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In early 2021, an investor wanted to invest in Bitcoin. However, because of the high volatility of the currency, she wanted to know when to buy and sell Bitcoin to avoid the price fluctuations caused by various short-term phenomena. Her main objective was to generate the maximum profit possible based on the moving average strategy. How could she use this strategy to profit from Bitcoin’s price movement?

Korean pop music (K-pop), once limited to an Asian market, broke its cultural boundaries and became global in 2012 when Psy’s song-and-dance video “Gangnam Style” went viral around the world. The subsequent global success of the Korean idol boy band BTS confirmed that K-pop had a place in an international music market. With international performances and major US awards since its debut in 2013, BTS was carefully analyzed by those who wanted to identify the reasons for its success. Factors such as the band’s active use of social media and quality transgenerational content were commonly identified, but media reports pointed mainly to the influence of the band’s fan group, or ARMY, and its social media influencers, known as hommas, as reasons for BTS’s success. Big Hit Entertainment (Big Hit), BTS’s talent agency, needed to sustain the band’s unprecedented success. What should Big Hit consider in developing a sustainable competitive advantage in a global music market increasingly taking advantage of new media?

Food safety and fraud were long-standing issues in China. For some imported products, such as Australian beef steak, food fraud could be a massive issue: consumers could purchase the wrong or even harmful products, and legitimate brands subsequently lost sales and reputation. BeefLedger Ltd. (BeefLedger) was an Australian blockchain start-up company that aimed to solve these issues by using blockchain technology to supply authentic beef products to customers in China and elsewhere. The technology also significantly improved transparency in the beef supply chain. Since 2017, BeefLedger had gained important experience in this area and achieved a certain level of success.<br><br>The concept of blockchain, proposed in late 2008 and used successfully used in finance since then, was still in its infancy in other areas. The next promising field to adopt blockchain was supply chain management, where the technology had the potential to revolutionize the supply chain with its unique functions, including immutability and decentralization. However, many challenges emerged for BeefLedger during blockchain implementation—especially in early 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and Australia–China tensions. BeefLedger now had to determine how to handle these recent challenges.

In September 2019, the newly appointed manager of the procurement department at Jiangxi Hengda High-Tech Company Ltd., located in China, was wondering how to make his department more efficient. He took some time to understand the working relationships of his department with other internal departments and with external suppliers. During his research, he uncovered sources of conflict between the procurement department and other functional departments, including the marketing, manufacturing, warehousing, and finance departments, as well as the company’s suppliers. The manager took his findings to the company’s chairman and reported that the low efficiency of the procurement department was caused by the company’s lack of synergy across departments. The chairman acknowledged the issue and agreed that some reform of the company’s departments was necessary. However, he also pointed out that this would be a complex, costly, and difficult task. The manager of the procurement department was adamant that the company would have to resolve this systemic issue at some point and decided to prepare a proposal for his next meeting with the chairman.

Both founded in the mid-2000s as two of China’s earliest online video platforms and both emphasizing creative, original content, Youku and Tudou enjoyed popularity among China’s young netizens, while constantly battling each other for market leadership. Both firms went public, on the NYSE and Nasdaq respectively. Facing China’s hyper-competitive online video market, the twin firms decided to engage in a series of transactions, including a merger of the two, the delisting of Tudou, a major investment from and eventually the acquisition by Alibaba, and the delisting of Youku Tudou and transformation into part of Alibaba. Together with Baidu’s iQIYI and Tencent Video, Youku Tudou will continue to shape China’s entertainment and media landscape.

Following problems during the 2016 Iowa caucus, the Democratic National Committee mandated the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) to publish raw vote totals for the upcoming 2020 Iowa caucus. This mandate coincided with the IDP’s shift for the 2020 caucus from a partnership with Microsoft, Inc. to one with a political consultancy, Shadow Inc., for developing a vote-recording application (app)---a partnership choice believed by many to have been politically motivated. Shadow developers were given much less time and resources than Microsoft had been afforded for the previous caucus. When the time came for the app to be used on February 3, eligible users could not download the app, which led to several problems. The consequences of the problematic app led to embarrassment for the Democratic Party, political ridicule by the Republican Party, distrust among democrat voters, and ambiguity and a delay in election results.

Isaac Park was only six weeks into the role of leading all technology operations for Primal Leadership Solutions, a global leadership advisory organization that offered consulting services and executive recruitment. The lifeblood of the business was its database, which contained the critical and comprehensive information for all of the organization’s past and current projects as well as its employees, clients, and recruits. The legacy system had to be replaced by a single, efficient, and reliable database. Although implementing a new database sounded straightforward, about halfway through implementation, pandemonium had broken out. The project’s leader was asked to step aside, and Park was asked to step in as the new leader. Park knew that going back to the old system was not the right answer; it was imperative that the company find a way forward. Both Park’s own credibility and the credibility of the project were on the line.

In 2016, the University of Calgary (U of C) was celebrating its 50th anniversary with a variety of events, such as the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, which brought visiting scholars from across the globe. At the same time, Alberta, ON, had been hit with significant forest fires, and many residents that were evacuated from northern communities had moved into U of C residences. The campus was alive with activity when its information technology (IT) systems were encrypted in a ransomware attack. The university’s emergency response team had to act quickly to identify and isolate the root cause of the problem and to decide how to contain it, whether to pay the demanded ransom, and what to tell members of the university and the wider community. The university’s response to this threat and its management through the crisis would ultimately shape the IT team and future investment decisions.

Broadband-X, is a small-sized electronic contract manufacturing company. The company had been using QuickBooks accounting package and Excel sheets to manage its processes. As the company grew, Brian, the owner, noticed that the current model was not capable of efficiently managing the production processes and decided to acquire an enterprise resource planning (ERP) package. Brian tried to implement the system employing its current human resources. However, he realized that ERP implementation required a company-wide change management effort. Brian hired Zayan Preet to champion the ERP implementation project. Preet analyzed the system, conducted interviews to figure out the issues and the priorities, and began working on an implementation strategy and a project plan.

In February 2014, Global 3PL, one of the largest logistics companies in the world, announced an ambitious expansion strategy. In accordance with that plan, the company struck an agreement in 2017 with TradeIX Limited (TradeIX) to optimize its working capital management. TradeIX was a start-up based in Dublin, Ireland that offered blockchain technology solutions to help companies manage trade finance more efficiently, especially in the area of accounts receivable. However, the potential for improvement in the realm of trade finance was heavily restricted by a complex network of suppliers and an organizational structure of silos for data flow. Global 3PL was therefore working on a pilot project with TradeIX, using its Marco Polo platform, to connect with insurance and banking services through a secure network. The process enabled full transparency of all financing transactions in the accounts receivable process. Despite the success of the pilot project, the efficiency of the Marco Polo platform had to be assessed on a technological and strategic level. Determining if the platform could prove to be a long-term sustainable solution for full operation across Global 3PL’s global trade finance system landscape was critical.

In late 2019, the chief people officer at World Vision Canada was feeling overwhelmed. Eighteen months earlier, she had exited her intense and successful career in the private sector to join World Vision Canada, a leading international development charity. While she embraced the organization’s mission-driven ethos of collaboration and collegiality, it had led to an excess of meetings. In just the past week, she had attended more than 100 meetings. Was it time to resurrect the organization’s previous attempts to address its meeting culture? What roadblocks had prevented the success of those previous attempts? How could the chief people officer continue to be an advocate for a culture of collaboration and inclusivity while also ensuring a change to the meeting culture?

In 2017, the chief information officer (CIO) of Midwest Health System (Midwest), a major health care provider in a central town in the United States, noticed that incorrect billing, data theft, waste, fraud, and abuse in the health care industry had increased over the years. Compliance requirements related to various rules and regulations had also posed increasing challenges. The CIO wanted to meet with his colleagues in the information systems and audit groups to review risks related to information technology and the billing and collection process—the most critical process in terms of its impact on Midwest’s operations and financial statements. His plan was to modify and strengthen existing controls and to institute new ones to mitigate the significant risks identified. The CIO believed that better controls would enable Midwest to improve patient satisfaction and reduce loss of revenues due to incorrect billing, fraud, and other factors by ensuring better security processes while complying with various rules and regulations.

Social and political issues in the US health care system, along with near-record employment levels, had led to a high employee turnover rate throughout the industry in 2019. In October, after Brownspeed Health Care, a consultative service, received numerous requests from its clients for assistance, the chief analytical officer was asked to prepare a report on how the company could help its clients address the problem. The first phase of the plan was to use the Consumer Price Index for urban wage earners and clerical workers as part of a low-risk strategy to enhance employee compensation and deploy wide-scale retention strategies and forecasting services.

In 2019, the chief executive officer of Carefirst Seniors & Community Services Association (Carefirst) was sitting in her modest office near Toronto, Ontario, Canada, looking back on 22 years of providing health care services to seniors and other clients in the Toronto area. Demand for its services had been growing steadily, as Canada’s aging population continued to increase in numbers. The 2016 census reported that seniors outnumbered children for the first time in the survey’s history. One in six Canadians was age 65 or older, and this age group was growing four times faster than the overall population. In addition, more than one in five Canadians lived with a chronic disease. With increasing financial difficulties for the Canadian government to meet the needs of its aging citizens, and with a diverse population reflecting Canada’s comparatively open immigration policy, Carefirst was experiencing a changing external environment that demanded a swift pre-emptive response. A recent change in the provincial government had also led to a restructuring of the Ontario health care system. What would be its next strategic move, to ensure that it was better positioned for imminent changes?

The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding (Panda Base), located in Chengdu, China, was the world’s most popular scenic spot for giant panda tourism. Panda Base was founded in 1987 with a mission that included the protection and breeding of the endangered giant panda, scientific research, public education, and cultural tourism. In 2002, the director of Panda Base began to build panda culture and the panda brand in an effort to resolve low brand awareness and to better protect the giant panda. In 2020, Panda Base promoted the giant panda on various digital media platforms. Based on the concept of Web 3.0, Panda Base integrated the theories of social media marketing, content marketing, and viral marketing to promote panda culture and brand value, and successfully developed its core cultural brand value: "Tell the most touching story of the giant panda." Looking to the future, Panda Base’s director wanted to develop a smart tourism project to continue protecting giant pandas and increasing their population with the help of 5G (fifth-generation) technology, while providing tourists with an immersive experience. How can the director best use technology to support and promote Panda Base?

Yueting Network Technology Company Ltd. (Airparking) was founded in Guangzhou in 2015 by a pair of former managers from a large, state-owned real estate company to solve a common problem in Chinese metropolitan cities: a severe lack of parking space. Airparking's business model, based on the sharing economy concept, allowed the company not only to optimize the distribution of parking spaces but also to increase the operational efficiency of parking lots through digital technologies and solutions. As the company grew, the founders pivoted their business model by spinning off an asset-management branch focused on financializing their digital technologies and parking facility management capabilities. By 2019, Airparking was a relatively mature regional start-up, and the co-founders were looking forward to future growth and looking for ways to scale both the Airparking platform and the related asset operation platform. Their dream was a ¥10 billion valuation for each.

In 2016, the Volkswagen Group (VW Group) announced a new future program, Together–Strategy 2025, which outlined the company’s ambition of becoming “a world-leading provider of sustainable mobility” by 2025. The VW Group made it clear that innovation and technology would be essential enablers to the success of the new strategy. In 2018, VW Group, like other players in the automotive industry, was increasingly drawn to artificial intelligence (AI), which could be used in areas including manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, and data analytics.

Montreal Toheed Society (MTS), a community-based organization founded in 2012, has adopted various social media technologies to capture member interactions and to make the work of its board of directors more efficient and effective. The organization attempted to meet its needs by using JomSocial at first, followed later by Viber. MTS was partially successful in reaching its social media goals by implementing the Viber platform. The organization is now considering migrating to a new platform to overcome some limitations of the Viber technology. Two options for a new social media platform are Telegram and WhatsApp. In order to ensure a successful migration to a new platform, MTS must consider several questions: What should be the governing structure of the new social media platform? What would be the optimal balance of user freedom versus control? What sort of content should be allowed on the platform? Given its structure, how can MTS find the resources to manage a larger digital community?

In 2014, the Internet of things (IoT) was still considered in its infancy stage. Over the next two years, the IoT matured and represented a considerable amount of uncertainty for the entire electronics industry. In 2016, the industry was at an inflection point regarding the technology, and its largest competitors had to make a choice: risk investing in research and development for a potential return (or failure), or stay the course and let competitors assume the risk. The chief executive officer of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (Samsung), Boo-Keun Yoon, was in a position to take a stand in regard to the IoT and invest US$1.2 billion, which could have a major impact on the company’s future. It was up to Yoon to decide.

As Shanghai MarcPoint Information Technology Co. Ltd. (MarcPoint) celebrated its fifth anniversary, its founder was quite pleased by what the company had achieved. MarcPoint was a start-up that offered marketing research services by analyzing user-generated content (UGC) with big-data technologies. The company had been successful and grown steadily since its inception in 2013. It was founded upon the realization that UGC was disrupting traditional marketing research and that big-data analytics provided the technological means to analyze the UGC efficiently and effectively. In 2018, the founder reflected on what MarcPoint’s next steps should be: What technologies should they pursue? Which markets could they target for growth in the next five years? Should they try to transport MarcPoint’s success to overseas markets? All in all, what needed to be done to sustain MarcPoint’s growth and maintain its leading position in the turbulent technical and business environment?