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The case describes IDEO, one of the world's leading design firms, and its human-centered innovation culture and processes. It is an example of what managers can do to make their own organizations more innovative. In reaction to a rapidly changing competitive landscape, a team of IDEO designers have been hired by Cineplanet, the leading movie cinema chain in Peru, to reinvent the movie-going experience for Peruvians. Cineplanet wishes to better align their operating model with the needs and behaviors of its customers.

In May 2011, the managing partner of the Modern Agricultural Farm in rural Pakistan was reviewing the set of performance reports for the previous month sent by the farm accountant. These reports had been designed by a management analysis and research consultant to convert the farm system to that used by the head office of the Alamgir Group of businesses, of which the farm was a part. There were two concerns: how to handle the fluctuations in the farm’s monthly cash flow and how to plan the right combination of plantings and crops to ensure a profit. A computer-based accounting software program had been purchased to help expedite accounting and reporting, and an annual master budget plan had been established to control operations. Given the special risks faced in agriculture where the portfolio of crops was dependent on uncontrollable factors, such as the weather, the managing director wondered how he could develop a workable budget for the coming year.<br><br>Student spreadsheet 7B13B025 with data is available.

The general manager of market development for the Dalian International Airport in China was worried. Two years after he had successfully launched the Northeastern Hinterland and Bohai Rim Region Airport Aviation Market Strategic Alliance in 2009, it was facing serious external and internal challenges. Competitors had begun to impact on the alliance by intensively adding flights to regional airports with the support of subsidies from provincial and local governments. And as alliance members gained more air traffic, they began to compete for transport resources, which challenged the organization’s sustainable development. From the beginning, Dalian International Airport, as the core of the organization, had shared its routes and ticket fares with other alliance member airports, had removed landing fees for stopover flights and had organized a trade fair to encourage interactions between small regional airports and the airlines that had ignored them in the past, not recognizing how China’s booming economy was making even remote routes potentially profitable. The general manager had three possible options: utilizing outside help, increasing his airport’s market position and strengthening internal ties to resist external forces. All three options had their pros and cons. What should he do?

Nefertiti Nelson, a senior official at the Columbia Department of Public Health (CDPH) in the fictitious U.S. state of Columbia, has been asked by the governor's office to examine the cost-effectiveness of administering BMI and eating disorders screenings in schools. To carry out the project, Nefertiti and her team of CDPH colleagues join forces with the consulting firm, Datamon; yet, as the analysis begins questions quickly arise about the logistics and costliness of implementing the screenings, potential outcome measures, and the interests and concerns of respective stakeholders.

The open office is the dominant form of workspace design for good reason: It fosters collaboration, promotes learning, and nurtures strong culture. But what most companies fail to realize is that collaboration has a natural rhythm that requires both interaction and private contemplation. Companies have been trying for decades to find the balance between public and private workspace that best supports collaboration. In 1980 52% of U.S. employees lacked workspaces where they could concentrate without distraction. In response, high-walled cubicles took over the corporate landscape. By the late 1990s, the tide had turned, and only 23% of employees wanted more privacy, and 50% wanted more access to other people. Ever since, firms have been beefing up spaces that support collaboration and shrinking areas for individual work. But the pendulum seems to have swung too far: Once again, people feel a pressing need for privacy, not only to do heads-down work but to cope with the intensity of work today. To address these needs, according to the authors, we have to rethink our assumptions about privacy. Traditionally defined in physical terms, privacy is now about the individual's ability to control information and stimulation. In this article, the authors examine workspace design through the new lens of privacy and offer insights on how to foster teamwork and solitude.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Rising labor costs in China and other emerging economies, high supply chain and logistics costs, and wide differentials in energy costs in different parts of the world are provoking a fresh round of relocation of manufacturing and production. While some labor-intensive jobs are moving out of China to Southeast Asia or the next emerging low-cost regions, some manufacturing work is also returning to the United States. Wal-Mart is facilitating reshoring efforts among its suppliers, and consultants are offering reshoring conferences, reports and lots of advice. While the data on comparative labor and factor costs may be compelling, reshoring -bringing assembly work back from abroad -is hard work, notes author Willy C. Shih. This is especially true when needed resources (the supplier base, the workforce and even the company's own internal product design capabilities) have atrophied. Shih studied several initiatives aimed at rebuilding regional capacity in the United States (including at GE's Appliance Park in Kentucky and two Flextronics International plants in Texas) and other examples in Europe and Asia to identify lessons about what works. The benefits were no surprise. Placing manufacturing close to the market minimizes inventory in the pipeline, reduces delivery times and shortens ordering cycles. The challenges were less apparent: the need to stabilize the workforce, address skill gaps, rethink the capital/labor ratio, localize the supply base and rethink product design to leverage the proximity to manufacturing. In many ways, Shih writes, the challenges of reshoring to the United States are the challenges of reshoring in any market in the world. Managers must design supply chains for the production of goods that balance proximity to diverse markets with the locations of their capabilities and their supply ecosystems. Doing that well, Shih argues, will always be a source of competitive advantage.

Spreadsheet supplement for IMB483.

In early 2014, the senior vice-president of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan is considering two investment opportunities in the oil and gas industry brought forward by his team. He is trying to understand how to ensure that the principles underpinning responsible investing are incorporated in the decision about which to choose. Each investment looks very attractive, but a growing stream of controversies surrounding oil sands extraction, pipeline safety and environmental protection has raised concerns. He faces multiple questions: How can the impact of these environmental, social and governance issues be quantified precisely? Can they be translated into an informed investment decision that the organization's stakeholders will accept? What approach to responsible investing is appropriate for a pension fund? What alternative methods of incorporating these issues into the investment decision process should be considered?

The case examines the operations strategy of Whole Foods, one of the largest natural grocery chains in the United States. In late 2013, Whole Foods was expanding rapidly, with a publicly-stated goal of growing from 351 to 1,000 domestic stores by 2022. It was also engaged in a strategic initiative to combat "food deserts" - areas with limited access to affordable and nutritious food. In pursuit of these initiatives, the company's rapid entry into a heterogeneous set of new markets necessitated a reexamination of its store format, target customer base, and approach to human capital.

Tata Cummins Limited (TCL), a leading manufacturer of diesel engines in India, faced a variety of challenges in meeting the October 2010 deadline for new automobile emissions standards. These standards are identified as Bharat Stage (BS) standards ranging from BS I to BS V. The subject of this case — the BS III standard — was introduced in 2005 for just 11 cities across India and then made mandatory for the entire country by October of 2010. At that time, the BS IV standard had already been implemented in a few large cities and it was this standard that was expected to exist nationwide by 2017. Reflecting on their successful experience with the transition to the 2010 automobile emissions standards, the vice-president of TCL hoped to make this next transition a smooth one by identifying the issues that the company would face in the near future.

Organizing speedy and efficient supply operations for unpredictable major natural disasters was a continuing challenge for the U.S. military, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was both unique in its operational scope and political complexity. As he reviewed the after-action reports, George Topic, the Vice Director of the Center for Joint and Strategic Logistics at the National Defense University wondered how the performance of disaster relief efforts should really be measured. How should the efficiency of the response be characterized? He wondered if they could overcome some of the hurdles to applying concepts from commercial supply chains. The case explores some of the lessons learned from the Haiti disaster, and offers an opportunity to test well-known supply chain concepts.

This supplemental case follows up on the Netflix Prize Contest described in Netflix: Designing the Netflix Prize (A). In the A case, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings must decide how to organize a crowdsourcing contest to improve the algorithms for Netflix's movie recommendation software. The B case follows the contest from the building of the platform in 2006 to the awarding of the highest prize in 2009. The B cause also considers the aftermath of the contest, and the issues of successfully implementing a winning idea from a contest.

In 2010, Pfizer established four small research units in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and San Diego located close to several premier Academic Medical Centers (AMCs), or hospitals with adjoining medical schools. The goal of these units was to redesign collaboration with Pfizer and academic medical researchers with the purpose of developing new, innovative drugs candidates for testing in patients. Project teams consisted of Pfizer scientists and academics working side-by-side to reduce the time needed to bring a therapeutic drug from the lab to a patient's bedside. This case explores the academic collaboration model developed by Pfizer. What were the strengths of and challenges facing this model? How would the model evolve in the future? And how would new, similar collaboration models surfacing at other major pharmaceutical companies pose a threat to the Pfizer model?

Charlie Reese, an operations manager for a fragrance manufacturer, is given a directive to reduce costs in order to free up working capital for other initiatives. Reese discovers that his initial plan to approach the problem from an inventory perspective would be unsustainable. In evaluating his options, he must determine which other areas of the production process to focus on.

Many firms have enjoyed remarkable success using revenue sharing contracts to improve supply chain performance. Video rental industry and its pioneering deal with movie studios is one such example. At the same time, other firms have struggled to make it work. What accounts for this difference? When can revenue sharing create significant value and what are implementation costs? By comparing and contrasting several case examples-including our own experience working with a major semi-conductor manufacturer-we develop a general framework that helps answer these questions, which is based on the fundamental sources of added value and added costs.

The Akshaya Patra Foundation (TAPF), a Bangalore-based Indian non-governmental organization, is hailed globally for running the world's largest school meal programme. It has grown from serving five schools in Bangalore in June 2000 (1,500 children) a day to its current operations of 19 locations in nine Indian states, providing lunch meals to approximately 1.5 million school children every day. This case looks at the operations of one of its larger kitchens, which is located at Vasanthapura in Bangalore. It describes the complete range of activities: procurement, pre-processing, cooking, and finally packaging and dispatch, at this center. The case is rich in data and helps generate discussions around the material planning, procurement, and production planning activities at this kitchen.

Spreadsheet supplement for IMB475.

Easwaran Iyer, Dean of the Jain University's Business School, wanted to ensure that they admitted the right set of students to their Master of Business Administration (MBA) program, but he was not sure about the parameters that could be used to identify students who were ideal for the MBA program. Jain University received applications for the MBA program from across India and admitted approximately 400 students every year. There had been a steady increase in the number of applications received by Jain University over the years. Placement performance played a major role in attracting good quality students to the MBA program in India. In 2012, over 180 Business Schools in major cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Lucknow, and Dehradun closed down. Although, there could be many reasons for their closure, their inability to place their students played a key role. At the beginning of every admissions season, which began in April and stretched until July, Iyer thoroughly screened the admission seeking candidates and decided along with his admission committee which of candidates were admitted or rejected. Although there was no penalty if a non-placeable student was selected, it would weigh heavily on the institute's reputation. A wrong pick could eventually contribute towards an increase in the number of unplaced students as well as a reduction in the average salary. Moreover, there was the possibility of rejecting a placeable candidate. What made Iyer's job tougher was that he was expected to increase the batch size while also increasing the quality of the admitted set of students. He acknowledged that MBA admissions needed much more analytical reasoning, taking multiple criteria into consideration.

Efficiently and effectively providing flu shots on a college campus is the challenge that faces the school's director of health services. After a failed flu shot program the year prior and the resulting epidemic, the director must ensure students, faculty and staff receive the shot this year. Benchmarking reveals that a single day flu shot marathon has been successful on other campuses but lines must be managed to limit waiting time. The reader is introduced to basic queuing theory to determine how many shot stations are needed balancing line length and cost. They also explore the impact of peaks on line management.