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This case features the challenges of a startup in the crowdfunding space in 2015 as its leadership assesses potential sources of growth for the company's future. Founded in Israel in 2012 by a renowned venture capitalist, OurCrowd was a venture capital crowdfunding platform that strove to connect high-growth startups raising capital with accredited private investors from around the world. Its value proposition was to democratize an inefficient market for private equity that had historically been dominated by a small number of highly connected venture capital firms (VCs). The case asks students to put themselves in the shoes of OurCrowd's head of investor community as he prepares for a meeting with the company's board of directors to discuss potential strategies for growth: Should the company partner with the incumbent VCs it initially sought to disrupt, emphasize marketing its Portfolio Reserve fund, strive to provide its investors and investees with higher value-added services, target a broader swath of investors by aggressively marketing the platform in international markets, or attempt to go up-market and pursue increasingly larger deals with later-stage companies? Through assessing these options and discussing this case, students will learn about incentive problems in two-sided markets as well as how different types of crowdfunding platforms create value for users.

The case is set in November 2013, when Siam Park City - one of Thailand's biggest Amusement Park and Water Park - was celebrating its 33rd anniversary. Siam Park City was born out of the vision of Chaiwat Luangamornlert, a successful businessman who wanted to build an amusement park and water park for the people of Thailand that was of international standard, but yet available to the average Thai at an affordable price. With affordability as the cornerstone of the business philosophy, the park's entry fee was pegged at 'a reasonable price', with heavy discounts offered to Thai residents. Visitors also spent very little inside the park. This pricing strategy proved unsustainable for a business that had high set-up and operating costs, and the park suffered financial losses for more than two decades, ultimately leading to its bankruptcy. The financial loss was further aggravated by reputation loss, following two accidents in the park. Understanding that the park required a leadership change, Chaiwat stepped down from the helm in 2008 and handed over the reins of the business to his children. The new management team revamped internal operations and worked to diversify the park's customer base. The changes ushered in a new era for the amusement park - business improved and the company even earned a modest profit in 2012. Looking ahead, the new management faces the challenge of making the business financially viable over the long term, keeping in mind his founder's principles to keep the park affordable and accessible to locals.

Golf over the years emerged as a global, cash-driven property development industry with nearly 4.4 million registered players in Europe alone in 2014. It developed as a business relying on a dense network of small- and medium-sized enterprises steeped in tradition. The combination of high growth and low brand value led to the golf industry lagging significantly behind other industries in terms of sustainability and social and environmental responsibility. With the downturn of 2008, things started to change, reluctantly at first then more proactively. Sustainability emerged as a hot topic on greens around the world. Bert Stadhouders knew more about it than anyone else. Freshly appointed in January 2014 as project manager for the Sustainable Golf Project, he was himself a dedicated golfer and a sustainability specialist. He had witnessed firsthand the disdain with which the sport was treating its sustainability footprint, as if oblivious to the CSR higher callings. In fact, beyond its green image and vocabulary, the game generated massive environmental and social challenges. Bert wondered how he could help drive sustainability to the top of the agenda in a reluctant industry steeped in conventions and history. Were the economic difficulties of the time a bounty or a boon for sustainability as a cause? To address sustainability on a global scale in golf, how could he factor in the huge differences between upcoming markets in Asia and more mature markets in Europe and the United States?

This case gives students the opportunity to explore the concept of organizational status as a competitive asset. CEO Noura Abdullah of Saudi furniture retailer Aura founded her company as a middle-market furniture and home goods store offering affordable yet design-savvy products. By many accounts, both tangible and intangible, Aura had been a success. By late 2014, Aura had drawn considerable attention from several high-status Saudi wedding planners and media outlets, including Harper's Bazaar Interiors, Elle Décor, and Martha Stewart Weddings. This attention yielded unusually strong conversion rates (the percentage of visitors to the store who made a purchase). Foot traffic, on the other hand, remained unexpectedly low, leading Abdullah to wonder whether the high-status affiliations had unintentionally signaled to mid-market consumers that they would not be able to afford Aura's products, keeping such customers away. Students will decide, along with Abdullah, how to handle this unique "problem" as Aura enters a growth phase to other Saudi and Middle Eastern markets.

This case is set inside IBM Research's efforts to build a computer that can successfully take on human challengers playing the game show Jeopardy! It opens with the machine named Watson offering the incorrect answer "Toronto" to a seemingly simple question during the championship match. Was the answer a reflection of a strategic weakness, or was it actually consistent with design principles established by the development team? The case seeks to expand students' view of the product development process. Traditional software development projects begin with the gathering of requirements and analysis of the problem, and the writing of a detailed specification. The Jeopardy! problem is different-it requires a probabilistic approach where there is no closed form solution. Instead statistical patterns in the data are important and there is no obvious mapping to the way queries are expressed. Such problems are increasingly common in data mining, optimization problems, or Internet applications where the goal is to find an acceptably good solution in a short amount of time, when a deterministic approach might be less fruitful or impractical. We aspire for students to recognize that product development can take many forms, and that these are enabled by creativity and the right organizational flexibility and mindset. This abridged version of the case focuses on the choice of Jeopardy! as the development target, and the approach taken by the development team. The original case is HBS No. 612-017, and has much more detail on the design strategy for the Watson system.

Ambicultural organizations and executives go a step beyond simply embracing different thoughts and behaviors-they transcend divisions to integrate such "opposites" as competition and cooperation, East and West or Chinese and American business approaches and strategies. They combine the best of two or more entities-cultures, ideas, practices-while avoiding the shortcomings of each.

Rey Holdings Corp. was one of the two leading supermarket chains in Panama, with an estimated 30% market share,39 stores and a five-year aggressive expansion plan. In addition, Rey Holdings held a lower market share in the pharmaceutical and food industries. In 2011, the company was evaluating growth options through: a) point-of-sales and geographical growth; b) expanding product mix and store layout; and c) a strong market entry into the pharmaceutical industry through the acquisition of Metro Corporation.

Chair of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission Beverly Jones Heydinger has to decide on the right formula for the Minnesota Value of Solar Tariff (VOST). The calculation is a replacement for net energy metering. If the VOST is too low, then installing solar will become too costly for many. If the VOST is too high, then it will become a subsidy for the solar industry and customers who can already afford solar projects. Students are asked to put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist and find the right balance.

The Newlight Technologies case is set at the end of 2013. Newlight has been awarded the Innovation Prize for Biomaterial of the Year by nova-Institut GmbH at the Cologne International Conference on Industrial Biotechnology and Bio-based Plastics & Composites. The company has a small-scale pilot plant using enzyme catalysts to produce a bioplastic resin, PHA, which has a wide range of applications for products in the plastics industry. The pilot plant can produce enough resin to perform product trials for a number of end-users at the same time. The innovative process is the fruit of ten years' research and the result promises to be one of the first biopolymers to be economically competitive with petro-chemical based products on price and performance. The case provides details of the global industry, giving scope and scale information for businesses along the value chain, including market segmentation and resin pricing.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. American health care is undergoing a data-driven transformation - and Intermountain Healthcare is leading the way. This MIT Sloan Management Review case study examines the data and analytics culture at Intermountain, a Utah-based company that runs 22 hospitals and 185 clinics. Data-driven decision making has improved patient outcomes in Intermountain's cardiovascular medicine, endocrinology, surgery, obstetrics and care processes - while saving millions of dollars in procurement and in its the supply chain.

CEO Tim Cook is contemplating the source of longer-term growth at Apple.. Since Steve Jobs' death, Cook has successfully led Apple and made it the first company to be worth more than $700 billion. Under Cook's leadership, Apple has largely released derivatives of existing products (e.g., iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, etc.). This has increased Apple's reliance on the iPhone (2/3 revenues), and Apple appears to be following a path to sell complementary products to the iPhone (Beats, Apple Pay, Apple Watch) at the same time that it is pursuing product development (Apple TV, Apple Car). The Apple Watch is the first new product category introduced under Tim Cook. As industry convergence continues, the case also looks at Apple main competitors: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung.

The case begins with Roberto Ioriatti, Vice President of Atlantic & Pacific Pricing and Revenue Management at Delta Air Lines, appreciating the diversity of the Delta workforce at the annual Delta Block Party. This is symptomatic of a shift toward a more diverse population in the United States. The party leads to a key question of the case: What should be Delta's strategic response to the changing demographics of the United States, both in terms of products and services? A secondary question of the case is this: How should Delta respond to increased global competition, especially to the threat posed by rapidly expanding airlines from the Middle East such as Etihad Airways, Emirates, and Qatar Airways?

The case outlines the growth of Google: from its beginning at Stanford, to its achieved milestones (becoming profitable, becoming an IPO) and finally to its success attracting competition and inciting government regulation-this, along with technology change, are the current challenges its CEO Larry Page must now face. With Android, Google has successfully shifted from search functionality on personal computers to search functionality on mobile devices and developed an ecosystem of services to attract users. However, Google continues to depend heavily on advertising (which makes up 90 percent of its revenues). Further, as R&D investments are increasing at competing firms, R&D productivity is simultaneously decreasing at Google. The shifting sands of competition and regulation cannot be ignored, and Google faces the prospect of needing both business as well as corporate strategy to better guide its activities.

The case dilemma centers around Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer (COO) and second in command. She is looking to take the company to the next level: not only to continued growth in mobile ads, but to dominance in the digital ad space. For this to occur, Facebook would somehow have to top Google in both display and search ads, despite only having nominal presence and expertise in display ads. Moreover, Facebook is facing the continued convergence in this fast-moving industry

Since 1980 global corporate profits have grown at an unprecedented pace, increasing their share of global GDP by 30%. North American and Western European multinationals have been the biggest beneficiaries, capturing more than half of corporate profits by leveraging their scale and exploiting unprecedented opportunities for reducing costs. This remarkable era is now coming to an end. Growth is slowing, costs are rising, and new rivals from emerging economies and from the technology sector are changing the rules. In the decade ahead, the authors forecast, profits will continue to increase in absolute terms, but they will fall to 7.9% of global GDP--around what they were when the boom began. To maintain their lead, executives in Western multinationals must consider the following responses. (1) Be paranoid. Instead of focusing internally, executives in Western firms need to understand their new rivals. (2) Seek out patient capital. Emerging-market firms and technology companies often take a long view, building their market share over years at the expense of short-term profits. (3) Radically self-disrupt. Companies must overcome strategic inertia by reallocating capital as conditions change. (4) Build new intellectual assets. The most profitable businesses are in idea-intensive industries, so intellectual capital, such as data and algorithms, is a prime asset. (5) Go to war for talent. As populations age and talent becomes scarce, now is the time for human capital management to become a strategic priority.

The case on BharatMatrimony.com elucidates the business model of a matching platform, one that matches the users on one side with those on the other side. The case describes the entrepreneurial journey of the firm and its founder, elaborates on the business model, and its attempts at diversification. Key issues for discussion using this case include sustainability of the matching platform business model and identification of the specific industry conditions where such business models could be extended (and where it could not be).

The caselet on Practo elucidates the business model of a matching platform, one that matches the users on one side (clinics) with those on the other side (patients). The case elaborates on the business model, and elucidates why a combination of the SaaS offering (Practo Ray) and the platform business model (Practo.com) is essential to the sustainability of the business model. Key issues for discussion using this caselet in conjunction with the BharatMatrimony.com case and the Just Dial caselet include sustainability of matching platform business models and identification of the specific industry conditions where such business models could be extended (and where it could not be).

The caselet on Just Dial elucidates the business model of a matching platform, one that matches the users on one side (consumers) with those on the other side (local, small and medium businesses). The case elaborates on the business model, and elucidates the evolution of Just Dial's business from a simple local search platform, to a search & transact platform. The case ends with questions on the sustainability of the business model and the extension to product ecommerce. Key issues for discussion using this caselet in conjunction with the BharatMatrimony.com case and the Practo caselet include sustainability of matching platform business models and identification of the specific industry conditions where such business models could be extended (and where it could not be).

Amazon began life as an online bookseller, of course, but now there are few products you can't buy on the site. New research led by HBS's Feng Zhu investigates a common worry of Amazon's third-party sellers: What happens when, instead of just matching buyers and sellers, the platform decides to offer competing products itself? Zhu's team examined 164,000 products sold exclusively by third parties and found that 10 months later, Amazon had begun directly selling items in 3% of those product categories. Further, the items sold directly by Amazon often became the default option in search results. The team recommends that sellers using the Amazon platform take some defensive steps: They can reduce the odds of Amazon's entering the market by signing exclusive deals with suppliers (or manufacturing some products themselves) and focusing on a large selection of niche products rather than widely popular items. This reprint contains three additional Idea Watch articles. "Do CMOs Really Add Value?" looks at extensive new research aimed at providing a once-and-for-all answer to this persistent question (the conclusion, in brief: Yes). "The Wrong Way to Reduce Churn" describes a study of a wireless communication firm whose seemingly customer-friendly outreach effort--offering overspending consumers a better plan--backfired and cost it customers, and offers some theories as to why. And "Quitting Time" is a visual depiction of when employees in a million-person sample left their companies--showing that in today's candidate-driven job market, people move on surprisingly soon.

Although learning executives such as chief learning officers must shoulder the burden of developing the company's talent capabilities and supporting strategic priorities, the authors argue that CEOs and other top executives have a critical role to play. Personal engagement and leadership on the part of the CEO can make a big difference in setting the right tone for the organization. While companies often begin with training-needs assessments, the authors recommend starting by mapping what they call the "CEO agenda"to ensure that learning gets properly aligned with strategy. This connects learning and development with the company's specific needs and cuts through the noise of multiple initiatives vying for attention -highlighting the critical "must-win battles"that the CEO has identified. The next task is to operationalize the learning agenda through a portfolio of learning and development activities. This involves doing an inventory of existing learning and development resources. Companies should repeat this on a regular basis, the authors say, to ensure that the activities in place reflect the company's learning strategy. Companies should be wary about making wholesale changes to learning portfolios and organizational structures, the authors warn, unless there are major shifts in the company's mission or business context. Reorganizations "should be limited to situations where they are warranted -for example, when the learning agenda is misaligned with corporate strategy or the strategy changes." Like the CEO agenda, the company's learning agenda should articulate the essential strategic initiatives for corporate learning. Choices about what to include or eliminate to bring learning activities in line with current priorities should not be made in isolation, and the authors say it's important to get input and buy-in from both the learning organization and business leaders -all the way to the CEO level.