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Alice Handy, an investment professional with 30 years' experience as head of the University of Virginia Investment Management Company, has opened a new asset management firm targeted at midsize endowments and nonprofit institutions in January 2004. Her business, Investure, LLC, offered outsourced investment services to institutions with $150 million to $1 billion in assets and access to top-performing managers at lower cost than a fund of funds (FoF). Smith College, a prestigious liberal arts college with a nearly $1 billion endowment, is interested in increasing its current allocation to private equity. Handy and her partner are preparing to meet with Smith's trustees in an attempt to win Smith College as Investure's first client. The case presents three different approaches to private equity investing: direct investment through a traditional limited partnership, investment through an FoF, or investment through Investure's outsourced model. The class discussion presents an opportunity to evaluate advantages and shortcomings of each approach, introduce key terminology, and discuss the current trends in the private equity market. Students are given the cash inflows and outflows for a representative investment in a venture capital fund of the type Handy hopes to invest in on behalf of Smith College. The main analytical task requires students to evaluate the expected gross and net returns generated by the representative investment under each of the different approaches and fee structures.

While entrepreneurial creativity is a desired behavior in most firms, it is difficult to understand both how this complex phenomenon occurs and how to increase its rate of occurrence. Understanding and increasing managerial creativity is important not only in developed economies but also in developing economies, where the research discussed herein was conducted. Argues that a solid knowledge base, a well developed social network, and a strong focus on identifying opportunities are all necessary inputs toward entrepreneurial behavior. High-tech entrepreneurs interviewed in Hong Kong, however, indicated that creativity also plays a critical role in the entrepreneurial process. Attesting to this, they credited their competence with their being able to make the associations and bisociations needed to develop new products, leading to their entrepreneurial success.

The organizers of a music festival may use video from the Friday concert to create a DVD to sell to those who come to the Saturday concert. Attendance on Saturday is uncertain, as is the percentage of those who attend on Saturday who will buy the DVD. Is this a good project? If so, what number of DVDs should be burned early Saturday morning and offered for sale at that evening's performance? By that time, Friday attendance is known, as well as whether it rained on Friday, and there is a forecast for whether it will rain on Saturday. Historical information on these variables may help us predict Saturday attendance using multiple regression; together with the results of a marketing survey, such analysis will help us make better purchasing decisions. This case series (see also the B case, UV0841) can be used to illuminate a multitude of concepts that are covered in basic decision-analysis courses. The series starts by examining the role of uncertainty in decision making, proceeds through the estimation of probability distributions from sample data with multiple regression, culminates in the development of a full decision model, and ends with a qualitative and quantitative analysis (with a tornado diagram) of how to add value and reduce risk. Key pitfalls for students are failing to recognize both limits on sales (supply and demand), incomplete reasoning in the determination of the attendance probability distribution, and oversimplifying the full forecast model (i.e., averaging the Saturday rain/no Saturday rain outcomes, rather than incorporating the uncertainty explicitly into the simulation).

The organizers of a music festival may use video from the Friday concert to create a DVD to sell to those who come to the Saturday concert. Attendance on Saturday is uncertain, as is the percentage of those who attend on Saturday who will buy the DVD. Is this a good project? If so, what number of DVDs should be burned early Saturday morning and offered for sale at that evening's performance? By that time, Friday attendance is known, as well as whether it rained on Friday, and there is a forecast for whether it will rain on Saturday. Historical information on these variables may help us predict Saturday attendance using multiple regression; together with the results of a marketing survey, such analysis will help us make better purchasing decisions. This case series (see also the A case, UV0840) can be used to illuminate a multitude of concepts that are covered in basic decision-analysis courses. The series starts by examining the role of uncertainty in decision making, proceeds through the estimation of probability distributions from sample data with multiple regression, culminates in the development of a full decision model, and ends with a qualitative and quantitative analysis (with a tornado diagram) of how to add value and reduce risk. Key pitfalls for students are failing to recognize both limits on sales (supply and demand), incomplete reasoning in the determination of the attendance probability distribution, and oversimplifying the full forecast model (i.e., averaging the Saturday rain/no Saturday rain outcomes, rather than incorporating the uncertainty explicitly into the simulation).

Spreadsheet supplement to cases UV0840 and UV0841.

Supplement to Air Deccan (A): Changing the Face of Indian Aviation, product #9B07A001. By November 2005 Air Deccan, India's first low cost airline, had been in business for two years. During this time, the airline had grown rapidly, adding both planes and passengers at breakneck speed. Using low fares as its central strength, it had caused huge, unconventional changes in the Indian domestic airline industry. Not satisfied, however, the founder and chief executive officer wondered how to adapt to the future and sustain Air Deccan's tremendous initial success.

Faced with capacity constraints at the company's river fed facilities, the president and general manager of Piscifactorias de los Andes (Piscis), the largest trout farming company in Peru, is considering an option to create a trout farm on Lake Titicaca. Although Titicaca was the largest lake in South America and was in many ways ideally suited to trout farming, all previous attempts to commercialize the lake's fishery had failed. In addition, Piscis faced potential opposition from local fishers and environmentalists. Titicaca was also too distant from the company's existing fish plants. Therefore, if it were to establish operations on the lake, Piscis would need to build a processing plant at a cost of several million dollars. However, because of the region's history of political instability and violence, financial institutions were reluctant to offer loans.

A student project team must recommend to a firm whether or not it should acquire its largest competitor in the salmon farming industry, and if so, at what maximum price. The case does not provide enough information for students to solve the case, instead, students must think about the data and analysis they would need in order to answer their client's question. This case highlights framing a strategic problem for analysis and decision making as well as the preliminary analysis and planning required for efficient and effective data gathering. The case provides an opportunity to focus on secondary sources of data and introduces students to the resources available through the university library.

In June 2007, the governor of Pennsylvania, was negotiating with the state's legislative leaders about his proposal to lease the Pennsylvania Turnpike to private investors. Leasing public highways to private companies was unheard of in the United States until the City of Chicago leased the Chicago Skyway, an 8-mile toll expressway, for $1.83 billion in 2005 and the State of Indiana leased the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road for $3.85 billion in 2006. The sums astonished state and local governments around the country, and encouraged many, like Pennsylvania, to consider leasing as a means of covering budget shortfalls. This case is designed to support a discussion of the pros and cons of leasing assets as a means of raising public resources and of having the private sector finance and operate infrastructure. HKS Case Number 1878.0

In late November 2002, halfway through the vital Christmas selling season, William E. Aziz, hired to turn around White Rose Crafts and Nursery Sales Limited (White Rose), has to decide what to do. White Rose is under Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) protection, having breached its debt covenants. The company's upper and middle management is frustrated that their efforts since 1999 have not turned the firm around. The remaining employees blame the firms' situation on the change in strategy that occurred in 1999. The changes led many of White Rose's original employees to leave. At least partly due to an attempt to compete head-on with new U.S. entrants into the garden and crafts industry, the company endured three straight years of losses. In November 2002, White Rose launched a strategic review of its operations and asked its chief executive officer of three years, Dave Symons, to resign.

The founder and executive director of E+Co faces the challenge of ten-fold growth and reviews the core parts of the company's innovative business model, the changes in the energy markets around the world, and the rationale for local solutions to energy scarcity and inefficiency. Also presented is a set of entrepreneurial growth strategies that preserve the core of the model - i.e., simultaneously tackling energy poverty and energy waste, and bringing people up the energy ladder with locally suitable and affordable solutions. These strategies help consolidate and leverage E+Co's 12 years of experience and strong local presence through an innovative combination of complementary wedges.

The director and co-founder of Honey Care Africa (Honey Care) looks back over the six years of operations and describes the original business model and several sequential changes based on feedback from rural communities, partner organizations, and learning by doing through field operations. Increasing international recognition highlights the potential impact of the model on inspiring sustainable grassroots ventures in the agriculture sector in Kenya. For Tanzania and other developing countries, he ponders the potential opportunities and challenges in replicating the Honey Care model elsewhere. The case also tackles alternative routes for scaling up the model in East Africa. Students are presented with several specific challenges which illustrate the growing tension between Honey Care's original commitment to the farmers and its prospects for international take-off, and are asked to propose alternative model reconfigurations to resolve this tension.

As a major player in a $200-billion market with only a 15% market share, SYSCO outperforms its industry competition. This execution champion and organic growth winner has figured out how to balance and manage tensions between decentralized entrepreneurial autonomy and centralized controls. But what makes SYSCO different is that its leaders have figured out, on a daily basis, how to keep everyone, from the CEO to the truck driver, focused on the details that count to customers. In 2005, however, the growth of its underlying market had leveled forcing the company to face the challenge of continuing to grow and maintain its margins in a plateauing market.

Examines technology, firm performance, and the stock market during the 1929 Great Crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The 1920s was an extraordinary period of technological progress marked by a strong run-up in stock market prices. Firms invested heavily in R&D and human capital, while mass production and scientific management techniques were extensively adopted. Narrates the history of the 1920s and 1930s through the life of Irving Fisher, a prominent academic, investor, technologist, and market commentator who claimed that innovation was driving equity prices higher. Analyzes why Fisher believed that the high level of the stock market was justified, and his explanations for why the stock market crashed. Further explores the 1930s, marked by mass unemployment and social distress on the one hand, and entrepreneurship and innovation on the other. Fisher's views provide a conduit for examining the dynamics of stock market behavior and economic performance during one of the most significant periods in U.S. economic and financial history.

Shopster.com is a Calgary-based e-business company whose business is to assist other individuals or companies in setting up their own retail transactional websites. Shopster differs significantly from ordinary website developers in that retailers are able to select from a huge inventory of saleable products, through Shopster's network of goods providers. Shopster also provides software tools, and expertise, to allow anyone wishing to create an online retail store to do so quickly and easily. Shopster's business has done well to date, but there are plenty of operational challenges ahead. As well, the principals would like to raise the bar substantially, to something they refer to as Shopster 2.0, the specifics of which are still at a formative stage. The Shopster case provides an interesting example of a small but rapidly growing Canadian company with an innovative business model and big dreams for the future.

Shane Immelman, founding CEO of Lapdesk (South Africa), is facing several acute problems: a conflict between his director of marketing and his director of field operations; a dramatic increase in prices by a key supplier; and a major strategic alliance that does not seem to be moving forward. Lapdesk is a for profit social enterprise (FOPSE) dedicated to eradicating the shortage of classroom desks in public schools. What should Immelman do? Will Lapdesk achieve its mission?

The founder and executive director of E+Co faces the challenge of ten-fold growth and reviews the core parts of the company's innovative business model, the changes in the energy markets around the world, and the rationale for local solutions to energy scarcity and inefficiency. Also presented is a set of entrepreneurial growth strategies that preserve the core of the model - i.e., simultaneously tackling energy poverty and energy waste, and bringing people up the energy ladder with locally suitable and affordable solutions. These strategies help consolidate and leverage E+Co's 12 years of experience and strong local presence through an innovative combination of complementary wedges.

The majority partner in the Hooplah Media Group (Hooplah) of Toronto, Ontario, was trying to decide what to do about one of Hooplah's website design contractors (contractor). The contractor had taken on a project directly with a key contact at JewelWorks Inc., one of Hooplah's largest clients, without going through Hooplah. As an independent contractor, he offered to design a website for JewelWorks Inc. for a lower price than Hooplah's rate. Apparently, the project was not going smoothly, and there was significant tension between the contractor and the contact at JewelWorks Inc. The majority partner at Hooplah was unsure how he should react to the contractors' involvement with JewelWorks Inc. and whether he should assist in the completion of the website.

Diaspora networks (DNs) are an important resource for global entrepreneurs. Discusses several features of DNs, combining both academic and practitioner perspectives. Describes the history and prevalence of DNs in many ethnicities, documents the broad resources DNs can provide to founders, and specifies potential pitfalls or traps from working through DNs. Closes with some practical advice for entrepreneurs accessing and utilizing their DNs

This case describes E+Co's approach to promoting clean energy entrepreneurship in developing countries and its current strategic challenge; how to scale up its business model to reach 100 million unserved or underserved people in the developing world by 2020. In the last 12 years E+Co was successful at demonstrating and validating an "enterprise centered model" which offered reliable access and improved energy efficiency to the poor in emerging economies. Its approach to bringing the poor up the modern energy ladder, one step at a time, was initiated in response to a challenging project for the Rockerfeller Foundation, marked by a radical departure from the top-down, large scale infrastructure projects sponsored by international institutions. So far, these models had left 2.5 million people trapped into the double bind of energy poverty and energy waste. E+Co's approach was working well; by September 2006 it had invested in 138 enterprises in 30 countries. These local entrepreneurs currently provided clean energy to more than three million people. The next issue was scaling it all up; however, this risked straining the resources of E+Co's global team of 38 employees and could change the services the company provided to local entrepreneurs. Tenfold expansion within these constraints required an innovative growth strategy. Supplemental case, E+Co: The Path to Scale (B), product 907M55, presents a set of entrepreneurial growth strategies that preserve the core of the model.