個案總覽

The case series describes strategic transformation at Takeda, the largest Japanese pharmaceutical company, with a special focus on the R&D function. Since 2015, the 237-year-old industry doyen has narrowed its strategic focus from six to three therapeutic areas, reorganised its global R&D footprint around one Japanese and two US sites, and engaged in over 180 new partnerships across multiple modalities of drug discovery around the world. The pipeline of new drugs, a key gauge of future growth, has shifted from 7% partner-based pre-transformation to approximately 45% partner-based today, and an entrepreneurial, geocentric way of working has taken hold. At Takeda, a generation's worth of strategic transformation has been compressed into three years.From the outset of the transformation process, outgoing Chairman Yasu Hasegawa and incoming CEO Christophe Weber made it a point to sound out major shareholders and engage candidly with the union, working with different stakeholders to find novel organisational solutions. Once plans crystallised in 2016, Hasegawa and Weber moved to reconstitute the board of directors, changing its composition and renegotiating its modus operandi to further strategic dialogue. During the course of the same year, the executive team was recast around people - internal and external - who had the skills and the mindset to take the company forward on its new path. Early in 2017, executives finally initiated a review and adjustment of existing structures in R&D, particularly as they pertained to the burgeoning partnership portfolio. In other words, Takeda stands out not only as a rare example of a large company reinventing itself, but also as a case that illustrates the importance of proactively addressing the governance of transformation.

The case series describes strategic transformation at Takeda, the largest Japanese pharmaceutical company, with a special focus on the R&D function. Since 2015, the 237-year-old industry doyen has narrowed its strategic focus from six to three therapeutic areas, reorganised its global R&D footprint around one Japanese and two US sites, and engaged in over 180 new partnerships across multiple modalities of drug discovery around the world. The pipeline of new drugs, a key gauge of future growth, has shifted from 7% partner-based pre-transformation to approximately 45% partner-based today, and an entrepreneurial, geocentric way of working has taken hold. At Takeda, a generation's worth of strategic transformation has been compressed into three years.From the outset of the transformation process, outgoing Chairman Yasu Hasegawa and incoming CEO Christophe Weber made it a point to sound out major shareholders and engage candidly with the union, working with different stakeholders to find novel organisational solutions. Once plans crystallised in 2016, Hasegawa and Weber moved to reconstitute the board of directors, changing its composition and renegotiating its modus operandi to further strategic dialogue. During the course of the same year, the executive team was recast around people - internal and external - who had the skills and the mindset to take the company forward on its new path. Early in 2017, executives finally initiated a review and adjustment of existing structures in R&D, particularly as they pertained to the burgeoning partnership portfolio. In other words, Takeda stands out not only as a rare example of a large company reinventing itself, but also as a case that illustrates the importance of proactively addressing the governance of transformation.

Blockchain is poised to help media and entertainment companies build innovative business models that offer new monetization strategies for their digital assets and streamline critical business activities.

If you think sophisticated communication technologies are the ticket to your virtual team's success, think again. It's not the tech that matters -it's how people use it. New research reveals five strategies for conquering distance and improving communication and performance in dispersed teams. The same strategies can help co-located teams, which depend increasingly on virtual [...]

Organizations need to focus on how blockchain can be used to support their unique strategies. Without this focus, they risk investing in initiatives that don't provide meaningful value.

With the rise of blockchain and adoption of cryptocurrencies, companies across different industries can benefit from the increased trust and transparency these emerging technologies provide. Most executives recognize the need to prioritize blockchain as part of their business strategy, but the question of how to adopt and reskill can be daunting.

Companies are looking to artificial intelligence to create business value, and as MIT Sloan Management Review's 2018 Global Executive Study and Research Report on AI shows, Pioneer organizations are pulling ahead of their counterparts. By deepening their commitment to AI and focusing on revenue-generating applications over cost savings, these early implementers are positioning themselves to reap the benefits of AI at scale.

Initiated in 2001, 100 Women in Finance (100WF) has evolved over the years from a small, informal networking group of women working in hedge funds in New York City into an international, non-profit networking organization with more than 15,000 members in 23 locations in 2018 with a broadened focus on the entire finance industry. In June 2018, CEO Amanda Pullinger visited Hong Kong to deepen her understanding of issues in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, particularly the organization's reliance on volunteers in Asian cities which lacked a culture of volunteerism. Some APAC members also felt disconnected from the organization's New York and London centers because of the geographical distance. The APAC head, Sarah Dyer, needed to ensure that APAC members' needs were met. She wanted to decide about the organization's future strategy for the region which might differ from the strategies for other regions.

The culture-strategy-execution framework, known as the Trio Model, offers organizations a powerful, adaptive approach to navigating today's complicated global issues. By considering culture as an integral part of strategic thinking, executives and practitioners adopting the model can take a holistic approach to solving practical problems.

This case describes how a small business venture started by five friends turned, over a 20-year span, into a company with sales of USD 49 million and a renowned, sustainable and innovative business model that had a high social and environmental impact. It also illustrates impact entrepreneurs' calling and motivation, as well as the dilemmas and challenges faced in order to stay true to their principles as the business grows and consolidates. The key question confronting these entrepreneurs at the end of the case is whether Guayakí should continue to grow at its current pace, or whether it should moderate its growth in order for its founders to gain a better understanding of the negative environmental impacts that the business creates and to find ways to manage those impacts.

The case reviews how the Japanese company Park24 reinvented the short-stay parking industry in Japan and expanded it over the years, establishing itself as the unchallenged market leader. Hitherto short-stay parking in Japan was largely provided as a public service. Shortage of land and the high price of real estate explained the severe shortage of city parking space was due to land scarcity and lofty prices of land resources. Park24 saw that the solution was not building gigantic multi-storey car parks but making parking lots available everywhere people went and accessible anytime of the day. Drawing insights from the convenience store industry, Park24 looked for small plots near popular destinations and launched a low-cost, secure and automated parking service called Times. Rolled out rapidly across Japan, it fundamentally redrew the landscape of the short-stay parking industry. Park24's blue ocean move shows how a nondisruptive market-creating approach can open up new value-cost frontiers, new demand and high growth. The case comes with a teaching note, a first-hand interview with Koichi Nishikawa, Park24 President, and lecture slides. The slides and videos can be downloaded for teaching purposes from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/park24/

In April 2017, an entrepreneur in the tour operator industry faced a potential investment decision. Her company, Extraordinary Journeys (EJ), created custom luxury African safaris for a US-based clientele. While EJ had enjoyed dramatic growth since its founding in 2009, the entrepreneur worried that competitive pressures were increasing, as resource-rich companies had entered the market, drawn by the industry's rapid growth. In response to this growing competition, Gordon considered taking on one of three possible strategic opportunities: a public relations campaign, a direct marketing campaign, or a firm-optimization campaign that would use custom-built software to enhance employee productivity.

Kaan Terzioglu, Turkcell's CEO, was in a pensive mood on his fifth day on the job. He had just received his first WhatsApp call, which highlighted the challenge his company - Turkey's largest mobile telecommunications provider - was facing from over-the-top (OTT) service providers. Of Turkcell's 35 million mobile subscribers, 10 million were WhatsApp users. The 4.5G spectrum auctions, where the company would be competing against Vodafone and Turk Telekom, were approaching in August 2015. Turkcell needed to decide whether to bid aggressively to maintain its market leading position or to bid less aggressively to acknowledge a more competitive and less profitable future. Turkcell had remained solidly profitable and its revenues in Turkey had increased by 10% from the first quarter of 2014 to early 2015. Voice revenues in Turkey had dropped by 4%, though an increase in data revenues of 46% had more than counterbalanced this. Intense competition with Vodafone and Turk Telekom made it difficult to increase prices. Turkcell faced significant internal challenges. Mobile and fixed-line communications were run by separate subsidiaries, which made it difficult for Turkcell to present one face to the consumer and react effectively to the converging telecom market. The organization was top-heavy with too many managers at all levels. Despite all this, the feeling within the company was that there was no compelling need for change because it was number one among mobile telecom operators and profitable. Turkcell's international operations had been hit by currency devaluations in Ukraine and Belarus. They were a mixed bag including both subsidiaries and minority stakes. As the new CEO, Kaan Terzioglu knew that he had a window of opportunity to make significant changes. He wondered where he should start.

Supplement to case IMD972 Kaan Terzioglu, Turkcell's CEO, and his top team had spent Capital Markets Day with global investment analysts celebrating the firm's achievements. Over the last three years, the company had transformed itself from a network operator selling undifferentiated data and voice services in Turkey into an experience provider that offered messaging, music, TV, search and other services to its customers. This had culminated in the launch of its Lifecell digital brand in Turkey in September 2017. This had turbocharged its revenue growth, which reached 23% in 2017. While there was room for Turkcell to grow its core consumer business in Turkey, it would also rely on opportunities in digital services, the corporate market and in new business areas including energy, finance, healthcare and automotive to sustain future growth. Turkcell had rationalized its international portfolio, taken steps to make its subsidiaries in Ukraine, Belarus and Northern Cyprus financially stable and was moving forward with the same digital operator strategy as in Turkey. The company planned to grow internationally by franchising the digital operator model it had pioneered in Turkey to telecom operators worldwide. Kaan Terzioglu felt this would increase the company's valuation given the valuation of global over-the-top (OTT) companies. Turkcell's growth plan raised questions. Did the firm have the management bandwidth to move into so many new business areas in Turkey? Would it be able to grow internationally using the franchise model? The answers were not clear.

In late 2016, Russ D'Souza and Jack Groetzinger, co-founders of the online event ticketing platform SeatGeek, faced some difficult decisions. In the company's seven-year history, SeatGeek had positioned itself primarily as an aggregator, facilitating ticket transactions between sellers and buyers on the "secondary ticket market." But in early 2016, D'Souza and Groetzinger had decided to pursue the "primary ticket market"-contracting directly with the sports teams and venues that issued tickets to events, a space dominated by Ticketmaster. This move would require SeatGeek to confront Ticketmaster, an established incumbent, develop or acquire the back-end software necessary to enable primary market ticket sales, and establish partnerships with sports teams and event venues. Entering the primary market would also likely necessitate a Series D funding round.

Focusing on the use of digital technologies in the retail sector in Hong Kong, this case describes the challenges confronted by the largest department store operator in Hong Kong, SOGO department stores. A traditional brick-and-mortar retailer with negligible e-commerce operations, SOGO has recognized the impact of technology in the retail sector. Just as its customers are influenced by technology in their daily lives, SOGO has been perpetually challenged in seeking the optimal ways to integrate technology into its daily operations, such as point-of-sale (POS) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. SOGO needs to understand better the best ways to interact with its more than 500,000 loyal SOGO Rewards members, particularly the digitally-savvy younger customers. As a business case, this is not just a discussion about technology trends in retail, but about the strategic decision-making of an Executive Director of SOGO as she confronts the challenges and inherent costs to acquire new technologies and the resources required to train employees to use such technologies which would improve the company's interactions with its customers and drive growth. Furthermore, at the intersection of technology and customers is often data - data about customers' demographics (gender, age etc.), what items they are purchasing, how much they are spending, and what their likes and dislikes are. For SOGO, how could it leverage technology to utilize the extensive data it collects and maximize lifetime customer value?

In July 2017, CEO Kevin Tabb of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center announced his plan to consolidate 11 Massachusetts hospitals under a common management structure. These hospitals collectively generated $5 billion in patient revenue and 25% of privately-insured hospital stays in the state. The merger would create a credible competitor to Partners Healthcare, the state's dominant health care provider, but would potentially reduce competition and raise prices. State regulators were assessing the merger, and Tabb needed to argue its merits.

This case covers the ten-year development of Shenzhen's innovation landscape from 2008 when China hosted the Summer Olympics and launched its nationwide 3G mobile network to 2018, which marks the 40th anniversary of the nation's economic reform. Specifically, it identifies the confluence of global and China-specific factors that transformed Shenzhen from a shanzhai (copycat) hub to startup haven, such as the rise of mobile internet and the adoption of automation in Shenzhen factories, as well as the "Made in China 2025" and "Chinese Dream" visions promoted by the government. The case discusses how the decades-old practice of shanzhai may not be a flaw but a feature crucial to Shenzhen's innovative vitality. It returns to the idea of innovation as a web to be woven, "layer by layer, with every business deal brokered among its firms, and with every inventive idea sketched out by its army of makers". It poses several questions revolving around the idea of shanzhai. Is it something so undesirable that it has to be exorcised from Shenzhen? Or is it the basis of which innovation, Shenzhen style, flourishes and spreads?

In 2016, the managing director of innogy Consulting GmbH (iCon), an international strategic consulting firm based in Germany, had many reasons to be delighted. The company had risen to second place in an annual ranking of internal consultancies after successfully expanding into four new countries. He now pondered new challenges and directions for iCon, after having led RWE Consulting-the predecessor to iCon-since 2007. As an internal consulting department within the RWE Group (RWE) in Germany, the consulting unit mainly conducted information technology implementation and project management within RWE. Although the managing director had led the consultancy unit into new geographic markets and toward new external clients, iCon faced many challenges, including tough competition in the external management-consultancy market. How could iCon take steps to compete away from home?

In June 2015, a new president and chief executive officer, Sandip Lalli, was hired by the board of directors of Keystone Excavating Limited (Keystone) to turn the company around and increase its value. In its 35 years of operations, Keystone had failed to articulate a purpose, and for the past five years it had been in double-digit decline. The economic downturn in Alberta from 2014 to 2016 had made the situation dire, and by September 2016 Lalli was going to recommend closing the company. But how should she do this? How should she tell the shareholders of this family-owned business that things were unlikely to improve and that there would be another challenge ahead? How could Keystone cease operations while retaining its legacy?