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This case explores the life and career of rapper and music producer Swizz Beatz. Set in 2019, it covers the evolution of Swizz's musical career and his new venture into the commercial art market.

Set in 2018, this case follows married couple and music industry titans Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys as they consider how best to use their platforms to achieve their goals. Since achieving professional success in the music industry early in their lives, Swizz and Keys had explored many different personal and professional pursuits. Swizz was particularly interested in the arts and had launched an initiative aimed at supporting emerging visual artists of color. Keys had taken on acting roles, written a children's book, and had become an increasingly vocal advocate for social justice causes. Anchoring their professional work, Swizz and Keys had built a loving family rooted in communication and mutual respect. As one of the music industry's most recognizable power couples, Swizz and Keys now considered how they might use their joint platform to continue to drive positive change for artists and creators of all stripes.

India's start-up ecosystem is amongst the largest globally, with a variety of funding options from angel investors, venture capital and corporate venture capital to debt. Classic consumer focused start-ups which look to leverage technology have been able to raise significant amounts of capital but the situation is more challenging for deep science and technology focused startups. This note focuses on these issues and the factors behind them.

In late 2017, the co-owners of Rocky Mountain Soap Company in Canmore, Alberta, faced an important challenge. Their company produced and retailed toxin-free, 100 per cent natural bath and body products, and they wanted the product packaging to reflect their company’s commitment to sustainability. To meet the challenge of identifying and implementing sustainable packaging solutions, the co-owners needed to address intensifying competition, make good use of their limited ability to conduct research and development, and manage their customers’ expectations. How could the co-owners develop a packaging solution that aligned with the company’s brand focus of “100 per cent natural”? How could they find the support they needed to move the company forward?

In early 2016, Canada’s venture capital (VC) investment environment was growing and, as a result, exciting new start-ups were fruitfully collaborating with a sophisticated selection of investors. Ajay Joshi, a partner at Helarctos Ventures (HV), a seed-stage venture capital investment fund based in Toronto, Canada, was an experienced entrepreneur in the mobile wireless technology (tech) space and a savvy VC investor. HV, founded in 2013, had invested in 28 tech start-ups, and six of them had been successfully acquired. But even with past successes, in an environment of hungry, enthusiastic start-ups that was getting larger and more diverse every year, Joshi and the HV team needed to continuously re-evaluate their process and be sure that they were relying on the right criteria for evaluating investments. Each investment in a start-up was a major decision and represented a significant and long-term allocation of finite capital, time, and energy. Joshi and HV needed to be sure of their decisions, when surety was in short supply.

On February 24, 2016, HTL International Holdings Ltd (HTL), a Singapore-based furniture company, announced that it had entered into a purchase agreement with Guangdong Yihua Timber Industry Co. Ltd (Yihua). According to the agreement, which was subject to approvals, Yihua would pay SG$1.00 for each share of HTL. However, the agreement required that HTL meet set profit targets in each of the next three years. A compensation agreement between HTL’s controlling shareholder and Yihua stipulated that if HTL did not make its profit targets, HTL’s controlling shareholder would make up the shortfall to Yihua. When the agreement was announced, HTL’s share price was at $0.70, and the $0.30 gap signalled uncertainty about whether Yihua’s shareholders would agree to the acquisition. Minority shareholders and potential investors, who were not bound by the profit guarantee, needed to decide whether they should buy, sell, or hold HTL’s shares.

Stephen Scott needed to decide whether to keep his behavioral analytics startup in the people analytics sector or shift his company into the RegTech sector. Starling had develop technology that enabled its customers to anticipate and shape the behavior of their employees by examining company data on employees, including email traffic. Starling had struggled to grow in the people analytics sector while RegTech was an emerging sector that might provide better opportunities to grow.

An examination of the first few years of San Franciso-based, fast-growing furniture and home accessory e-commerce startup, Dot & Bo.

A founder looks back at the issues at play in the final year of failed furniture e-commerce startup, Dot & Bo. He shares his perspective and learnings in the aftermath.

This case explores the life and career of Alicia Keys, the 15-time Grammy winning singer-songwriter and producer. Set in 2019, it covers the evolution of Keys's 18-year musical career and additional passions, including acting, entrepreneurship, social justice activism, and collecting art with her husband, rapper and music producer Swizz Beatz. Now a mother of two young sons and with no intentions of slowing down, Keys considers what the next phase of her life and career might hold. This case would be useful for students studying the music and entertainment industry. It also holds relevance for executives approaching the peak of their career and looking to make more deliberate decisions about time management and prioritization.

This case provides an update to the (A) case, which introduces students to adaptive platform trials, an ambitious, more efficient type of clinical trial that increases access to therapies. The A case centers on Dr. Brian Alexander's efforts to launch an adaptive platform trial for studying potential therapies for glioblastoma (GBM), an aggressive form of brain cancer. The (B) case provides an update and explores the strategies that Alexander is considering for sustainably financing this trial.

Since its founding in the late 1990s, JetBlue Airways has been known as an innovator in the U.S. airline industry. This case explores how in the mid- to late-2010s, JetBlue sought to drive further innovation by setting up a corporate venture capital arm. Led by Bonny Simi, a long-time JetBlue executive, commercial airline pilot, former U.S. Olympian, and Stanford alumna, JetBlue Technology Ventures (JTV) seeks to bring external innovation in house. The case relates the history of JTV's establishment, details its investment decision-making criteria and processes, and examines the governance structures put in place to ensure strategic alignment with its corporate parent. Considerable attention is also paid to the ways in which JTV helps integrate into JetBlue Airways new technologies developed by the start-ups it invests in. Overall, the case assesses how JTV tries to achieve both financial and strategic objectives, which has historically been a challenge for corporate venture capital arms set up by other large companies across a variety of industries.

In 2016 (A case), the founder of Tokyo Smoke, a cannabis retailing enterprise based in Toronto, needed to attract investors. The former Google Inc. employee had taken advantage of public policy changes in Canada and was modelling his retail business on Starbucks Corporation, which had educated North American consumers about coffee and captured a huge share of the coffee market. He needed investment capital in order to build his brand and needed to determine an appropriate valuation as part of his pitch for investment capital. By 2018 (B case), he had to address new challenges in his role as chief retail officer of Canopy Growth Corporation (Canopy), the Canadian licensed producer of cannabis that had taken over the company he founded. How could he position Canopy as a world leader in retail cannabis?

David Bladow and Matthew Schwab, close friends and former college roommates, left their jobs and moved to San Francisco to start a new venture together. After exploring the gifting industry, they ultimately focused on floral delivery. They launched BloomThat, an on-demand service that made sending flowers as easy as sending a text message and gained initial traction over Valentine's Day in 2013. On the back of this success, the team was accepted into Y Combinator for the summer of 2013, raised $3.6 million of seed funding over the next year, and in December 2014, secured $4 million of Series A financing. Problems arose soon after BloomThat expanded to Los Angeles in early 2015, and by the summer, the company teetered on the brink of collapse. Aggressive restructuring saved BloomThat, and existing investors provided bridge financing in late 2015. In the end, however, the turnaround was not enough to attract new investors. When the case picks up in May 2017, Bladow and Schwab must decide what to do next. One option is to shut down BloomThat and move on. The other is to search to sell the start-up to one of the large companies in the industry, with the cofounders knowing that the process will take multiple months, would yield a low valuation and require them to go work for the incumbent for a meaningful period of time. Given their position in the capitalization table, the co-founders are unclear how the value from such a transaction will be divided with the venture capital and venture debt investors. With this uncertainty, the co-founders need to decide how to proceed.

In 2018, the founder and chief executive officer of Zarr Tech Canada Inc. (Zarr Tech), understood the need for his young business to continue along its impressive growth trajectory. However, he was unsure how this goal could best be achieved. Given the increasingly competitive information technology consulting sector, he questioned whether Zarr Tech was well positioned to take advantage of further industry growth, and he wondered how best to promote his business to achieve the growth it needed. He considered various options, such as attending trade shows; hiring a sales representative; using online advertising mediums, such as Google Ads or LinkedIn; and employing an email marketing campaign. Additionally, the business' young founder was considering expanding his operations to the Vancouver area but wondered if now was the right time to do so.

In January 2019, the low-cost brokerage house Zerodha emerged as India’s largest broker by number of customers. From 2014 to 2018, Zerodha's client addition had grown by 200–300 per cent annually; however, the company now needed a strategy to maintain and defend its leadership position. It needed to tap India’s retail broking segment for continued growth. And in a market swamped with nearly identical products, Zerodha needed a strategy to avoid being confused with similar firms and to consistently be consumers’ first choice. Could it stay ahead of its rivals with product innovation?

Sundaram Multi Pap Ltd. (Sundaram), based in Maharashtra, India, was in the business of school and office stationery and e-learning. The company had been in the business successfully for more than two decades, backed by some innovative and cost-effective marketing strategies and excellent labour management. However, by 2017, the situation had changed. Losses had accrued in the core business in its subsidiary digital education business. The company had not announced any dividends since fiscal year 2014/15, after having an unbroken track record of profits and dividends over a decade. High interest cost, low sales, and high fixed expenses had caused mounting losses for the company. Changing market dynamics were also challenging, with a shortage of raw materials, low margins, and an increase in competition. In 2017, with the company’s stock plunging in value, management had to decide how to revive this ailing company.

In August 2018, Glenwood Laboratories Canada Ltd. (Glenwood), an importer of medical devices from the United States, is caught in the crossfire of public policy. In June 2018, the United States imposed a 10 per cent tariff on the import of raw aluminum from Canada; in July 2018, Canada imposed a retaliatory tariff of 10 per cent on the import of processed aluminum from the United States. As an importer of aluminum oxygen cylinders from the United States for distribution to its Canadian customers, Glenwood is in the middle of a trade war between the two countries, whose aluminum supply chains have been integrated for over two decades. Glenwood’s president and chief executive officer (CEO) must examine the options before him and find a way forward.

Although participation of women in entrepreneurship continues to grow, a gender-performance gap persists. While the differential inputs and values perspectives have investigated both external and internal forces that help explain this gap, neither perspective has considered an important cognitive mechanism that captures gender differences: identity. The purpose of this article is to examine the role of impostor fears in shaping entrepreneurial identity and the desire for business growth. Entrepreneurship has long been associated with masculine notions of success, which may lead women to discount themselves as 'real'entrepreneurs or successful in the context of these masculine norms. Our goal is to draw attention to women entrepreneurs' imposter fears in order to understand how women think about and construct their identity as entrepreneurs and subsequently contemplate the success and growth of their ventures. We also propose mitigating factors that can disrupt gendered norms and facilitate self-efficacy for women entrepreneurs in the pursuit of business growth.

The first Freshippo store opened in Shanghai, China in January 2016. It was not until nine months later that the second store was opened. However, from that point on, Freshippo stepped up its nationwide expansion by opening a new store every six days, on average. By June 2018, Freshippo owned 46 stores in 13 cities and had set a target of operating over 100 stores by the end of 2018. When entering a Freshippo store, customers not only saw an array of fresh produce that reminded them that they were in a supermarket, but they also saw food being prepared, people dining, and meals being packaged and sorted in bags for customers to pick up and take home to eat. Although the number of services were impressive, flaws had started to surface in the evolution of Freshippo’s business model, such as store management issues, poor service, and long wait times for food preparation. Freshippo had to make some decisions regarding expanding and exploring new business models, or instead resolving problems and making improvements. Which option was a higher priority?