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In March 2011, CSN Stores is a collection of nearly 200 Internet retail websites, including Cookware.com, Strollers.com, and Luggage.com. Co-founders Niraj Shah and Steve Conine were considering making a major investment to build brand equity at the corporate level.

First Class Trading Corporation, a Montreal-based company, had two partners: Jeff Morahan, the founder of the company, and David Sciacca. After evaluating the school supplies industry, Morahan had identified an opportunity to market a fully stocked school bag to schools and parents. The bag was filled with various items that a child needed as determined by a given teacher’s requirements. The strategy of the company was to target elementary and secondary private schools in the greater Montreal area, with elementary schools as the initial target. To date, the partners had generated a disappointing level of sales through cold calls and sales visits to schools. They had drawn up a strategic plan with objectives, positioning, and a marketing mix and were now wondering if they were on the right track. Had they missed something? Should they seek additional advice? Should they move ahead? The situation was complicated because of the stakeholders (school directors, teachers, parents, and students) involved in the marketing process.

Bruce Ballantyne had recently joined C.R.P. Products (CRP), a furniture manufacturer in Stratford, Ontario, to help review the company’s operations and assess what changes were necessary to keep up with demand. Although it was early 2011 and the peak season was still four months away, Ballantyne knew that he would have to determine what equipment was needed over the next three weeks to ensure it was delivered and installed before the peak season. Jamie Bailey, the owner of CRP, had also concluded that CRP did not have the financing available for both the new equipment needed to make its unique design of outdoor furniture and the seasonal working capital required to support inventory and accounts receivable. He had turned to Ballantyne to develop a solution that would keep up with demand, keep inventory low, and work within the available financing.

It was August 2011 and Martin Cartier, senior board member of Drowling Mountain, was beginning to feel the pressure of Drowling Mountain Ski Resort’s 2010 general meeting that was coming up in two months. Drowling Mountain had historically been the ski resort of choice for the local residents of Syracuse, New York. However, the company had recorded losses for the past two years. At last year’s annual general meeting, Cartier explicitly stated that he would bring the company to sustainable operations. He felt personally responsible for the company’s struggles, since he was the longest-serving member on the board. Management had been keen on developing a new marketing plan focused on new pricing schemes and increasing sales, but Cartier thought an advance meeting to discuss the plan with select board members would be advantageous. He held significant influence in the forthcoming meeting in October, and any recommendations that he made were likely to determine the future success of the company.

The Paddle8 case is a short case that presents the idea for a new business in the global art market and asks students to evaluate whether it will work, given the structure and unique workings of the art market. Paddle8 is a New York-based startup that partners with well-known galleries to offer art works from their collections for sale on the Paddle8 website to carefully selected, globally-dispersed members. The firm aims to help galleries overcome their geographic limitations and to make art more accessible to a wide range of new collectors with the help of its technology platform. The question is: will this succeed in the context of the art market where exclusive access is a prime driver of value?

An entrepreneur is at a crossroads. He has successfully executed a pilot event in Las Vegas for THUNDERBALL!, his long-drive golf media property that includes live events, television production, and sports wagering. He has also secured a prime-time airing commitment with The Golf Channel for three episodes. However, he must cover the costs of hosting a live event and producing it as a television show. The business model would combine sponsorship from television, event tickets, commissions for players, merchandise, and a partnership with a licensed casino for wagering. This case exposes readers to the world of television/media production and financing and the challenges entrepreneurs can face in spite of a successful initial effort.

This supplement to Thunderball (A) deals with the entrepreneur’s mission to find a successful business model.

This a supplement to Thunderball (A).

The president and chief executive officer (CEO) of an established Toronto-based boutique consulting firm is in the process of expanding his company’s core competency from the largely mature tech sector to the new and rapidly growing field of clean technology. During this time, the CEO is introduced to an inventor and an entrepreneur who have developed a waveform technology that they claim will instantaneously reduce electricity consumption by 30 per cent or more, when applied to a fluorescent lighting ballast. The two of them present the CEO and his partners with a rough prototype, a handful of patents on the verge of expiring, and mere verbal confirmation that the technology can be proven and certified. The CEO is intrigued by the potential of this radical new technology and must decide whether he and his firm will back the partners.

This supplement to LumiSmart (A): Answering the Call for Negawatts explores how the development of the clean technology might be financed.

In the three years since Bishop and Button purchased Verengo in a leveraged buyout (LBO), the company had gone through dramatic changes. Initially a residential windows and insulation firm, after the economic recession of 2008 the company switched gears and began offering solar installations to local residential customers. Aided by favorable regulatory changes and a consumer financing partnership, Verengo's solar business took off and became the company's primary focus. By the end of 2010, Verengo had grown to $27 million in revenue and was the largest solar integrator in Southern California. In December 2010, Verengo raised $9.7 million in growth equity funding and was considering its options for future growth. Eager to expand to markets outside of Southern California, Bishop and Button knew that they had to carefully assess the firm's many opportunities and tightly manage its growth.

Tommy Li was a designer and brand consultant renowned for his black humour and bold visual impact. With business spanning Hong Kong, China, Macau, Japan, and Italy, Tommy Li was one of the few Hong Kong designers to have entered the international market. In his ten years of experience as a design staff member, Li learned that getting the right clients was the key to a successful design consultancy business. Therefore, Li set up his own company to have full freedom in choosing his own clients, and his strategic selection of clients brought him great success. Consequently, he became a famous Hong Kong designer and brand consultant with reputable local and overseas clients. With international firms many times bigger than Li’s firm entering China, Li saw mounting competitive pressure. Was his stardom an adequate defence against firms composed of multidisciplinary teams that had innovation-driven design thinking and processes? Was scale a critical issue in staying competitive? Was proximity to the market an important advantage?<br><br><br><br>The brand consulting industry also faced intense competition from international business consultancies, advertising, and public relations agencies. Each camp used a different approach to target the same group of brand-conscious clients. Could Li cope with these challenges?

It's the ultimate bottom-of-the-pyramid challenge: How do you create a well-designed, safe, and affordable house for the world's poorest people? When Vijay Govindarajan and Christian Sarkar posed that question in an HBR.org blog post in August 2010, they offered their own simple sketch of a possible solution-and wondered if a version could be mass-produced for $300. Since then the $300 house has become a full-fledged movement, with a growing list of advisers, a website (300house.com), and corporate sponsors. In June 2011 the group announced the winner of its first design contest, sponsored by Ingersoll Rand. Here is the first-place entry, as voted on by members of the online community at jovoto.com.

Baldwin Farms, a California-based organic lettuce grower, has opened a distribution center in Pennsylvania to meet the rising demand for its product on the East Coast. Though the center has strengthened the young company's relationships with regional retailers, it's bleeding money and distracting the top team from other priorities. Can the company turn things around, or is it time to throw in the towel? William A. Sahlman and Allison Berkley Wagonfeld author this fictional case study with commentary provided by experts Charles Sweat and T. Gary Rogers.

Baldwin Farms, a California-based organic lettuce grower, has opened a distribution center in Pennsylvania to meet the rising demand for its product on the East Coast. Though the center has strengthened the young company's relationships with regional retailers, it's bleeding money and distracting the top team from other priorities. Can the company turn things around, or is it time to throw in the towel? William A. Sahlman and Allison Berkley Wagonfeld author this fictional case study with commentary provided by experts Charles Sweat and T. Gary Rogers.

Baldwin Farms, a California-based organic lettuce grower, has opened a distribution center in Pennsylvania to meet the rising demand for its product on the East Coast. Though the center has strengthened the young company's relationships with regional retailers, it's bleeding money and distracting the top team from other priorities. Can the company turn things around, or is it time to throw in the towel? William A. Sahlman and Allison Berkley Wagonfeld author this fictional case study with commentary provided by experts Charles Sweat and T. Gary Rogers.

The case focuses on an investment made by AXA Private Equity, a French manufacturer of food ingredients. The investment is made at the height of the financial markets, and financed with significant debt. Soon thereafter, the financial crisis impacted the company's financial performance, the valuation of all companies, and the balance sheet of banks. When the company breaches a covenant this set off a series of negotiations over the restructuring of the debt on the balance sheet. The case raises issues over the proper valuation and financing for a company, how capital markets can impact this, and the incentives and motivations of all the stakeholders.

The founding team at ScoreBig, an event ticketing company, is on the verge of a public launch of their product. The company has made great progress in negotiating access to tickets, designing its interface, and building a proprietary architecture. For consumers, ScoreBig offered the opportunity to buy tickets at below face value. For event managers, ScoreBig helped solve the problem of filling empty seats and recruiting new customers in a way that did not harm other forms of ticket sales. ScoreBig has raised over $20 million in three rounds of financing.

Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, the three founders of Airbnb, an online private accommodation rental market, stared at each other across the kitchen table in their San Francisco apartment. It was March of 2009. A single sheet of paper sat on the table in front of them. The three founders were on the verge of finishing the three month program at YCombinator (YC), a business accelerator located in Mountain View, CA.

Nokia, headquartered in Finland, was a global telecommunications equipment manufacturer. It operated Vertu, a luxury mobile phone brand that had pioneered the luxury mobile phone market in the late 1990s by using precious materials such as diamonds, sapphires, titanium, and exotic leather for phone production. The company had enjoyed impressive growth in almost 70 countries and had sold hundreds of thousands of phones in the eight years since its launch. On February 11, 2011, Stephen Elop, the new CEO of Nokia, announced a new mobile strategy to adopt Microsoft’s new but unproven Windows Phone as its primary smartphone operating system. The market reacted poorly, and the company’s share price took a 14 per cent dive on the day of announcement. How should Vertu respond to this new Nokia mobile strategy? Was Vertu well positioned to take the brand forward under the new Nokia? Should this U.K.-based wholly owned subsidiary be left alone and continue to be managed at arm’s length from Nokia? Changes to Vertu were inevitable — it was not a matter of if, but when.