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The cofounders of foursquare are deciding how to respond to competitive threats and scale up the organization. Foursquare was a location-based online service that allowed users to "check in" to a location using an application on a smartphone. Foursquare kept track of a user's check-ins, shared them with users' friends, and unlocked "Specials" that gave users discounts at nearby locations. Within a year and a half of its founding the company had 45 employees and over 5 million users and was valued in excess of $100 million. However, many competitors, including Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp, developed competitive services requiring foursquare to respond.      

The owner of a small home and garden shop in Chaguanas, Trinidad, is faced with declining sales and the recent entry of a competitor offering similar products at competitive prices. In order to compete, he is considering moving to a larger location and expanding his business to capitalize on emerging opportunities, such as the demand for landscaping services by wealthy professionals. He is uncertain how his current customers would react to such a move and is considering what kind of marketing activities he should engage in to ensure the business’s long-term survival.

The huge growth of information technology (IT) and information technology enabled services (TIES) businesses in India and, in particular, in Hyderabad, led to the establishment of Indian and multi-national companies. With large numbers of employees and thousands of square feet of office space, these companies recognized that maintaining their premises was not part of their core competence and outsourced their housekeeping requirements, thus creating a new industry. A single mother who was unable to make ends meet on her salary as the principal of a catering college grabbed a tiny opportunity to provide cleaning services at the Oracle office in the Cyber Towers at Hyderabad and, over 10 years, built up Golden Star into the third-largest housekeeping services provider in the city, with over 2,000 employees. While maintaining her strong personal ethical values, she built a young, professional team and maintained high standards of professionalism and quality of service. The case is set at the time when she is faced with the typical dilemmas of organic growth: to take on allied functions of office management, such as maintenance of electrical and mechanical equipment - a growing trend in the industry; to expand geographically to manage the offices of her clients in several cities; or to make a huge amount of money by simply selling the business she had built from scratch.

This case focuses on management innovation in the South African dairy industry, describing how an innovative new yoghurt product, Danimal, was created specifically for the market at the base of the pyramid. It explains how management of the product line embodied the various innovation opportunities and challenges presented. The concept was initially introduced in order to assess the feasibility of profitably servicing this market. However, the project was not simply about introducing a cheap brand to the poor but was more about creating brand awareness in the market at the base of the pyramid. The new product took into consideration the nutritional shortcomings in the diet of children in this market and also allowed for the lack of available infrastructure — electricity and refrigeration. <br><br>The case illustrates the importance of a product being affordable, relevant, and available to its market. Innovation went further than product design and also took into account the necessity of a lean distribution channel. This took the form of micro-distributors, referred to as Danimamas, who comprised township residents that were unemployed or part-time employed. The case offers insights into the complexity of doing business in developing countries. It concludes with the challenge of how to ensure that the project continued on its upward trajectory.

High Mountain Technologies is a diversified research and manufacturing company that produces a wide array of products based on patented technology. A certified management accountant has been given the assignment of completing a capital budgeting analysis of two projects — a GPS transmitter and surveillance aircraft. Rogers has been instructed to calculate the net present value for each project, including an appropriate cost of capital, so that the company can make its final decision.

Dropbox is a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup, founded in 2006, that provides online storage and backup services to millions of customers using a "freemium" (free + premium offers) business model. The case recounts Dropbox's history from conception through mid-2010, when founder/CEO Drew Houston must make strategic decisions about new product features, how to target enterprise customers, and whether to pursue distribution deals with smartphone manufacturers.

A Canadian online floral delivery company considers whether to source more flowers from its existing growing locations and which of those would be optimal given its current market. What would be the advantages of opening a logistics facility in Miami?

Spreadsheet for case UV6304

Corporate entrepreneurship necessarily entails both risk and high levels of uncertainty; yet, established organizations are typically positioned as efficient engines that function best via cautious and routine progress, which can hinder attempts to inject innovative ideas into mature businesses. As such, conscious effort is required to build a corporation's capacity for sustainable entrepreneurship. While a few exceptional companies have built and maintained an enduring capability for entrepreneurship, the majority of firms possess a general resistance to these initiatives. Commitment to entrepreneurship may cycle between high or moderate support for the activity, to floundering interest or disbanded initiatives, as conditions in the internal and external environment shift. This cycling pattern, unfortunately, prevents the development of enduring capabilities. Herein, it is revealed how companies can progress their entrepreneurial capabilities over time, adjusting and improving them as the firm learns and adapts to change. To accomplish this, companies must develop strategic objectives to guide entrepreneurs, a management structure to support their work, and processes that inform assessment and decision making. Through an Evolve and Connect model, these three contexts can adjust to shifts in the external environment and the changes and progress happening within the organization. Over time, however, managers need to maintain a link between entrepreneurial activity and the organization's mainstream.

discussion about the firm's overall strategy, post Gulf Oil spill, moving forward. The case describes how within a single decade, BP had emerged as one of the largest energy companies in the world. Within that scope, BP had an odd achievement: It had been building an alternative energy business and had gained a reputation as being an oil company with a regard for the environment. Then a series of preventable accidents, in the United States in particular, started to chip away at the firm's status. In a matter of five years, BP went from celebrating its most profitable period to finding itself selling assets while industry watchers wondered whether the company would survive after being responsible for the largest oil spill in the United States.

Spreadsheet for case UV6289

Yoshito Hori, dean of the Graduate School of Management, GLOBIS University, was planning to launch a full-time English MBA program in September 2012. GLOBIS University was already offering successful part-time MBA programs in English and Japanese. The full-time English program was a necessary step to fulfill Hori's ambition to make GLOBIS the No. 1 business school in Asia, however it remained to be seen whether the school could attract international students who needed to relocate to Japan and compete with other world-class international business schools.

Stan Shih, founder-CEO of Acer, Inc., had proactively chosen and transitioned the "perfect" successor as CEO, but was now faced with major problems. Over the last two years, his heir apparent, Leonard Liu, had made the changes he had been hired to make, including revamping the organization structure and instilling a new corporate culture that emphasized accountability. However, such changes had caused numerous clashes between him and other cofounders of the company, in particular, Shih's wife, Carolyn. Liu had now suggested that "Carolyn should retire into her kitchen." Faced with office infighting and increasing clashes between the markedly different Western and Chinese styles of management, Shih needed Liu to manage the increasing complexity of global competition. However, Shih was now wondering if he had made the right decision to appoint Liu as his successor.

This note identifies the key issues that must be addressed in the creation of a viable venture, and provides an overview of the processes and techniques available to resolve the issues discussed.

In late 2009, the management of Mochi Media, a venture-backed startup, must decide how to invest scarce resources to achieve continued growth. Mochi has developed a three-sided platform, connecting Flash game developers, sites that aggregate these games, and advertisers. The case describes the company's history from conception through 2009, when strategic options include broadening beyond Flash games into iPhone-, Android- and Facebook-based games, and vertically integrating into the game aggregator role, which would capture more value but put Mochi into direct competition with platform partners.

Spreadsheet supplements case UV6301

Juner New Materials (Juner) is a private China - based company that develops, produces, and distributes modified plastic compounds. Founded in 1995 by female serial entrepreneur Xiaomin Chen, Juner has exhibited strong performance and growth potential in the past fifteen years. The company currently has a workforce of more than 300 employees and is an icon of high-technology ventures in Zhejiang province. As Juner strives to become the leader in China's modified plastics industry, the company presently faces scalability challenges primarily limited by financing constraints. Recently, with two major competitors having raised additional capital through their respective public offerings, Juner has reacted to these market changes. Since competition was aggressively dedicating new resources toward production and service capacity expansion, by June 2010 it was apparent that external funding was imperative for extending and sustaining Juner's competitive edge. Upon several discussions, Chen and the board of Juner concluded that it was opportune to take Juner public. The decision to go public has led to the discussion of several issues: (1) the choice of stock exchange, (2) the "justified" valuation based upon Juner's fundamentals and respective comparables, and (3) the methods Juner would adopt to maintain its growth rate and exceed investor expectations before and after the IPO.

Suitable for MBA, EMBA, GEMBA, and executive education programs, this field-based case offers an opportunity to use simulation modeling to evaluate an investment affected by prices, technical success, and yields from raw materials that are all uncertain in a global context.

This technical note is part of a course module that focuses on teaching design-thinking skills and 10 tools to identify and implement innovation and growth opportunities. It can be taught to MBA, undergraduate, or executive groups. The note and its accompanying teaching note includes an explanation of why design thinking is a useful addition to a business curriculum, an outline for a 15-session course, a description of the 10 design tools taught, and a set of student exercises to practice them. It also summarizes a series of 10 video interviews with leading designers and teachers that are available for free on the designing at Darden website.

The owner of a small home and garden shop in Chaguanas, Trinidad is faced with declining sales and the recent entry of a competitor offering similar products at competitive prices. In order to compete, he is thinking of moving to a larger location and expanding his business to capitalize on emerging opportunities, such as the demand for landscaping services by wealthy professionals. He is uncertain how his current customers would react to such a move and is considering what kind of marketing activities he should engage in to ensure the business's long-term survival.