個案總覽

Private venture capital casts a long shadow over corporate ventures, in part because they compete for the same entrepreneurial talent. Corporate venturing may improve its performance by emulating certain practices of private venture capital but will never achieve the structures that private venture capital can create. Instead, the design principles for corporate ventures should embrace potential structural advantages of corporate venturing and leverage those advantages. These potential advantages include: an indefinite time horizon, the ability to commit very large sums of capital, the ability to coordinate complementarities with non-tradable corporate assets, and the ability to retain greater group and organizational learning from failed venture experiences. Lucent's New Ventures Group adopts many useful practices of private venture capital, but retains some of the potential structural advantages of venturing within an established firm.

American Airlines is a widely cited leader in the development and implementation of yield management practices. This case is based on a training exercise used at American Airlines to introduce managers to their yield management system. Participants are given the responsibility for a single flight from Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas to Miami, Florida and are required to make a series of sequential booking decisions in real time. The objective of the exercise is to maximize total revenue for the flight, after taking into account no-shows and penalties. De-briefing following the exercise provides an opportunity to discuss both the strategic and tactical issues that arise when applying yield management systems in service firms. The case is designed for use in a service management elective course or in a service operations course and is intended to expose students to yield management by giving them hands-on experience managing bookings for a flight. The game takes approximately 50 minutes to play, leaving approximately 30 minutes for class discussion. Ideally, a supplemental reading dealing with yield management should be assigned with the case in order to provide background theory on yield management and to describe the complexities of a yield management system.

American Airlines is a widely cited leader in the development and implementation of yield management practices. This case is based on a training exercise used at American Airlines to introduce managers to their yield management system. Participants are given the responsibility for a single flight from Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas to Miami, Florida and are required to make a series of sequential booking decisions in real time. The objective of the exercise is to maximize total revenue for the flight, after taking into account no-shows and penalties. De-briefing following the exercise provides an opportunity to discuss both the strategic and tactical issues that arise when applying yield management systems in service firms. The case is designed for use in a service management elective course or in a service operations course and is intended to expose students to yield management by giving them hands-on experience managing bookings for a flight. The game takes approximately 50 minutes to play, leaving approximately 30 minutes for class discussion. Ideally, a supplemental reading dealing with yield management should be assigned with the case in order to provide background theory on yield management and to describe the complexities of a yield management system.

Supplements the (A) case.

This team exercise allows students to experience some of the dynamics of developing products in the fast-paced Internet environment and was inspired by the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft. Designed to be taught in a single class session, the exercise introduces various sources of uncertainty (e.g., various press releases, different team sizes) that make the task of designing a development process particularly challenging. Student teams have to make decisions on organization, features, milestones, testing, and integration in a period of about 30 minutes and present their results to the rest of the class.

Stainless Steel Studios is the latest entrepreneurial venture of renowned computer game designer Rick Goodman. Goodman must now decide the role of customer feedback in crafting the next generation of computer games. This case addresses how operations systems can be designed to manage significant uncertainty.

Entrepreneur Nassib Chamoun has created an innovative anesthesiology device that monitors patients' consciousness levels during surgery. This case tracks how Chamoun and his executive team built the infrastructure of the company and actively managed the adoption process through product design and development, clinical trials, close work with regulatory agencies, selection of appropriate lead users, and active management of the learning process for the lead users. Now faced with a relatively unfavorable market and increasing competition, Chamoun must decide how to increase current and future adoption of the monitor. Three options are presented: contracting for OEM deals with large, well-established distributors; expanding the range of services offered to include other aspects of the perioperative process; and exploring the use of the monitor in other clinical areas such as Alzheimer's.

The received wisdom--which many practitioners rigidly follow--assumes that competitiveness in a global economy requires companies to focus on core competencies, reduce their number of suppliers, and develop strong partner relationships built on shared information and trust with the remaining suppliers. But interviews with leading practitioners indicate that blind adherence to this three-step approach trivializes the issue and may be bad medicine. We provide a simple guideline for choosing the appropriate relationship for each supplier. An important consideration is whether the supplier relationship aims at cost reduction or value-added benefits for the customer, or both. The appropriate relationship could be one of competitive tension, cooperative partnership, or strategic alliance. In this study, the firms with successful outsourcing strategies began with well-developed and rigorous technological forecasts. Otherwise, strategic outsourcing will be filled with many blind avenues and deeply regretted decisions.

Describes the details of IBM's dramatic corporate turnaround in the early 1990s led by CEO Louis V. Gerstner. Accounts of events are from interviews with IBM executives. Covers the factors that led to the company's decline and actions taken to recover.

Describes in operational detail the activities involved in creating a collaborative and artistic product. Parallels to companies in dynamic industries emerge from the management philosophies and artistic methods of the case protagonist, Artistic Director Abigail Adams.

Heartport, an entrepreneurial medical device maker, has introduced several innovative systems for conducting less-invasive cardiac surgery. Despite initially high expectations, the company has struggled to get its technology adopted by cardiac surgeons. The company's newest CEO, the third in less than four years, must figure out how to turn around the fledgling company. This case describes Heartport's method of performing minimally invasive cardiac surgery as well as rival techniques for treating cardiovascular disease. Describes the evolution of the company, its product strategy, and its fortunes over the period 1991-99.

Some of the advantages and disadvantages of franchising from the point of view of both the franchisor and the franchisee are described in this note. It also gives some guidelines for what characteristics one might look for in deciding whether a business is franchisable. It is intended as background reading for students, and could be used in conjunction with a case that involves franchising as a central issue.

An assistant manager of a university student residence is aware that there are capacity and service problems in the cafeteria. Long waits in line were common, and he hoped to propose some improvements to residence management, preferably ones with no major investments or disbursements involved.

Delta Electronics, an automotive supplier, moves from delivering components to integrated systems of hardware and software. The company is facing the entry of Sun's Java and Microsoft's Windows CE into automotive electronics. Delta must decide which of the two possible standards to follow, and understand how the entry of these software platforms changes its own competitive position.

IACo. is an aerospace company developing UAVs (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles). The case describes the project of developing a bid for a large contract under severe time pressure. The case discusses project planning for rapid time-to-market.

The operations manager at Diverse Industries International's plant needs to make a decision regarding a restructuring of the plant's Automatic Dishwasher Gel production line. The restructuring suggestion which included replacing a loading table with a lift conveyor and hopper system, came from the company's industrial equipment contractor who hoped to sell them some used production equipment. The operations manager, while he was fairly sure the investment was a good idea, was concerned about how he could best justify the cost to the finance department and, if approved, how he could reallocate direct labor on the line to maximize efficiency.

Online grocery retailing, despite its unproven track record, had generated a substantial amount of interest by mid-2000. Although no online grocery retailer had managed to develop a business model that consistently delivered profits and created value for the customer, several companies touted value propositions and fulfillment models that hoped to overcome the challenges facing the industry. Presents five companies with different fulfillment models: Streamline, Webvan, NetGrocer, Tesco Direct, and Le Shop. Challenges readers to think about which online grocer creates the most value for customers and which grocer will likely be able to overcome the challenge of fulfillment, i.e., building the last mile to the customer.

The Boston Globe newspaper has decided to move its home delivery time up from 7 a.m. to 6 a.m. to increase sales and retain more customers. Anne Eisenmenger has been assigned to coordinate this process, building consensus for change among a diverse group of stockholders: management, unions, editors, department heads, and so on. The case is helpful for joint discussion of operational and organizational issues.

At the May 1996 annual shareholders meeting, Alcoa CEO Paul O'Neill reported that Alcoa was making great progress toward becoming a world-class leader, both in terms of workplace safety and profitability. This validated of O'Neill's decade-long emphasis on safety as the company's leading value. Despite these achievements, O'Neill was challenged on Alcoa's treatment of employees in the company's Mexican plants. A Benedictine nun accused the company of treating its workers poorly and systematically violating its much publicized value system. Now, one month after the contentious exchange with the sister, O'Neill considers the report of an investigation team he had dispatched to the Mexican plants and the observations he made during his own visit to the factories. Builds on Workplace Safety at Alcoa (A), a case, in which students learn about Alcoa's efforts to become a safety leader and to wrestle with issues related to changing the physical work setting and the behavior and attitudes of people (employees and managers in that setting). This case is set several years later, after Alcoa has made tremendous progress in safety and profitability.

Focuses on Millennium's strategy to grow and revolutionize drug development through the use of new technologies such as genomics. Describes how Millennium Pharmaceuticals--a fast-growing biotechnology firm in Cambridge, MA--has used strategic alliances to finance the development of technology platforms based on the latest breakthroughs in genomics. As the firm considers developing pharmaceutical drugs itself, they face a number of challenges: 1) Can they revolutionize drug development by making it more predictable, faster, and less costly? 2) How should they select their alliances such that they move closer to becoming a pharmaceutical firm and still attract the funding needed for their strategy? 3) How can they continue to grow rapidly and attract and retain some of the best minds in the pharmaceutical industry?