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Beginning with an exploration of insurance player Ping An's evolution to contrast with HDFC ERGO's strategy adaptation to the Indian market, this case sheds light on HDFC ERGO's strategic shift towards a mindshare-centric ecosystem from its roots as a digitised insurance provider in India. The case starts with Ping An, which is perhaps the best-known successful example of an insurance-based multi-product (and multi-actor) ecosystem. It looks at Ping An's journey, emphasising its digital transformation, ecosystem expansions and technology integration. It then turns to HDFC ERGO, which aimed to create its own ecosystem, and considers the similarities and differences. Drawing parallels and contrasts with India's burgeoning startup ecosystem and the transformative India Stack, HDFC ERGO crafted unique strategic principles. It emphasised avoiding direct competition, offering tangential value, filling market voids and balancing mindshare with value. Utilising internal capabilities and market insights, HDFC ERGO focused on healthcare, leveraging data and digital infrastructure. The development of the 'Here' app exemplifies the company's strategic prowess, aligning healthcare solutions with customer preferences. The case illuminates HDFC ERGO's meticulous approach to tailoring an ecosystem strategy amid shifting market dynamics and technological landscapes, and shows how it built its multi-actor ecosystem in various verticals to support its multi-product ecosystem play. It showcases the company's adeptness in adapting strategies while embracing innovation, resonating with market needs to forge a unique path in the evolving digital insurance realm. This case study stands on its own, offering valuable lessons on strategic planning and execution in the rapidly evolving digital and consumer landscapes. However, when taught in conjunction with its sister case "HDFC ERGO: A product ecosystem built on mindshare" (LBS CS-24-009), students can gain a comprehensive understanding of both the macro-strategic vision and the micro-level steps that underpin HDFC ERGO's ecosystem approach. This complementary perspective enriches the learning experience, illustrating not just the 'why' and 'what' of HDFC ERGO's shift towards ecosystem building but also the 'how' of its implementation, which is what this case focuses on. This case sheds light on two sets of topics that are not covered in the previous case. First, it looks at the choices a firm needs to make as it builds an ecosystem: Which parts of it need to or should be built by itself?

Anuj Tyagi, Joint Managing Director of HDFC ERGO, is facing the challenge of transcending the traditional limitations of insurance interactions and establishing a significant presence in customers' minds beyond annual transactions. The case explores the context of the insurance industry in India before 2019, spans HDFC ERGO's history, exploring the impetus for digital transformation with an emphasis on "multi-product" ecosystems, the evolving regulatory landscape, market shifts, and the inception and strategies behind the Control N vertical - the spearhead of HDFC ERGO's digital innovation. The case delves into HDFC ERGO's pursuit of expanding its market presence beyond traditional insurance through an ecosystem play and illustrates one of the facets of industry convergence and the rise of digitally-enabled broad firms that span several sectors. The case focuses on Anuj, a key decision-maker in HDFC ERGO, as he is confronted with the need to enhance customer engagement (mindshare). The case then analyses HDFC ERGO's assessment of the healthcare and mobility sectors, examining opportunities for ecosystem expansion. This case can be taught independently or paired with its sister case, "From Ping An's inspiration to HDFC ERGO's journey: Building an insurance-based ecosystem" (CS-24-009) for a more in-depth analysis of the sequential steps HDFC ERGO took in this transformation. The present case focuses on the "what" and the linked case focuses on the "how".

The case describes the air-taxi industry at the end of 2023 as many companies vied to join the "eVTOL revolution": in January 2022 the Vertical Flight Society listed 600 designs from nearly 350 companies and innovators worldwide, although only about two dozen of the 600 concepts had made it to the flying-prototype stage. The industry was enabled by the convergence of technologies (including advances in electric propulsion, lightweight materials, AI, autonomous flight systems and batteries), propelled by unexpected social and geopolitical events that pushed the boundaries of drone and electric-proportion technologies. As a result of such advances, and fuelled by growing interest in the space on the part of the VC community, the global flying taxi market was valued by one analyst at around $3 billion in 2022 and was expected to be worth around $37 billion by 2032, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.9% from 2023 to 2032.

The case traces the roots of culture at Ganga Hospital, a trauma care center in Coimbatore, an industrial hub in South India. The hospital was founded by an anesthetist with his resourceful wife. Their sons trained overseas with legends in plastic and orthopedic surgery, and returned home. Given the triad of specialties within the family, trauma care emerged as a focus for the hospital. As directors and expert surgeons, the brothers established a core team, and carefully built a sustaining culture at the hospital. Culture emerges in a hospital setting from the attitudes of employees towards each other, their shared values, and governance structures. This culture impacts patient safety and outcomes. The case begins by contrasting the transactional principal-agent model of culture with that of pro-organizational stewardship. The RBV framework helps administrators who wish to make their staff valuable and inimitable. The case provides examples of stewardship by the directors of Ganga Hospital as well as its senior leadership. A few tenets form the threads of shared thinking at Ganga: a spirit of Ubuntu, collective patient ownership, a healthy hierarchy based on mentorship, delegated decision making, and so on. In the natural progression of the hospital, Ganga has gone beyond its focus on clinical excellence to establish academic and research pillars. This has helped the hospital nurture its homegrown talent, as well as train doctors in the streams of anesthesia, plastic, and orthopedic surgery, the triad of disciplines constituting trauma care. The case concludes by highlighting the societal orientation of the hospital with numerous examples.

In January 2024, Kara Nortman, Julie Uhrman, and Natalie Portman, the founders of Angel City Football Club (ACFC) were developing the club's first three-year strategic plan. Founded in 2020, ACFC had a star-studded investor group, including Portman and celebrities such as Eva Longoria, Jennifer Garner, Billie Jean King, and 13 former players from the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team (USWNT). As outsiders to professional sports, the all-female founding team had rewritten the playbook for how to build a sports franchise by applying lessons from the tech and entertainment industries. They had harnessed digital platforms to establish and cultivate a global brand. Unlike typical sports franchises that built their teams and track records over many years before extending their brand beyond a local base, Angel City had inverted the model, generating as much global as local interest in the club within the first three years. ACFC's success was reflected in its estimated private market valuation of $180 million, the highest in the league. But perhaps equally important to ACFC, the club had made a positive impact on its local community and had started to bend the curve toward greater pay equity in women's sports-the club's ultimate goal. The founders knew there was much more to do to capitalize on the club's momentum. There were opportunities to build the brand further globally and to build out fan engagement and membership in the mobile app, but these would require investments in digital content and production, CRM systems, and e-commerce. There were also opportunities to build the "on-field product" (team and facilities) that would demand budget allocation to training facilities, the field, coaching staff, and medical rehabilitation facilities and staff. The founders weighed the most effective ways to build value for the franchise. Was it better to allocate the incremental budget dollar to investments in digital brand building or to investments in the on-field product?

Founded in Hyderabad, India in 2019, Inkpothub is India’s first digital media platform to offer researchers, scholars, and academics a forum for sharing success and experience stories. The platform allows users to share their journeys to promote research as a career, help researchers make informed career choices, and avoid common pitfalls. Inkpothub also creates, curates, and shares content, information, and knowledge to promote management scholarship and research. The platform connects users with scholars in major Indian academic institutions through content, mentorship programs, courses, and workshops. Inkpothub facilitates high-quality research output and works closely with institutions across the country to promote their doctoral programs to prospective students.<br><br>Inkpothub’s co-founder and current sole owner is Anita Sharma, India’s first woman skydiver with a disability, who is also an entrepreneur with a doctorate from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore. Sharma has worked as professor at IIM, Amritsar and has been a keynote speaker, among other roles she has held. In April 2020, Inkpothub’s co-founder Nishan Singh left the company for personal reasons, leaving Sharma to lead the company alone and face the impact from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. With a difficult business environment for all businesses across all countries, Sharma was considering three potential options for the future: sell the business to regain her investment in the company, find a new partner to grow the business and share the risks and revenues, or continue to run the business on her own.

Founded in Hyderabad, India in 2019, Inkpothub is India's first digital media platform to offer researchers, scholars, and academics a forum for sharing success and experience stories. The platform allows users to share their journeys to promote research as a career, help researchers make informed career choices, and avoid common pitfalls. Inkpothub also creates, curates, and shares content, information, and knowledge to promote management scholarship and research. The platform connects users with scholars in major Indian academic institutions through content, mentorship programs, courses, and workshops. Inkpothub facilitates high-quality research output and works closely with institutions across the country to promote their doctoral programs to prospective students.<br><br>Inkpothub's co-founder and current sole owner is Anita Sharma, India's first woman skydiver with a disability, who is also an entrepreneur with a doctorate from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore. Sharma has worked as professor at IIM, Amritsar and has been a keynote speaker, among other roles she has held. In April 2020, Inkpothub's co-founder Nishan Singh left the company for personal reasons, leaving Sharma to lead the company alone and face the impact from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. With a difficult business environment for all businesses across all countries, Sharma was considering three potential options for the future: sell the business to regain her investment in the company, find a new partner to grow the business and share the risks and revenues, or continue to run the business on her own.

This case, set in January 2024, discusses the entrepreneurship journey of Serene Lim, the co-founder and CEO of Vibefam, a tech management system for boutique fitness studios. In the Singapore gym and fitness sector, besides the large chain studios, there were many smaller studios that offered niche activities to consumers. These studios often did not have automated booking services, relying instead on pen-and-paper records. Lim felt that she could develop an app to streamline the booking process for these studios and their clients. In 2021, Lim assembled a team comprising members with a common passion for entrepreneurship and possessing the relevant business and technological expertise. After several online interviews with potential customers, the team pivoted away from building a system based on social features. The team then built a prototype booking app to gain actionable feedback from both studio operators and users. Most of the early adopters loved the product and quickly converted to paying customers. While Lim was proud of Vibefam's achievements thus far, she was constantly thinking about how best the startup could expand.

On July 10, 2023, a Snow Valley Resorts co-owner was reviewing his organization’s first quarter financials for fiscal year 2022–23. Snow Valley Resorts was founded in 1993 in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, when the first of the group’s four resorts, Snow Valley Resorts Manali, was built among the Himalayan mountain range with panoramic views and pleasant weather. The co-owner had set a goal to increase the organization’s revenue growth rate to nearly twice the previous year’s rate, but he realized several issues had to be addressed first. Technology and operations at the four resorts needed to be integrated. Communications and transactions had to be smoothened. Actions had to be taken to address various issues raised in the customer feedback. Service quality had to be improved at each of the four resorts. Overall, the ripples of customer complaints had to be converted into guest satisfaction by taking appropriate measures.

On July 10, 2023, a Snow Valley Resorts co-owner was reviewing his organization's first quarter financials for fiscal year 2022-23. Snow Valley Resorts was founded in 1993 in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, when the first of the group's four resorts, Snow Valley Resorts Manali, was built among the Himalayan mountain range with panoramic views and pleasant weather. The co-owner had set a goal to increase the organization's revenue growth rate to nearly twice the previous year's rate, but he realized several issues had to be addressed first. Technology and operations at the four resorts needed to be integrated. Communications and transactions had to be smoothened. Actions had to be taken to address various issues raised in the customer feedback. Service quality had to be improved at each of the four resorts. Overall, the ripples of customer complaints had to be converted into guest satisfaction by taking appropriate measures.

Founded in 2010, Supercell was a Helsinki, Finland-based mobile gaming company that had developed and launched five global hit mobile games: Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Hay Day, Brawl Stars, and Boom Beach. The company's early philosophy was that it could produce hits by designing the company with a structure and culture that would prove compelling to the world's top developer talent. Developers worked in small, autonomous groups called cells with little oversight. The formula was a success. Supercell had nearly $2 billion in annual revenues, and Clash of Clans alone had generated gross revenues of over $10 billion since inception. However, the company had not released a hit game in five years. In early 2022, Paananen asked in a blog post whether Supercell's best days were behind it. As a result, in summer 2023, he and Supercell's leadership decided to restructure the company into two divisions-New Games and Live Games. The New Game cells would retain the small team structures, which were largely flat and non-hierarchical, but the Live Game cells would add more traditional structure and hierarchy to exploit franchise hits. Now, Paananen wondered if Supercell could continue to attract top talent despite its shift to more traditional ways of managing the business. As importantly, what would it take to restore the company's winning streak by originating more new games and growing its global blockbusters?

Nitin Kapoor, the managing director of Saera Electric Auto Pvt. Ltd. (Saera Electric), a leading three-wheeler electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer in India, was excited to capture the opportunity brought about by some recent favourable regulatory developments in the Indian EV sector in early 2015. Although Nitin, along with his father, Vijay, had spearheaded the growth of Saera Electric despite several difficulties, the new developments were compelling Nitin to reevaluate Saera’s playbook. This case examined the strategies adopted by Saera Electric for transforming an innovative idea into a final product and explored the various opportunities and challenges associated with competing in a BoP market segment in a larger emerging-market context.

Nitin Kapoor, the managing director of Saera Electric Auto Pvt. Ltd. (Saera Electric), a leading three-wheeler electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer in India, was excited to capture the opportunity brought about by some recent favourable regulatory developments in the Indian EV sector in early 2015. Although Nitin, along with his father, Vijay, had spearheaded the growth of Saera Electric despite several difficulties, the new developments were compelling Nitin to reevaluate Saera's playbook. This case examined the strategies adopted by Saera Electric for transforming an innovative idea into a final product and explored the various opportunities and challenges associated with competing in a BoP market segment in a larger emerging-market context.

This case descibes the journey of a social entrepreneur as she establishes a new venture in the garment manufacturing business. It explores how she chose to become an entrepreneur, how she utilized her ecosystem to establish her venture and the choices and challenges she faced creating and financing a new venture. At the end she is faced with strategic decisions about how to grow the venture and its impact. This case provides an excellent illustration of the challenges faced by early stage entrepreneurs, as well as the value of using a hypothesis driven approach to evolving a new venture.

This case explores the formation and growth of an innovative nonprofit venture that provides human milk banking services. It describes the challenges faced by the founder getting medical buy in, establishing operations and adressing intial challenges. This case enables an exploration of the challenges of entering a new and untested market. This case demonstrates the value of using a business model canvas to evolve a new venture as well as the way an entreprenur can utilize key marketing frameworks (5 P and 5 C) to evolve a new venture.

The mass mechanization of farming, coupled with the push to go away for college, has led to rural communities losing many of their most educated and talented workers. This trend, referred to as brain drain, has resulted in rural communities suffering significant population declines and an array of social problems. But one set of rural communities has greatly deviated from this trend: Amish communities. Through an inductive field study of Amish communities and entrepreneurs, we reveal how the Amish have curbed mass exodus and promoted community preservation, resulting in the retention of roughly 90% of their community members and fostering a variety of entrepreneurial opportunities. Specifically, we discover that through a creation perspective toward work, a collectivist focus, and an emphasis on vocational practices, the Amish offer a nuanced approach to community cultivation, thereby reducing brain drain.

Entrepreneurial firms, due to their size and limited resources, are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to attracting, hiring, and retaining top talent. These challenges place the firm's survival and success in jeopardy, as they waste resources on talent management and operate amid talent shortfalls. Simply put, in the scale-up phase, managing talent could be the most important activity entrepreneurs pursue. While entrepreneurs cannot eliminate their strategic shortcomings (e.g., prestige, the ability to pay top salaries), they can take advantage of their unique strengths (e.g., a more intimate environment, job flexibility, and greater opportunities for growth, advancement, and leadership) to make themselves more competitive among candidates not necesarily destined for large corporations. In this article, drawing upon the lessons of best practice and theory, we make three recommendations for entrepreneurial hiring managers: (1) treat all prospective employees as transformative organizational members, (2) recognize and embrace the contributions of all, and (3) make new and established employees consistently feel valued. While these lessons allow all managers to display their organizational strengths, they provide the best return on investment for those with the greatest hiring challenges: entrepreneurs.

Karim Nour, the founder of Kashat, an Egyptian nano-lending fintech company, is contemplating how to manage the growth of his startup. Over the summer of 2022, Kashat's loan disbursements had grown by nearly 40%, fueled by macroeconomic instability in Egypt. However, economic uncertainty had also deterred investors from investing in the region. Nour soon began to realize he did not have the funds to maintain the company's rapid growth, in fact, he may not even have the capital to keep the company running. The case explores Nour's journey as he grapples with the concept of 'hibernating' the company, halting lending operations and preserving Kashat's invaluable data algorithm. Within the case, Nour weighs the risks of hibernating versus holding out for funding as he prepares to meet with Kashat's board. He also considers the possibility of being acquired as a means of continued survival for Kashat.

"Storrowed" is an exercise to help participants raise their capacity and curiosity for generative AI. It focuses on generative AI for problem understanding and ideation, but can be adapted for use more broadly. Participants use generative AI tools to understand a problem and then to arrive at ideas for solving it. The exercise begins with the following introduction: "A problem vexed Boston, Massachusetts, and its drivers. Trucks got stuck under the bridges on the city's Storrow Drive so often that this predicament even had a name, 'Storrowing' or getting 'Storrowed'. Efforts to date, including signage, social media campaigns, and fines, among other measures, had not put an end to Storrowing. One driver - dismayed and delayed on the way to work behind one such run-in - wondered, 'What would AI have to say about why this keeps happening?'" The exercise is accompanied by a game and can be run in teams; the best prompts keep the teams' trucks from "Storrowing."