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An Israeli startup founded in 2014, Zebra Medical Vision, develops algorithms that produced diagnoses from X-rays, mammograms, and CT-scans. The algorithms used deep learning and digitized radiology scans to create software that could assist doctors in making diagnoses. By July 2018, Zebra had developed seven algorithms to analyze scans for emphysema, liver density, compression fractures, bone density, brain bleeds, breast cancer, and a calcium score-used to detect calcified plaque in coronary arteries. For each scan analyzed, Zebra charged hospitals $1. By 2018 Zebra found itself in a race with its competitors to perfect these algorithms, create software tools, distribute the tools to physician partners, and create a market. Zebra already had several partners in the U.S. and Europe who gave feedback on its development. Management had to decide: What should they do next at Zebra? Should they work on the accuracy of the already-developed algorithms, or continue to develop many new tools? If they chose to develop new products, which applications should they address? And how should they go to market?

In 2018, Swagat Textiles (Swagat), a traditional family-owned textile business in Gujarat, India, was looking for growth amidst several challenges. Since 2017, the market for Swagat's traditional products is shrinking-the younger generation preferred to wear Western casual clothes for daily use and traditional clothes only for special occasions. Additionally, branded competition from online and offline stores had increased, and there were concerns about possible fragmentation of the family business as more members from the next generation planned join the firm. A family member who was about to complete his master of business administration degree was asked to evaluate a proposal about moving into digital printing. He needed to address all of these problems while searching for the next big growth opportunities for the company.

In 2018, Swagat Textiles (Swagat), a traditional family-owned textile business in Gujarat, India, was looking for growth amidst several challenges. Since 2017, the market for Swagat’s traditional products is shrinking—the younger generation preferred to wear Western casual clothes for daily use and traditional clothes only for special occasions. Additionally, branded competition from online and offline stores had increased, and there were concerns about possible fragmentation of the family business as more members from the next generation planned join the firm. A family member who was about to complete his master of business administration degree was asked to evaluate a proposal about moving into digital printing. He needed to address all of these problems while searching for the next big growth opportunities for the company.

In 2016 unforeseen Oil and Gas industry-wide demand slump drove ProdEng's average service rates down by more than 37%, with EBITDA margins falling from 50% to 24% in the second half of 2016. Although the Partners remained optimistic about ProdEng's long-term fundamentals and management team, the short-term challenges required that they act rapidly. However, they had divergent views on the path forward. Should they stay the course and focus on their core competencies or should they rethinking their approach to sales and driving profitability via spot contracts in a highly uncertain time?

Chinese appliance company Haier's 2016 acquisition of iconic GE Appliances ushered in strategic and structural changes to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship at the U.S. company, and to help it grow. Haier, which had a model designed to bring the company closer to users of its products, wanted GEA to adopt a version of the model that suited the U.S. market, U.S. consumers, and GEA's employees. This case describes GEA's efforts to do that as a member of the Haier Group.

In 2016, Elixir, a financial technology start-up, was developing a social banking application to provide mobile banking to young adults and other underserved banking customers. Elixir had a social finance business model called MillennialMoney, where existing customers had an opportunity to earn referral fees by introducing new customers. For the banks, Elixir provided a novel marketing solution to attract millennial customers. As a technology company in the social finance space, Elixir could use the strategic and operational advice of an experienced banker to help turn this vision into a reality. One such banker had been in discussions with Elixir’s chief executive officer and the chair of the advisory board. The banker had been conducting due diligence of the company all summer of 2016 and had even gone on sales calls in Malaysia to see what banks thought about Elixir. Now it was time to make a decision. Should he join the management team of Elixir and invest in the start-up?

Twenty-four-year old Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of India-based online, hotel branding network OYO Rooms, has tackled the issue of unreliability in India's highly-fragmented budget hotel industry. In 2018, OYO branded 8,500 properties across 200 cities and managed to capture almost 1.5% of India's budget hotel market. Ritesh believes that in the process, OYO has honed technological skills and infrastructural capabilities that can transform the company from being a technology player to a hotel developer. OYO now aspires to convert corporate spaces and homes into accommodation spaces, and to make its mark worldwide.

In 2018, Ludovic Le Moan and Christophe Fourtet, co-founders of the French tech startup Sigfox, reflected on the evolution of their venture and the way forward. Founded in 2009, Sigfox was a company that provided a global connectivity network for devices connected to the internet. As the startup was scaling rapidly, the founders made the strategic decision to target fewer industry verticals and to focus on asset tracking as the common denominator of the business. With a committed target of reaching 1 billion devices connected to the Sigfox network by 2022, they wondered which consequential changes needed to be made in order to achieve success in the nascent IoT market. Which initiatives would help them bring the company to the next stage?

In April 2017, the co-founder and vice-president of Hitch Health in Minneapolis Minnesota was faced with an intriguing but challenging strategy decision. Hitch Health had been created as part of Upstream Health Innovations at Hennepin County Medical Center to improve transportation services for its many vulnerable patients. By using human-centred design, Hitch Health had succeeded in developing a system of ride sharing and sophisticated information technology that met its initial goal of reducing missed appointments. However, the development of Hitch Health had also presented a new opportunity to engage patients in many aspects of their own care. The co-founder realized that she had to make a key strategy decision. Was Hitch Health just a practical solution to Hennepin County Medical Center's transportation problem? Could it solve transportation problems at similar hospitals across the country? Could it be an idea big enough to serve as a platform with the potential to disrupt health care delivery?

In August 2016, China’s home-grown ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing Technology Co., Ltd. (Didi) acquired the Chinese assets of Uber Technologies Inc. (Uber), including Uber China’s brand, business, and data. Didi had previously ventured into Uber’s territory by investing and collaborating with Lyft Inc., Uber’s main competitor in the United States. Didi’s transformation from its beginning as a humble mobile application into a technology giant that was re-shaping transportation both within and beyond China was related to significant transformations in its social and business context. These transformations included the rapid growth of China’s cities and China’s status as one of the first countries to formally recognize the legality of Internet-based private car services. Looking to the future, Didi faced questions about its development in a rapidly changing global digital economy: How could it expand its products and services to the international market? Could Didi achieve the same impressive market record abroad? How could Didi continue to innovate? What was a truly sustainable business model for an online ride-hailing firm? How could it maintain its current leading position in the market?

In early 2017, the chief executive officer of Empowerment through Integration, a not-for-profit organization based in the United States and also operating in Lebanon, wanted to scale up the organization’s social impacts and improve its financial sustainability. Empowerment through Integration was committed to breaking social stigmas against people with visual impairments and empowering them to reach their full potential; however, it faced financial, legal, and social struggles in Lebanon, which limited its abilities to reach its goals. What tactics should the chief executive officer pursue to achieve the dual goals of scaling up the organization’s social impacts and enhancing its financial sustainability?

On April 20, 2016, printer and ink maker Lexmark International, Inc. (Lexmark) announced that it was being acquired and taken private by a consortium comprising China-based computer hardware company Apex Technology Co., Ltd. (Apex), as well as private equity firms PAG Asia Capital (PAG) and Legend Capital (Legend). On the same day, Apex formally announced its acquisition of Lexmark for the Chinese capital market. The announcement caused a huge sensation because Apex was a small company compared to Lexmark; Lexmark completed 2015 with US$3.6 billion in revenue—approximately 10 times the revenue of Apex. To raise enough money to pay for the acquisition, Apex had established the consortium with PAG and Legend, and borrowed a large sum of money from its controlling shareholder and banks. Although Apex had ultimately raised enough money to complete the acquisition, its satisfaction over this success soon gave way to pressing questions about financing. In order to dispel the doubts of regulators and the market, Apex needed to decide whether it should adjust its financing plan for the acquisition, and if so, how.

Supplement to case NTU213

In June 2018, the co-founder of a work-integration social enterprise in Calgary, Alberta, called CMNGD (Commongood) Linens, took stock of the impact her venture had on helping homeless people get back on their feet and into meaningful employment. Her ambition was to expand into other Canadian cities, but she was worried that scaling CMNGD might place so much strain on the venture that its viability could be thrown into question and its core mission put at risk. She knew that a lot was at stake, not only financially, but also for the vulnerable people she was trying to help. She and her husband had to carefully weigh the options and decide on the best way forward.

Accounts of the copyright industries in national reports suggest that strong intellectual property (IP) rights support creative firms. However, mounting evidence from sectors such as video game production and 3-D printing indicate that business models based on open IP can also be profitable. This study investigates the relationship between IP protection and value capture for creative industry firms engaged in collective/open innovation activities. A sample of 22 businesses interviewed in this study did not require exclusive ownership of creative materials but instead employed a range of strategies to compete and capture value. Benefits for some firms resemble those for participants in private-collective innovation (PCI), originally observed in open-source software development. Advantages of PCI include the ability to commercialize user improvements and a reduction in transaction costs related to seeking and obtaining permission to innovate existing ideas. Some creative firms in this study were able to generate and capture value from PCI in two directions, upstream and downstream. These dynamics offer a mechanism to understand and articulate the value of openness for creative industries policy and management of creative organizations.

In 2017, the president of Fujitsu Asia Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, a subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Fujitsu Limited (Fujitsu) needed to decide between two project options that represented growth in different industries in Asia. Both projects represented Fujitsu's vision of connected services and could potentially be much-needed engines of new growth for Fujitsu Singapore over the next 5 to 10 years. The first option was to offer its Japanese-engineered cloud-computing platform to engage small and medium enterprises in the manufacturing industry. Given the high costs of customizing the existing platform for local use, the president wondered whether small and medium manufacturers would generate sufficient demand to justify such a costly investment. The second option was to leverage the success of Fujitsu’s intelligent agricultural cloud-computing project with the Japanese government to offer vertical farming to Singapore and other Asian cities that faced similar space constraints but valued food resilience. But was it the right time to enter the agricultural industry? The president had limited time and resources, and needed to make a decision very soon.

The co-founder of a geological consulting start-up was taking an unconventional approach to employee motivation by using non-salary enticements (e.g. retreats) as tools to drive employees' engagement with the company. The approach ran contrary to not only long-standing human resources practices but also to the preferences of the company's own employees. But that approach had only been tested in a small setting so far. Would it work as the company scaled up in size to become a larger organization?

On July 4, 2016, the president of Pathfinder Career System Inc. (PCS), based in Montreal, Canada, was preparing to meet with his company’s advisory board to present a comprehensive plan mapping out the growth and financing strategy for the business, which he acquired in 2011. PCS was a career assessment system that used 85 behavioural attributes and 35 career themes to predict potential job performance. The company had sales of approximately $1.4 million at the end of 2015, and the president aimed to attain revenue of $22 million by the end of 2021; however, the company faced several challenges. PCS had limited organizational structures and resources. The company needed to raise investment capital; develop a marketing plan; instill a sales culture; define its customers; and establish a brand name, vision, and mission. PCS's president needed to finalize a plan to overcome these challenges by the launch date of September 2016.

Phenicoptere Ltd. (Phenicoptere), founded in 2012 by two female entrepreneurs, was a Polish start-up offering a makeup-removal glove called GLOV. Phenicoptere went global at the very early stage of its development. By 2017, the company was present in 44 countries and derived nearly 90 per cent of its revenues from foreign markets. The chief executive officer and vice-president of Phenicoptere must now decide whether and how the company should incorporate e-commerce into its internationalization strategy.

It is February 2017, and Ronald Lee is project director of City Properties, a sister company of Myanmar-based City Mart Holdings Limited (CMHL). CMHL runs the City Mart supermarket chain. To support the supermarket business, CMHL had grown into a large diversified family empire in the retail, import, distribution, logistics, property and supermarket landscape. In 1996, when City Mart, a local family-run enterprise, began operations, supermarkets were virtually unheard of in Myanmar. A relatively poor developing country in Asia, it had a very undeveloped free market economy, and almost no modern trade. The business had to be built from scratch, against a backdrop of a paltry logistics network, rolling blackouts, inadequate property infrastructure and many international brands being barred from entering the Myanmar market due to international sanctions. But retailing is a downstream business that depends on many upstream suppliers, decisions and processes. Unfortunately, as Myanmar began moving to more open markets not all of these supporting firms and processes were in place, providing the nascent retailer with many operational challenges that often turned into new opportunities. Over the years, the company developed numerous businesses organically as the challenges arose. CMHL became the first modern supermarket in Myanmar, comprising supermarkets, hypermarkets, convenience stores, bakeries and pharmacies. At the time of this case, Lee was planning his next move ahead of multinationals who would surely be looking at entering the market in the future.