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Fintech company TranSwap Pte Ltd was set up in Singapore by CEO Benjamin Wong and COO Lim Kien Leong to address customers' bugbears when carrying out overseas money transfers. It began operating in 2017 and has since evolved to include products such as global payment and collections and multi-currency global virtual accounts in its expanded set of offerings. TranSwap has six offices across Asia and Europe. Its clientele is evenly split between two key segments - the B2B (Business-to-Business) segment, and the B2C (Business-to-Consumer) segment. It has over 80 FX (foreign exchange) liquidity and settlement partners globally. The firm's profit formula is largely based on charging transaction fees for sums transferred, and additional fees for voluminous transactions. Transactions involving exotic currencies also attract higher charges. TranSwap used a mixture of venture capital investments and grants to fund its business in the initial stages. It hopes to file for an IPO (Initial Public Offering) eventually. The case also explores other topics including the co-founders' entrepreneurial journey, the designing and validation of business models, and how TranSwap built its ecosystem.

In this two-part case, in case A, a non-binary entrepreneur founded New FRDM Bodywear Ltd. (NEW FRDM) in 2015 in Toronto, Canada. The apparel and accessories company produced underwear for transgender and gender nonconforming individuals. While growing their business as a sole proprietorship, the founder sought out a mentorship opportunity through ACME Entrepreneurship Incorporated but was concerned about a request to censor NEW FRDM’s website and messaging content. The founder had to decide whether to stray from NEW FRDM’s original business model and accept the opportunity. In case B, over a year later, the entrepreneur was presented with new potential mentorship opportunities from three different programs. Build Your Best focused on female entrepreneurs and offered a permanent workspace and prestigious contacts in the industry. Womentrepreneur Network seemed to offer superior mentorship, non-financial resources, and promising events, but it seemed to be explicitly intended for people who identified as women. Out and Proud! offered one-on-one mentorship and large events and was explicitly focused on LGBTQ2+ businesspeople. The founder again faced the issue of having to change or abandon NEW FRDM’s business model to take advantage of one or more of these significant business opportunities.

In The ClearZone (ClearZone), founded in 2020 by Jenessa and Madison Olson, was a sanitization service start-up that used ozone technology to disinfect commercial and residential spaces. The sisters started ClearZone when their existing business, STMNT, a successful online clothing rental business, was put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Noticing a heightened need for disinfectant services in response to the pandemic, the sisters took the opportunity to use their business skills, build on their concerns for environmental sustainability, and support clients attempting to create safe environments. ClearZone experienced exponential growth and was now considering its next step in expanding the business.

Supplement for product W25263.

Handout for Case SMU837

In this two-part case, in case A, a non-binary entrepreneur founded New FRDM Bodywear Ltd. (NEW FRDM) in 2015 in Toronto, Canada. The apparel and accessories company produced underwear for transgender and gender nonconforming individuals. While growing their business as a sole proprietorship, the founder sought out a mentorship opportunity through ACME Entrepreneurship Incorporated but was concerned about a request to censor NEW FRDM's website and messaging content. The founder had to decide whether to stray from NEW FRDM's original business model and accept the opportunity. In case B, over a year later, the entrepreneur was presented with new potential mentorship opportunities from three different programs. Build Your Best focused on female entrepreneurs and offered a permanent workspace and prestigious contacts in the industry. Womentrepreneur Network seemed to offer superior mentorship, non-financial resources, and promising events, but it seemed to be explicitly intended for people who identified as women. Out and Proud! offered one-on-one mentorship and large events and was explicitly focused on LGBTQ2+ businesspeople. The founder again faced the issue of having to change or abandon NEW FRDM's business model to take advantage of one or more of these significant business opportunities.

In The ClearZone (ClearZone), founded in 2020 by Jenessa and Madison Olson, was a sanitization service start-up that used ozone technology to disinfect commercial and residential spaces. The sisters started ClearZone when their existing business, STMNT, a successful online clothing rental business, was put on hold because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Noticing a heightened need for disinfectant services in response to the pandemic, the sisters took the opportunity to use their business skills, build on their concerns for environmental sustainability, and support clients attempting to create safe environments. ClearZone experienced exponential growth and was now considering its next step in expanding the business.

Case Supplement for Case W25263

In 2016, a Black woman entrepreneur in Ajax, Ontario, Canada, in the greater Toronto area founded a small but successful venture named Kids Swag in response to a gap she identified in the children’s products market, which was failing to represent the Black community. The founder started her business while working as a full-time marketing professional. Kids Swag sold globally sourced products that featured positive Black personas and imagery in pop-up stores, local community events, and online through her social media account. Within four years, she exceeded her initial goals and found herself struggling to keep pace with the growing demand for her products. Her clientele grew from the local community and Facebook groups to international customers, large companies, and institutional clients such as retail outlets and school boards. By the end of 2020, the founder was wondering if she should open a physical store to complement her online presence and if she should leave her full-time career to devote herself fully to running her business. With warehouse space becoming increasingly limited and demand for her products continuing to grow, could she invest the necessary time and resources to take Kids Swag to the next level?

Yogesh Bellani was the chief executive officer of FieldFresh Foods Private Limited (FieldFresh), a joint venture between Bharti Enterprises and Del Monte Pacific Limited. Bellani, with his entrepreneurial mindset, had successfully led FieldFresh in establishing the Del Monte brand in India. A great deal of that success was attributable to Bellani’s ability to capitalize on business-to-business sales. <br><br>FieldFresh had pivoted to a business-to-consumer (B2C) sales model, but issues that arose in fiscal year 2019–20 and were expected to be more pronounced in 2020–2021 indicated that an even greater emphasis on B2C sales was needed. The pivot to B2C would be crucial to unlocking the equity FieldFresh had built with the Del Monte brand and would enable the brand to take a leadership position in key categories, but was this the right time to make that change?

In February 2019, the associate product owner of the Branch Rapid Labs at the Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank) was asked to provide his knowledge and expertise to develop the final iteration of a new customer onboarding process. The new model developed for Scotiabank, one of Canada’s Big Six banks, was named Project Fusion. Working closely with cross-functional teams, the associate product manager was advising his product team on how to best proceed after the completion of the final round of user testing trials. With all user trials on the latest prototype completed, he had a significant amount of feedback to analyze and results to implement in the project.

Case A focuses on how entrepreneurs and leaders deal with sudden unexpected events and crises. It describes the tensions that Russian female entrepreneur and CEO Anastasia Tatulova had to deal with in response to the coronavirus pandemic that wrought wide-scale disruption on society and businesses across the world. Tatulova founded the AnderSon café to address a lack of family-friendly cafés in Russia. Having started in 2009 with a single café in Moscow, AnderSon celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2019 as a chain of 52 cafés in Russia and neighboring countries. It employed 1,500 staff in its cafés and in the "Factory of Happiness," which produced the confectionery sold in the cafés. At the beginning of 2020, Tatulova was poised to expand her business with outside investment, but by March, as COVID-19 triggered restrictions and the shutdown of society, her core business was paralyzed by a 90% drop in sales. This put her in the critical situation of having to fight for AnderSon's survival. Along with other small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Russia, AnderSon was obliged to pay staff during the lockdown and received very limited government support. The case highlights the struggles that Tatulova faced and it ends with her having to decide what to do with her business.

Case B describes Tatulova's actions in response to the crisis. This included a meeting with President Putin to discuss the situation of small businesses. Tatulova's speech, in which she pleaded with him to support Russian entrepreneurs, made her very visible in Russia and propelled her into a nationwide role as the ombudsman for small businesses during the crisis. This new role provided her with an opportunity to influence at a broader level, yet it diverted time from nurturing her own business. Her choice to accept the ombudsman role provides an opportunity to discuss what motivates entrepreneurs to stretch and reinvent themselves and the role of communication and networks in crisis management.

Following its official launch on April 6, 2020, Quibi, a mobile-only short-form video streaming platform that had raised over $1.7 billion had failed to gain the traction it was expecting and fell well short of its first-year growth projections. The company ultimately announced that it was shutting down after just six months in October 2020. Exactly where had Quibi gone wrong, and what lessons could investors learn from their failed investment in the company?

Consumer Reports (CR) is a nonprofit organization that traditionally provided independent testing and research on consumer goods. With the need to diversify its audience and revenue streams CR partnered with market research firm Spark No. 9 to identify potential digital products and services for younger audiences using digital marketing tests. This case provides background on various social media platforms and their advertising offerings along with details on running "smoke tests" to validate product concepts before investing resources to build them.

In January 2021, Kwek Hong Sin, a Singaporean, attended a crowdfunding roadshow. She had been captivated by Thailand's retail environment and founded the crowdfunding platform Sinwattana in 2012 to help Thai businesses, particularly SMEs, raise capital. SMEs constituted over 99% of all enterprises in Thailand, and many were unable to borrow from banks because of strict lending requirements. These businesses suffered from the lack of government support, limited marketing skills and inadequate skilled labour. However, Kwek felt that Thai businesses were worth investing in. Crowdfunding would allow them to issue debt or equity directly to individual investors, including those overseas. Sinwattana provides consultation services to help companies succeed, and also offers business insights to prospective investors. The Sinwattana platform allows these stakeholders to connect; it provides companies with much needed capital and investors with attractive returns they might not have access to elsewhere.

In March 2020, a physician in southwestern Ontario, Canada began working on the development of an innovative digital application called the Pandemic Population Health Navigator, designed to help mitigate the pressure on Ontario's health care system due to the rapid increase and spread of COVID-19 infections. The founder worked quickly to engage local health system partners, trusted advisors, the provincial government, and a digital health vendor to support the development of his innovation, which was intended to act as a COVID-19 triage tool. The project garnered widespread support and benefited from unprecedented quick approval times by the provincial government, which was undergoing a provincial transformation to a new health care system. Six months later, however, unexpected issues and risks began to surface. A key stakeholder was threatening to terminate the project's agreement due to increasingly complex customization demands from users of the Pandemic Population Health Navigator. The physician realized that he quickly needed to find a way to alleviate these complexities and associated risks, while maintaining the trust of his health care collaborators.

On January 3, 2017, the principal investigator at the Biomedical Engineering and Technology Innovation Centre (BETIC), in India’s Indian Institute of Technology Bombay was considering the next steps for a newly developed product. BETIC was a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional translational research and development network in the medical technology sector that acted as a running partner for innovators and entrepreneurs. The core vision of BETIC was to create global success stories of indigenous medical devices by providing systematic guidance and support to innovators developing medical devices. The principal investigator and his team had developed an indigenous and innovative smart stethoscope from the ideation stage to a functional prototype. The next critical challenge was how to commercialize the product and ensure that it could deliver the maximum amount of social impact.

Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon) India expanded Amazon Food into the food delivery market in March 2021 amid a pandemic and the ensuing lockdown. The move surprised the industry, especially considering that Swiggy and Zomato Ltd. (Zomato), the two key players in the food delivery business, were facing an all-time slump and that restaurants were seeking to move away from aggregators to create their own ordering platform. Zomato and Swiggy, a duopoly in the food service aggregator (FSA) space in the country, had been struggling to keep cash burn low, squeezing delivery-executive commissions, executing mass layoffs, and scaling down profit-draining cloud kitchens. Although the timing of the launch appeared risky, Amazon India’s confidence to take on the established players and challenge the status quo stemmed from its size, reach, resources, technological prowess, reliability, trust, and goodwill. In a market scenario where safety and hygiene standards were set to change forever and the odds were stacked against FSAs, the industry and consumers were expecting a tough battle. Amazon had to reassess whether its strengths would be adequate to help it make satisfactory inroads into the industry, confront the obstacles, and overcome the ongoing slump and make good on its decision to be the new entrant when the established players were bearing the brunt of not only the pandemic but also a deeply divided restaurant industry.

In May 2018, celebrated journalist Katie Couric and her husband, John Molner, had recently launched a full-service media firm called Katie Couric Media (KCM). Couric treasured the opportunity to address important social issues like gender equality, environmental sustainability, and mental health. The couple had raised enough funding to launch the venture. Now, they needed to land a first client to underwrite production costs, sign a partner to promote and distribute the content, and identify a story Couric wanted to tell. The first customer would be crucial in establishing a strong foundation for future work. They wanted to partner with a brand interested in the purpose-driven content about which they were passionate, but they did not want to sell a one-time consulting engagement. Rather, they were interested in customers to sign on for a recurring, subscription-based contract.