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Silicon Valley-veteran Shaun Stewart is the CEO of NewLab, a dynamic technology hub headquartered in the storied Brooklyn Navy Yard. Founded in 2016, NewLab fostered a community of entrepreneurs, corporate and government partners, and investors, all seeking to apply cutting-edge technology to solving global problems at scale. Stewart has expanded the business beyond the early membership subscription model to now include corporate partnerships, a venture studio, and an investor network. Partnerships include the likes of Ford, Verizon, and IBM, as well as civic organizations like NY State, and various nonprofits and academic institutions. Stewart contemplates the opportunities and the bottlenecks he now faces as he seeks to further expand NewLab.

Luigi Lavazza SpA (Lavazza) was the largest coffee maker in Italy and the seventh-largest coffee roaster in the world. Despite its success in global markets, Lavazza was finding it difficult to make its mark in the United States. After establishing its North American subsidiary in 1989, Lavazza entered the US market in the 1990s with strategic partnerships with restaurants and hotels to cater to US consumers. But even as a strong global brand with thirty years of experience in the US market, Lavazza continued to struggle. As competition in the global coffee industry intensified, Lavazza could no longer afford to be complacent with its performance in the US markets, and it sought to increase its market share. However, Lavazza faced a key strategic decision: should it try to introduce US consumers to the "Italian way" of drinking espresso coffee, or should it create a new brand identity and a new portfolio of products that were more aligned with the tastes of US consumers?

Desi Hangover, an Indian company empowering artisans to manufacture handcrafted leather footwear, was a finalist at Lakmé Fashion Week in 2020 in the category of Circular Changemakers. The chief executive officer had a dream of establishing his company as a leading circular economy fashion brand, and now he had a chance to pitch his vision of the future. But his core team had reservations and worried about the cost and risk of transitioning fully to a circular model. Considering the journey Desi Hangover had taken since its inception, the changing needs of the market, and the unpredictability of the business economy, Desi Hangover had to come up with the right pitch for the event-one that would continue on the path to conscious fashion while ensuring growth in revenues to sustain operations.

In October 2020, just a year after founding their company Meaningful Gigs, founders Ronnie Kwesi Coleman and Stephanie Nachemja-Burton prepared for a vital investment meeting with Rethink Education. They had already reached $400,000 in annually recurring revenue (ARR) on their mission to connect American companies with skilled freelance digital designers in Africa and were committed to developing an upskilling platform to nurture their designers' growth. However, early advice from advisors and investors cautioned Ronnie and Stephanie to focus on marketplace growth. The team needed to decide if their upskilling product was worth the investment now or if they should focus on sales and engineering of their marketplace in this round of investments. Furthermore, given the founders' ambitions to turn Meaningful Gigs into a $1 Billion revenue company, was Rethink the right capital partner for them or should they target a more traditional venture capital fund?

In 2022, the leaders of In-Q-Tel (IQT) considered what was next for the unique mission-driven organization. Since 1999, IQT had one mission: to be the most sophisticated source of strategic technical knowledge and capabilities to the U.S. government and its allies. IQT played a dual role for the national security community: to both inform the Intelligence Community (IC) with technology insights and to deliver cutting-edge capabilities. Its technical team identified sectors of interest, followed by investment professionals engaging with companies that had promising applications for the U.S. government. Recent years had seen an expansion of IQT's activities through a growing team of in-house technologists, international expansion, "situational awareness" reports, new a new program help federally funded researchers commercialize promising solutions. In the context of rapidly changing (and increasingly intertwined) technology and geopolitical landscapes, the IQT team had several big questions to consider: What was the right scope and complexity for the organization? IQT had expanded office geographies and activities, but IQT faced increased requests from government partners - such as countering offers to U.S. technology companies from foreign acquirers. What was the appropriate portfolio risk? Success for IQT went beyond just financial returns - but IQT needed to find a tolerable balance of potential failure. Lastly, how could the organization recruit the right talent to accommodate this growth? Recruiting and retaining talent was increasingly difficult in a competitive labor market.

Beginning with an ambitious, lean start-up effort in the highly competitive restaurant industry in Auckland, New Zealand, a husband-and-wife team built a small empire of successful fine dining Indian restaurants. Then came the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed their extreme vulnerability to external forces and the subsequent volatility of the restaurant industry. Their quick pivot to launching a line of Indian sauces for home cooks, Cassia at Home, was an instant success. As the couple contemplated different paths to recovery from the pandemic disruption, they wondered how they should expand their newest business into a sustaining brand and what the future of the existing restaurants would look like. Should they continue to expand the new retail business, abandon the move into manufacturing and broader distribution, or even focus on reviving their existing restaurant businesses? An earlier version of the case was awarded Second Place in the 2021 John Molson Business Ownership Case Writing Competition sponsored by the Bob & Raye Briscoe Centre in Business Ownership Studies, John Molson School of Business, Concordia University.

After a year filled with the highs of entrepreneurial success and the lows of personal hardships, Whitney Wolfe was considering starting a new venture—a social media platform aimed at creating positivity for women online. Wolfe was meeting with Andrey Andreev, the founder of Badoo, one of the world’s most popular dating services, to discuss her new venture idea. However, Andreev was disinterested in starting a social media platform and dismissed her new venture idea. But he had wanted to work with Wolfe for some time, so he instead suggested starting a new online dating service focused on women. Wolfe had to make a decision. Should she turn down Andreev’s suggestion and start her own business, or should she pursue his idea of creating a new online dating service focused on the needs of women? If so, how should this new service differ from the numerous current products flooding the market?

When it was founded in Hefei, China, in 2001, Jiujiu Xiyanghong Group (JX) started as a single private nursing home with fifty beds. Over its eighteen-year history, JX had maintained rapid growth; as of 2019 the company had 1,531 elderly people living in its facilities, and Xie Qiong estimated that elders residing at JX represented 36 per cent of all 4,205 people living in Hefei eldercare institutions. However, the Hefei eldercare market was witnessing rapid expansion from the entry of Chinese and foreign companies, state-owned enterprises, and investment funds. The founder wondered how JX should manage this situation.

In February 2022, an indigenous studies professor was considering applying for a position on Roche Canada’s Soaring with Roche program’s advisory Board. The program was looking for an individual to represent Canada’s indigenous population, as it pursued an open innovation strategy within Canada. In considering her decision, the professor examines the pharmaceutical industry as whole (and within Canada), the pros and cons of open innovation, and the fit between her, an open innovation program, and Roche Canada.

A San Francisco startup seeks to disrupt the freelancing industry through its user-owned talent network powered by the cryptocurrency, BTRST.

In June 2021, John Crain and Jonathan Perkins, the founders of SuperRare, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), contemplate whether to transform their company into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Crain and Perkins founded SuperRare in 2018 to provide a marketplace for fine art NFTs. However, after experiencing rapid growth in late 2020 and early 2021, they believed it was time to transition control of the platform's governance, curation, and strategic direction to the SuperRare community. Under the DAO, the platform's revenue would shift from SuperRare's balance sheet to a community treasury. Breaking new ground for startups, the founders have a difficult set of choices. They could immediately transform SuperRare into a DAO, pursue a tapered option in which the revenue gradually transitioned to the community treasury, or stay the course as a private company. They considered which option was the best for SuperRare and its community of artists and collectors as well as the SuperRare investors and team.

In late June of 2022, Sonja Perkins, co-founder of Broadway Angels, contemplated the group's future. She and her co-founders, Jennifer Fonstad, and Magdalena Yesil, started the group to gather together the most successful and powerful women in venture capital and technology with the mission to build a powerful network, showcase top female talent, inspire more women to enter VC and entrepreneurship, and make great investments. Overall, she was pleased with their progress toward their mission but still felt that gender equity in VC was slow to happen. She considered several different ways the group could expand its impact.

In December 2012, Altos Ventures General Partners Han Kim, Anthony Lee, and Ho Nam met to discuss the future of the firm. Altos had already adjusted its strategy multiple times. It began as a U.S.-focused venture capital investor whose first two funds were backed by a sole limited partner, a South Korean financial conglomerate. In late 2001, the partners made their first transformative decision, raising a fund from traditional institutional LPs to focus on bootstrapped technology companies. In 2008, Altos again refined its strategy, this time to fund similar capital-efficient companies but with more "explosive growth" potential. Now, in 2012, the firm was running out of capital and did not have the realized track record to raise another traditional institutional fund. They considered two options: raise a South Korea-focused VC fund or offer more co-investment opportunities to LPs through a "mini" fund. What should Altos do to stay afloat?

In December 2021, Han Kim, Anthony Lee, and Ho Nam reflected on how far they had come since 2012. This B case provides an update on Altos Ventures' decision-making and performance since the events presented in the A case.

In May 2022, the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) launched the pilot of Metaverse Seoul, a government-run metaverse. SMG had delivered a virtual version of Seoul's mayor's office. The team aimed to gain insights as they worked towards building a broad, immersive, online government platform. They'd invited citizen feedback in many ways, including via a virtual mailbox and bulletin board placed prominently around the corner from where an avatar of the mayor could greet visitors and preside over gatherings. Now, public comments were coming in and the team had to decide what to make of them.

In 1898, two Black entrepreneurs from Durham, North Carolina-barber John Merrick and medical doctor Aaron McDuffie Moore-put pen to paper and founded the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association (the Mutual). They would soon be joined by a third partner-an energetic young salesman named Charles Clinton Spaulding. This "triumvirate" faced long odds. While there was a long tradition of Black mutual aid societies-religious organizations that charged dues and paid members a small sum in the event of a death or emergency-operating a for-profit insurance company catering to the Black community presented several challenges. By the 1890s, an increasing number of Southern Blacks had the resources to afford a basic life insurance policy, but few had experience buying life insurance or knew why it was necessary.

Patrice Mousseau was an Indigenous woman in Canada who founded an organic skin care company, Satya. From Satya’s modest beginnings and early challenges, the company had several subsequent successes before Mousseau faced significant challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mousseau’ s Indigenous values and influences shaped her approach to launching and developing Satya. Additionally, Mousseau’s collaboration with a women-only network of investors (SheEO) and the support they offered not only aligned with her desire to achieve social change and impact through Satya, but also proved to be a vital virtual lifeline during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In January 2020, two social entrepreneurs were looking back at the first five years of operation of their venture JioVio Healthcare. The entrpreneurs had designed, developed, and implemented their cloud-based Internet of Things software Savemom. Using feedback from key stakeholders, Savemom assisted in the early detection of preventable complications during pregnancy and safe delivery, especially for expectant mothers in rural India, with a goal to reduce India's maternal mortality ratio (MMR). Using an iterative process, Senthilkumar collaborated with various stakeholders in central and southern parts of rural India to enhance and implement the Savemom software. To achieve the socially-conscious goal behind the Savemom software, the team developed a wearable device for use by each expectant mother, as well as a medical measurement device and an online platform for healthcare providers to access the health information of patients. After several iterations of prototypes based on process outcomes and feedback from stakeholders, the Savemom software, devices, and process seemed to have achieved its ultimate goal. But when one of the entrepreneurs visited doctors to get their feedback, they expressed great dissatisfaction with the vast amount of patient information to check each day on the portal, which was increasing their workload almost ten times. The two social entrepreneurs had to find a way to address the genuine issues the doctors had raised.

In January 2020, two social entrepreneurs were looking back at the first five years of operation of their venture JioVio Healthcare. The entrpreneurs had designed, developed, and implemented their cloud-based Internet of Things software Savemom. Using feedback from key stakeholders, Savemom assisted in the early detection of preventable complications during pregnancy and safe delivery, especially for expectant mothers in rural India, with a goal to reduce India’s maternal mortality ratio (MMR). Using an iterative process, Senthilkumar collaborated with various stakeholders in central and southern parts of rural India to enhance and implement the Savemom software. To achieve the socially-conscious goal behind the Savemom software, the team developed a wearable device for use by each expectant mother, as well as a medical measurement device and an online platform for healthcare providers to access the health information of patients. After several iterations of prototypes based on process outcomes and feedback from stakeholders, the Savemom software, devices, and process seemed to have achieved its ultimate goal. But when one of the entrepreneurs visited doctors to get their feedback, they expressed great dissatisfaction with the vast amount of patient information to check each day on the portal, which was increasing their workload almost ten times. The two social entrepreneurs had to find a way to address the genuine issues the doctors had raised.

Doodlage Retail LLP (Doodlage), a sustainable fashion brand based in India, was based on an idea that had come to the co-founder while she was interning with export houses. There, she witnessed large-scale discarding of fabric waste, which found its way to landfills and became a major source of pollution. Doodlage utilized the practices of circularity—repairing, reusing, refurbishing, and recycling—to transform industrial waste into women’s apparel. With time, the company came to collaborate with numerous players and extended into categories like home furnishings, accessories, and men’s apparel. Relying primarily on social media and e-commerce sites to market its wares, Doodlage slowly built a niche for itself. After nearly a decade, awareness of sustainable fashion, ethical fashion, and slow fashion had risen, and a number of competitors had emerged, heating up the competitive landscape. Doodlage thus faced multiple future challenges and needed to decide whether to continue to focus on the niche it had created for itself or to go mainstream. What was the optimal way forward?