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This case series describes the dilemmas encountered by Shenzhen Chasm Security Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Chasm Security") in its three rounds of funding since its establishment in 2012. As a company with Internet security technology as its core asset, it has five co-founders from three regions. Given the political and economic context of the China-U.S. trade war and the sensitivity of the information security industry, this case series always generates vigorous and enthusiastic discussions. Case (A) focuses on the first two rounds of funding in mid-2016 and discusses various dilemmas faced by the founding team. First, should the equity split among the co-founders be based on instinct or logical rationale? Second, should the company's shareholding structure be more concentrated or distributed? Third, should President Zhi Wang exercise his veto power? Crucially, the judgment on the last question encompasses three other dilemmas: (1) whether to insist on his rationale on market positioning, or swallow his opposition for the sake of maintaining relationships; (2) whether to gain a firm foothold in the Chinese market, or pursue a broad global presence; and (3) whether to chase a high valuation and wealth, or retain company control.

Case (B) is based on the China-U.S. trade war and discusses how this Chinese Internet security company with American capital raises Series C funding in the second quarter of 2018. Should the company seek dollar funding to grow in the global market, or opt for RMB funding to focus on the Chinese market? Of utmost importance is how to deal with a situation where U.S. investors are pessimistic about Chinese security companies, and RMB funds are unwilling to invest in businesses with a dollar funding structure.

Case (C) introduces the latest progress of Chasm Security as of the end of 2018. It then poses a very inspiring question to comprehensively summarize the case series: "If the founders had a second chance, how would the game play out?"

Consumer products companies were beset by changes on all sides during the 2010s. Customers were increasingly turning to ecommerce platforms rather than shopping in-store. Meanwhile, nimble, digitally-savvy competitors were gaining market share by capitalizing on the troves of newly available data on consumer preferences. Alibaba was the largest ecommerce platform company globally and operated in China, which was seen by many as an image of the future of western markets. In 2017, Alibaba launched the Tmall Innovation Center (TMIC) which provided a range of services to support innovation for companies selling through the Tmall business-to-consumer platform. These included robust consumer insights backed by data from across Alibaba and mechanisms to rapidly solicit customer feedback. Armed with the TMIC, consumer products companies were learning that effectively targeting consumer preferences required a new approach to product development which had far-reaching implications across roles, skills, and organizational structure.

The United Nations Development Programme focuses on solving the world's most complex problems, such as poverty and public health crises. Businesses can gain much insight from this sprawling U.N. agency, which has built one of the worlds' largest networks of accelerator labs. Here's what it has learned along the way and how some companies are starting to adopt similar models.

Tea Connect, a chain of five tea cafés in India, had ended 2019 with sales revenues of ₹48.1 million. The co-founder of Tea Connect had the ambitious target of opening 20 cafés and achieving sales revenues of ₹200 million by 2020. The co-founder planned the renovation of the cafés to improve the speed of service, but he also wanted to launch Tea Connect–branded consumer packaged products. Three franchising offers for stores in Jaipur, Jodhpur, and Mount Abu were also under consideration. He was wondering whether renovation would help to enhance the customer experience and whether this was the right time to launch consumer packaged goods. Also, was it the right time to explore the franchise route of expansion?

In May 2019, the vice-president of operations at Danby Products Ltd. (Danby) was concerned that the production facility for the company’s latest product, Parcel Guard, would not be able to keep up with demand. Parcel Guard was one of the most anticipated new products that Danby had produced in years, and if the sales estimates were reliable, the vice-president needed to start thinking about how she could adjust capacity to keep up with new orders. The new production facility was located just east of Toronto, as Danby had determined that making the product locally would enable the company to respond faster to changes in demand while keeping costs under control. In order to meet anticipated demand, the options included adding new equipment to increase the capacity of the two production lines, adding a third production line, or adding additional shifts.

In the mid-1990s, Thyrocare disrupted the Indian medical diagnostic industry and steadily gained market share over the next two decades to become one of the top five competitors in India. Thyrocare built and sustained a competitive advantage and entered closely-related businesses. By 2017, the diagnostic industry had become extremely dynamic and competitors were attempting to replicate the unique operating model of Thyrocare. Stand-alone companies were scaling, online and digital aggregators were growing, substitutes such as self-test kits were emerging, and regulations were being tightened, resulting in severe margin pressures. How could Thyrocare preserve its unique model and competitive advantage in such a dynamic industry setting?

The co-founder and chief product officer of Miutcánk, a promising sharing-economy platform dedicated to neighbourhood networking and services, was analyzing the growth of the platform since its creation in 2014. Miutcánk had more than 43,000 registered users in December 2018, and it was time to think about the best way to monetize the platform. What kind of paid services should be included in the platform? Which revenue model was the most suitable for the platform’s growth? The co-founder and chief product officer wanted to ensure that the company was making the most efficient move toward becoming profitable, without discouraging users from participating on the platform.

In July 2017, with a proven track record in power distribution in Delhi and Mumbai, Tata Power Co Limited incorporated a new organization called TP Ajmer Distribution Limited using the distribution franchise model in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India. The new company was created in partnership with the state government company Ajmer Vidyut Vitaran Nigam Limited as a strategic partner. One year later, the management team had to overcome various challenges including recruitment from diverse private and public sources, a limited competent talent pool, a lack of administrative and technology infrastructure, many first-time managers, a scattered team concept, a silos working style, a low level of work experience, and a dated distribution network. To ensure a successful transition, the new company had to streamline business processes and establish an organizational culture of safety, excellence, quality, and ethics consistent with the Tata name. The company had to decide whether to adopt the organizational culture of its parent company, create and entirely new culture, or customize its own culture based on Tata Power principles.

On March 14, 2019, the convenience business unit manager of Greenyard Frozen was in his Roeselare, Belgium office preparing for a management meeting that would discuss current challenges facing the company. Greenyard Frozen had to decide on the market positioning of its cauliflower rice and how to promote the new product. The project, which was a great example of co-operation in the value chain and of open innovation for sustainability, had resulted from the unique collaboration of several key contributors: Greenyard Frozen, two cauliflower growers, a machine builder, the agricultural research group Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek, and the Flanders’ Food platform. Greenyard Frozen had to decide whether to emphasize the product’s sustainability benefits or simply position the cauliflower rice as a healthy, low-carbohydrate alternative to rice or other food products. What steps could the company take to remain ahead of its competitors, who were innovating at a relentless pace?

A young Canadian entrepreneur had established a digital medical tourism concierge service in Armenia--GetTreated CJSC--and in 2019 was evaluating the opportunities for the company's growth. While the company was experiencing steady growth, the founder felt that the growth rates were not reflective of the potential that was present in the market. Something had to be changed about how the company was acquiring its customers. The company's promotional strategy also needed work in the face of increasing competition locally and globally.

Big tech companies such as Google and Booking.com are running tens of thousands of experiments annually, and other businesses are following their lead. Here's how to use experiments in your company to better evaluate customer offerings and policies, test new ideas and innovations, develop and refine decision frameworks, and establish reliable facts in uncertain conditions and ambiguous situations.

In 2018, the founder and owner of the Karatu Coffee Company needed to decide what to do next with his company. He was considering several options: increasing the tourism part of the business, growing the original farm, pursuing a property development project in the capital city, or simply selling out and walking away. The company, located in Tanzania, began as a coffee farm, expanded into tourism with a remote, idyllic coffee lodge, and then brought coffee and tourism together with a bustling inner-city coffee house, which also housed a boutique hotel. The final phase of expansion included the purchase of high-quality coffee equipment and highly-prized roasting facilities to capture a larger share of the coffee value chain. The owner's decision would require insights into both the coffee industry and Tanzania itself.

Founded in 2016, Critterati was India’s first luxury hotel for pets, located in one of the most prominent residential and commercial areas of Gurgaon, India. The basic philosophy of the hotel was that pets provided unconditional love to their owners, so they deserved more than just basic care in return. The number of customers visiting Critterati over the previous three years had increased consistently from 500 in the first year to 1,200 in the second year and 2,600 in the third year. In a short time, the start-up had become a self-sustaining business. By early May 2019, the hotel’s top luxury Critterati Suite was already booked for most of June and the overall hotel was nearly fully booked for the next two months. The Critterati differentiator was an annual membership plan that had been carefully crafted to provide a package of services for one year at a cost effective flat rate. However, the number of customers who chose the membership plan was still low, at around 250, but 1,000 memberships were needed to break even. How would pet owners be convinced about the benefits of the plan? Partnering with other service providers would also increase brand awareness, but which partnerships were most important?

Kumar Food Corporation (KFC) was a partnership firm founded in the state of Maharashtra in India by Neeraj Kumar in 2010. The company manufactured, packaged, and distributed pickles, papads, and spices. Kumar, who had previously worked at a multinational company specializing in food processing, quit that job to start his own venture with an investment of ₹1 million. The company flourished and, in 2017, its revenue reached ₹50 million. Kumar then wanted to invest another ₹50 million with the aim of reaching a ₹200 million revenue target by the end of 2018. The company faced cutthroat competition from existing players in the food-processing industry, and Kumar was worried that the Government of India’s Start-Up India initiative to promote entrepreneurship would further add to the competition. With a limited budget for marketing and communications, Kumar could take any or all of the following routes to fulfill his expansion ambitions: enhance product category, add new markets, or increase distribution channels. Which growth strategies should the company implement to establish its Shagun brand?

In spring 2018, the chief supply chain officer of Traeger Pellet Grills, LLC, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, was visiting a supplier in in Changzhou, China. He was meeting with the supplier the next day but had not fully decided how to manage the meeting. The supplier was responsible for a large portion of the company’s supply of grills but was also positioning itself as a competitor by tooling, designing, and producing knock-off products that were then directly marketed to consumers in the company’s strongest market—the United States. Although the supplier denied any involvement in the knock-off grills, the chief supply chain officer knew the tooling and styling were impossibly similar to his company’s products and there was no other facility in that supplier's area with the capability to make look-alike grills at that level. The chief supply chain officer had to decide how to deal with the rebellious supplier.

Social and political issues in the US health care system, along with near-record employment levels, had led to a high employee turnover rate throughout the industry in 2019. In October, after Brownspeed Health Care, a consultative service, received numerous requests from its clients for assistance, the chief analytical officer was asked to prepare a report on how the company could help its clients address the problem. The first phase of the plan was to use the Consumer Price Index for urban wage earners and clerical workers as part of a low-risk strategy to enhance employee compensation and deploy wide-scale retention strategies and forecasting services.

In April 2018, more than one year after the chief executive officer (CEO) of Danby Appliances Inc. launched a private sponsorship program to support Syrian refugees in their integration into Canada, the CEO and others were starting to raise some questions. Although the program seemed to have had an overall positive impact on Syrian refugees, Danby's board of directors wondered about the impact of the program on the appliance business. The settlement program continued to take up a considerable amount of the CEO's time and may have even been a drain on other Danby resources, such as staff time. With competition intensifying in the appliance manufacturing industry, the board asked the CEO to assess the impact of the settlement program on Danby, the refugees, and the community, and to recommend whether the program should continue. The CEO knew it would be difficult to collect precise numbers and wondered how he should start to quantify the true impact of the settlement program.

Café Meteor Bistro was a newly opened bistro-style restaurant in Haileybury, Ontario. The owners of a nearby lodging business for up to 60 guests had developed Café Meteor Bistro to serve the local market, tourists, and their guests. In January 2019, the owners were each working 80 hours per week, and although their first year of operation had seen sales grow, they were behind their projections and not yet breaking even. Understanding that the situation was not sustainable, they were considering options. Should they sell the restaurant or hire an operations manager? If they planned to sell, they needed to come up with a valuation.