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Supplement for product 9B19M127.

In December 2018, GRIT Fitness was a growing chain of boutique fitness studios offering a variety of workout classes, including weightlifting, high intensity interval training, and cardio dance. With 400 members and three Dallas studios, CEO Brittani Rettig believed her business had found a niche in a crowded industry by promoting female empowerment and psychological resilience through fitness. Rettig wanted to extend GRIT's reach to impact more women. What was the best path to growth?

This note provides essential information on funding sources and valuation topics facing deep technology startups-ventures that are capital-intensive, with high technical and market uncertainty, and require long gestation periods. Both dilutive and non-dilutive sources of investment are described, along with empirical examples and figures.

The chief executive officer of RenY Corporation (RenY) based in Hong Kong, had just established the Ghana Investment Fund Limited (GIF) as a subsidiary of RenY in Ghana. GIF aimed to invest in the entrepreneurial ideas of university graduates in Ghana under a model that brought together the intellectual capital of the graduates, e-commerce, and investment capital under an umbrella of mentoring and collaboration. Access to Ghanaian government contracts to provide products and services was an important aspect of the CEO’s sustainable development plans for low income communities, but he was faced with ethical issues on the way government business was done in Ghana—to be successful in gaining some of these contracts, extra payments were required. He had to decide if his investment was going to result in nothing or if there was a way to move forward.

This article explores solutions-driven innovation within an emerging market context, specifically in Africa, and how it can be utilized as a strategy by multinational enterprises to address institutional voids in these markets. Through a qualitative case study of Uber and their expansion into Africa, it demonstrates how solutions-driven innovation can create markets and mitigate distance and institutional voids in emerging market contexts. Uber created markets in Africa by developing a solution to consumers' unmet needs. Such solutions-driven innovation can create opportunities not only at the bottom but also in the middle of the economic pyramid. But to be successful in African markets requires being mindful of how institutional voids necessitate innovative solutions and potentially different value propositions.

This article provides guidance to social entrepreneurs and their funders as they seek to advance the enterprise from startup to scale. It focuses on the evolution of four social entrepreneurs and their decision-making paths as they attempt to scale their respective organizations. It then develops a framework to understand how social entrepreneurs alternate between pursuing activities to increase the scale of their work and delivering social impact in a "zig-zagging" process.

The paradox of openness is inherent to all platform ecosystems-the tension in enabling maximum openness to create joint innovation while guaranteeing value capturing for all actors. Governance mechanisms to solve this paradox are embedded into the technical architecture of the platform, addressing the dimensions of access, control, and incentives. Blockchain technology offers unique ways to design novel governance mechanisms through the standardization of interactions. However, the design of such an architecture requires careful consideration of the cost associated with it.

Open innovation has become well established as a new imperative for organizing innovation. In line with the increased use in industry, it has also attracted a lot of attention in academia. However, understanding the full benefits and possible limits of open innovation still remains a challenge. We draw on strategic management theory to describe some of these benefits and limits. More specifically, we develop a dynamic capabilities framework as a way to better understand the strategic management of open innovation, which can then help to better explain both success and failure in open innovation. With this background, as guest editors we introduce select papers published in this Special Section of California Management Review that were originally presented at the fifth annual World Open Innovation Conference, held in San Francisco, California, in December of 2018.

While collaborating with several competitors on coupled innovation projects requires smooth knowledge sharing to ensure the project's success, protecting knowledge is also essential due to the prevailing risks of coalition formation, opportunism, and knowledge leakage. Intense tensions between knowledge sharing and protection may arise and must be managed to avoid project failure. This article explores the formal and informal mechanisms used to manage these tensions. The case studied (Galileo) reveals the limited role of informal mechanisms to manage such tensions and shows how a centralized project structure encouraged the formal sharing of knowledge by protecting firms from unwanted knowledge transfers between competitors.

This article investigates how project expertise and complexity jointly impact the decision to adopt open or closed innovation. It identifies four different types of open innovation models-crowdsourcing, coopetition, science-based, and network-and explores the varying conditions of project expertise and complexity under which firms tend to adopt a particular type. Using large data analysis from pharmaceutical drug development projects, the authors find that complexity moderates the relationship between project expertise and the choice of open or closed innovation and that levels of complexity and project expertise vary between different open innovation models.

Talking Points is a U.S. not-for-profit 501c3 organization that provides a multilingual platform to help teachers communicate with families. The idea was first created in 2014 at a Startup Weekend as a translation-embedded SMS tool, inspired by the evidence of a strong connection between parental engagement and student outcomes. By 2019 the organization was reaching 500,000 families, exclusively via word of mouth. They had plenty of internally-collected data and anecdotes about their positive effects on students, families and teachers. MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab was assisting them to conduct a randomized control trial (RCT, the "gold standard" in measuring efficacy) in the 20-21 school year. The product, which uses a combination of AI and human translation, had grown to include versions for schools and districts. The company was earning subscription revenue and strong customer retention. They also faced competition from several venture-backed for-profit start-ups. At the time of the case, the organization has just received a sizable grant from google.org, which would enable it to transition from a small start-up to a more established entity.

In 2015, Homesake entered the home décor sector in India by designing, producing, and selling home décor products, including lighting, tableware, and wall hangings. By 2018, after three years in operation, Homesake had generated sufficient sales that its founder was ready to grow the business internationally; increase its traditional (offline) retail sales; and expand to hotels, bars, pubs, and restaurants. However, challenges related to a possible expansion were becoming evident, including the contractual nature of the labour force, inefficiencies in the supply chain, a constant need to design and develop new products, and the need to improve quality control and logistics. What would be the best course and business model for the founder to pursue to ensure Homesake's consistent growth in the future?

Spreadsheet supplement to case 815055.

Alvéole was an urban beekeeping start-up in Montreal, Quebec. Founded in 2012, Alvéole offered beekeeping services and products in support of its social mission of educational outreach surrounding issues related to the natural environment, food security, and ecological concerns facing society. The company had successfully launched in the Montreal region and was now considering how to grow the firm. At the same time, Alvéole wanted to address some existing challenges such as seasonal labour and cash flow management.

Driven largely by advances in perception and situational awareness, robots in the 2010s were gaining functionality that allowed them to be applied to fundamentally new types of work. The expanding range of new types of tasks that could be completed by machines had significant implications for businesses, the workforce, and society. This primer grounds conversations about these implications by illustrating real-world examples of the new types of activities that robots were becoming able to perform. It describes the functionality limitations which dictated how earlier robots could be deployed and the advances in underpinning technology which have moved these boundaries and led to the current inflection point.

Synthetic biology start-up C16 Biosciences wants to solve a big problem: replace palm oil, a major contributor to deforestation and climate change, with a lab-grown substitute. CEO Shara Ticku has ambitious plans to supply her lab-grown palm oil to food manufacturers, who use palm oil liberally in a variety of products from ice cream to margarine. In bringing her product to market, Ticku faces a tough decision. Should she roll out the product first in the personal care market, which has lower volumes and premium prices, or go straight for food? The meteoric rise of lab-grown meat company Impossible Foods has caught the attention of an investor, who wonders if C16 should tap into excitement about lab-grown foods to raise a Series A funding round. But are there merits to starting small?

Founded in late 2014, Xinke used a crowdfunding café model to provide a platform for communication among entrepreneurs and investors. In June 2015, Xinke co-operated with a leading real estate company to create a crowd innovation café, and in August 2016, it received A-round financing that led to the establishment of a crowd innovation fund and the creation of a self-access media platform. Xinke had opened a high-end shared office to provide all around services such as funds, publicity, and venues for settled enterprises. It had a network of crowd innovation space (CIS) platforms in various cities across China and was beginning to build a nationwide CIS platform. Could the crowd innovation ecology designed by Xinke inject new vitality into the development of the CIS? How should Xinke’s crowd innovation eco-strategy be improved? How could Xinke realize professionalization in and improvement of the crowd innovation ecology?

On Wednesday, March 1, 2017, Jean-Louis Chaussade, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Suez SA (Suez), a French utility company that primarily operated in water and waste management, had to decide whether or not to acquire General Electric Water & Process Technologies. During the negotiations between Chaussade and the CEO of General Electric Company (GE), there had been many drastic changes, including the January 2017 inauguration of a US president with no political experience and an agenda that did not favour international co-operation. The deal represented a significant investment of US$2–$3 billion, and Suez would have to rely on an external partner to have even a chance of winning the bid GE had launched only a few weeks earlier. The complex negotiations were also fraught with risks due to increasing political interference from the new US president. What should Chaussade do?

Naledo Foods and Beverages Inc. (Naledo) was a small start-up headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, that operated as a social enterprise in the Toledo District of Belize. In 2018, Naledo's operation in Belize produced about 500 jars a day of wildcrafted turmeric paste. With large orders sometimes taking up to six weeks to fill, it was imperative for Naledo to find a way to increase production, and for that, the company needed capital. Naledo's chief operating officer was thus considering ways to raise the necessary capital.

In early 2016, ChimpChange Limited, a financial technology (fintech) start-up, had started operations in California and already had more than 80,000 customers. The company needed capital to acquire more customers in order to become cash-flow positive, as was the case with most start-ups. ChimpChange Limited should have been able to attain the break-even number of customers within another year or so, but it needed capital to execute a marketing campaign to attract these customers. It had already undergone several series of funding rounds. At this point, should it return for a series C funding round or should it raise funds through an initial public offering (IPO)? If it were to opt for an IPO, where should this take place?