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In June 2017, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Kindred Home Care, a home care company in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, bordering the United States, was grappling with three options for scaling up operations—take the familiar acquisition route, move toward the untested franchising route, or cross the border to the larger US market. The company has limited physical assets, and therefore the CEO cannot tap external capital to finance growth; however, he could access internally accrued funds of CA$2 million.

In 2018, the owner of Northwest Fitness, a fitness business in London, Ontario, Canada, was analyzing the business's past year of operations and planning for the future. The company focused on “functional fitness” training to help clients improve aspects of their everyday life. The owner had launched the fitness studio with the help of a bank loan and a line of credit; after three years of success, he wondered if the company was finally in a financial position that would allow him to expand operations. He needed to analyze the past financial performance and project a statement of earnings and a statement of position assuming an expansion was pursued.

In 2016, the Volkswagen Group (VW Group) announced a new future program, Together–Strategy 2025, which outlined the company’s ambition of becoming “a world-leading provider of sustainable mobility” by 2025. The VW Group made it clear that innovation and technology would be essential enablers to the success of the new strategy. In 2018, VW Group, like other players in the automotive industry, was increasingly drawn to artificial intelligence (AI), which could be used in areas including manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, and data analytics.

This is the course overview note for "The Entrepreneurial Manager," taught in the first year at Harvard Business School. Students will learn how to be opportunity-driven managers and how to lead under uncertainty. They'll learn how to identify opportunities, how to design and develop integrated operating models to pursue those opportunities, how to resource those activities amidst uncertainty, and, ultimately, how (and if) to scale them. The note covers the motivation for the course, historical and contemporary, and the course structure.

Among the many competing definitions of entrepreneurship, the one adopted in The Entrepreneurial Manager at HBS was authored by Howard Stevenson in the 1980s and elaborated on in the decades since. Stevenson provided a managerial take on the term; he described entrepreneurship as a distinct approach to management. That approach is the subject of this brief note. The note provides his definition of entrepreneurship ("the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled") and six domains that differentiate entrepreneurial managers from administrative managers.

In 2019, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Boston-based Feehan Investment Management faced a decision. After succeeding her father as CEO, she launched a quantitative research group, or quant group, which used statistical and mathematical methods to determine investment strategies that were applied to incubate a long/short equity strategy. After incubating the strategy for three years and realizing good returns, the CEO wanted to open up this fund strategy to outside investment; however, she needed to decide on which fund structure to wrap this strategy in—a hedge fund or a mutual fund.

Six years after its inception, Montréal-based social media marketing agency OVRGRND started a sister company, 66Agency, to tackle the growing need for brands to use Instagram influencers for their marketing needs. The new 66Agency acted as a facilitator between brands and influencers. However, the demands of managing people—the brands on one side and the influencers on the other—had become a burden that was distracting the agency from its original intention, which was be a social media marketing company. In May 2018, the company was looking for a creative business plan that would allow it to facilitate interactions between brands and high-quality influencers quickly and efficiently, while still ensuring that all parties were happy.

Two entrepreneur brothers purchased Trafalgar Ales, Meads and Distillery, a brewery with 19 active individual beer brands, each generating a small amount of sales. The brothers' purchase came at a time when they were transitioning from a contract brewer—a brand that outsources the actual production to another firm—to a production brewer. The challenge for the entrepreneurs was to determine how to manage their stable of brands for the future. Trafalgar Ales, Meads and Distillery seemed to be pursuing a strategy of releasing small batches of unique beers, and managing its portfolio as if it were a constellation of brands. However, the two brothers were wondering if it made more sense to focus on a handful of brands and create a distinctive identity for each brand.

The president and chief executive officer of Romet Limited, was preparing for a project team meeting that would start at 1:00 p.m. that afternoon. It was Friday April 27, 2018, and he had just finalized the architectural design and layout for the company’s new plant. The lease for the current plant would expire at the end of that year, and he was reviewing the activities required to complete the facility relocation project. The plant relocation was named “Project Destiny.” Recognizing that extending the completion beyond the end of the lease was impossible, he was concerned about being able to complete the project on schedule without increasing costs.

Norlha Textiles was a yak wool enterprise located on the Tibetan Plateau in China. Founded in 2007, the company designed and produced yak wool textiles made by Tibetan nomads and sold globally to customers that included such luxury brands as Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Yves Saint Laurent. In 2015, the company employed 120 local people, enabling them to adapt to the modern world while preserving their local traditions. Also in 2015, the local government invited the company to expand its model to another nomadic community on the Tibetan Plateau. Although this seemed to be a good opportunity to grow the company’s influence, the chief executive officer hesitated, reflecting on the pros and cons. Was such a partnership the right opportunity to grow the company?

A weather technology startup, ClimaCell considers the R＆D trade-offs and financing implications of pursuing a proposed contract with a major automobile maker, rather than continuing its focus on building a scalable, all-purpose weather prediction engine.

Boll & Branch is a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business launched in 2015. It was the first Fair-Trade Certified manufacturer of linens. The case provides background on the company, its start, business model, and evolution through 2019.

The Black Duck case describes the transition of a 14-year-old software start-up that was languishing with outdated technology, low growth, and modest margins, to a rapidly growing innovative company that had become attractive enough to be an acquisition target for major software houses. The new incoming CEO, Lou Shipley, had to make some tough decisions and a number of changes - some major and many minor - to set Black Duck back on a growth path and ready the firm for a sale, so that the investors could get their exit.

In June 2018, the wedding dress industry in Suzhou, China, was confronted with "the harshest clampdown," which required all unqualified wedding dress factories to move out within one week. The initiative from the local government had been expected, although its speed and force were surprising to the founder and chief executive officer of Suzhou Beibao E-Commerce Co. Ltd. (Babyonline). Established in 2012 and engaged in cross-border e-commerce of wedding dresses, Babyonline was unlikely to be affected by the clampdown. However, changes across the wedding dress industry as a result of the initiative had started the founder thinking about issues in the management of his company. At the end of 2015, Babyonline had moved to a make-to-stock system, which lowered costs but seemed to have raised inventory issues. Particularly in recent times, selective selling by some sales representatives had led to structural inventory problems. The founder wondered how he should resolve the inventory issue.

A social entrepreneur running a business in Khayelitsha, near Cape Town, South Africa, made and distributed healthy bread-based products for consumers in a poor community through his social enterprise, the Spinach King. His aim was to improve consumers’ eating habits and help them improve their health. In early 2014, after facing and overcoming many difficulties related to starting this social enterprise start-up in a resource-constrained context, this entrepreneur had a successful business. The business model had evolved over time, and while it was still small in scale, the owner was convinced that it was ready to scale. He needed to determine what business model would be most appropriate going forward and how he could implement it.

The co-founders of Prosper, an early-stage start-up offering a mobile application–based interview preparation and coaching service, were preparing a report for an upcoming meeting with private equity investors. The co-founders sought a CA$1 million seed investment and had to choose where to allocate marketing funds. Should they bias the marketing mix toward students reached via educational institutions or families, or toward professionals making a career switch? They knew that success or failure would depend on their ability to craft a compelling narrative and lay out a realistic marketing plan that would lead to an increased user base and greater revenue growth.

In August 2018, the founder of Speak-On, was finalizing plans for his company’s first year of operations. Speak-On was a learning tool used in classrooms to help students improve their communication and public speaking skills. Having worked on developing a prototype all summer with financing from the Government of Ontario, the founder needed to understand the cash needs for his company. He planned to project a cash budget for fiscal year 2018 and do a sensitivity analysis on his projections to determine the amount of additional financing needed. Did Speak-On require external financing, and would the line of credit support the cash needed?

MoviePass provided a subscription-based service that allowed its users to see films in theatres for a monthly fee. The company rose to stardom between 2016 and 2017, but in mid-2018, it suffered crushing financial losses when operating costs increased and ancillary revenues were too slow to materialize. The company’s subscription base shrank sharply following the introduction of restrictions on its service and an announcement of a price increase. Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc. (H&M), MoviePass’s parent company, would be de-listed if its stock price remained below the threshold stipulated by the NASDAQ Composite Index (i.e., US$1 per share). The chief executive officer of MoviePass and its management team had to keep the company afloat while trying to regain MoviePass’s lost momentum. How could they revitalize the once-promising upstart and prevent H&M from being de-listed?

In 1993, when the Chinese economy was in a major recession, Beijing’s Greatwall Enterprise Institute was founded by six consultants. The company eventually found its niche providing strategic and operational consulting to the governmental agencies (administrative committees) that managed science and technology parks. These agencies had witnessed explosive growth in China since the early 1990s. In 2019, with more than 350 consultants, headquarters in Beijing, 12 branch offices throughout China, and an annual revenue greater than ¥200 million (US$30 million), Greatwall Enterprise Institute faced new threats and opportunities: its success with so many government administrative committees meant that there was little room for it to grow in this area. The company wondered if it should expand to other local governments and their agencies in China. Or would business firm clients and the international market offer new opportunities?

GLAMI was launched in October 2013 in the Czech Republic as a fashion search engine with a focus on providing consumers with an accessible platform. It operated a neatly organized online fashion catalogue that consisted of combined products from fashion e-shops that functioned throughout various countries. Through its five years of existence, GLAMI had expanded throughout Europe and Asia. Fashion retailers and e-shops partnered with GLAMI as free or priority members, and had their items placed throughout GLAMI’s website. The company’s business model functioned through a cost-per-click (CPC) model, where GLAMI would charge priority members according to how much they were willing to pay per click. In August 2018, due to its success and the increasing size of the fashion industry and the online retail space, GLAMI was looking to expand beyond its current boundaries to a high-growth area—Latin America. However, considering the vast differences among Latin American countries, GLAMI was finding it difficult to narrow down the list of countries in which to explore international expansion.