as a business negotiation setting that brings together Inbev, the local entrepreneurs, the city council, and a local bank (instructions for four teams involved in the negotiations are provided in the teaching note). The case can also be used as a conventional case on entrepreneurship or strategy implementation.

This case is a supplement to Wolters Brewery (A): Negotiating Restructuring. It gives a debriefing of the (A) case. It is also an independent case on small- and medium-sized enterprises facing issues of local brand marketing in an industry increasingly dominated by global players, and of developing exports from scratch.

Companies in every industry are attempting to reduce their use of chemicals, particularly synthetic organic compounds, where there is a perception of harm to human health or the environment. The industrial and commercial floor-cleaning equipment industry is no different, with many equipment manufacturers seeking to reduce their use of harsh cleaning chemicals such as petroleum solvents. But with every competitor pursuing similar greening efforts in a mature market, companies find it difficult to differentiate their offerings to customers. <br><br>Tennant Company chose to differentiate itself through a technology-driven business strategy based on chemical-free cleaning. Instead of reducing the use of harsh cleaning chemicals, or reducing the harshness of those chemicals, Tennant offered its customers a cleaning solution that used ionized tap water to clean and disinfect surfaces, thereby eliminating harsh chemicals altogether. The benefits to customers were numerous, including lower total cost of ownership and improved health and safety, while maintaining cleaning performance relative to conventional chemical-based products. This case helps to illustrate the challenge of profitably going beyond incremental “greening” efforts (aimed at doing less harm) — could a significant innovation in environmental performance be the central argument for the company’s value proposition?

Looking back on the disastrous vacation of an American couple in Indonesia, this case shows how a globally branded North American hotel chain disregarded the basic tenets of maintaining their global brand promise, ignored generally accepted customer service standards, failed to instigate delivery failure recovery, and leveraged firm-specific capabilities to maximize shareholder wealth. The reaction of the local manager at the Indonesian hotel and adaptation of the value proposition are told from the perspective of the vacationing couple that experienced the diluted brand firsthand.

Foro Energy developed proprietary and patent-pending fiber-laser technologies that could disrupt existing processes and services for the exploration and production of oil and natural gas. These breakthrough laser technologies were protected by a strong intellectual property (IP) portfolio, which provided Foro with the flexibility to pursue a number of different business models. The market potential for oilfield applications was large, as global spending in the O&G E&P industry was expected to approach $600 billion in 2012.

This case is a two-part series on Dunia. Case A is set in 2008, where founder CEO Rajeev Kakar has just spent 20 months setting up Dunia, a finance company in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The enterprise originated from a partnership between his former employer, Fullerton Financial Holdings (FFH) and a couple of key entities in the UAE that were keen on building a financial presence in the region. On September 15, 2008 - as the Dunia team is preparing to announce the opening of its first branch in Abu Dhabi - news breaks on the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. For Kakar, it means that the product programmes he has lined up, as well as his funding assumptions for Dunia, have crashed. Dunia A deals with the time frame before the launch of the company and covers factors such as pricing risk and uncertainty, along with a broader view that covers the struggles presented with new ventures and entrepreneurship.