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This note describes the emerging on-demand economy, also referred to as the sharing economy. The note highlights several companies including Uber and Airbnb that exemplify this new mode of competition, a model that threatens to disrupt traditional firms. Uber provides ride services much like a traditional taxi company, but it owns no cars and employs no drivers, and instead matches independent car owners with customers looking for rides. Airbnb provides a lodging service, but owns no hotels, and instead matches home owners with extra rooms with customers looking for a place to stay. The note allows students to explore what impact such companies might have on traditional business models, what impact they might have on labor and how people work, and whether existing regulations aimed at traditional business models are adequate for the new model.

In a December 1, 2013, interview on American television program 60 Minutes, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon would soon change the future of online shopping by enabling customers to receive items within thirty minutes of ordering. This delivery service, Bezos said, would be powered by unmanned autonomous drones and could be offered as soon as 2015. The market reaction was instantaneous and positive. Still, Amazon needed some answers before it could launch autonomous delivery services: Were customers ready to embrace and pay for this type of delivery service? Would regulators allow it? Should Amazon make or buy its drones? Would it be too risky for Amazon to wait to launch this service? If it decided to go ahead, how should it launch, and to whom?

Spotify is an on-demand music streaming service founded in Sweden in 2006, in a music industry in crisis. It offers online music consumers legal access to a repertoire of over 30 million pieces of music, which varies by country. Its mission is to let people listen to the music they want, when they want and where they want. To accomplish this, the company offers a legal alternative that is superior to piracy, via a simple, clear and rapid platform, making listening to and sharing music easier than ever. Its service falls within the freemium model: users can access it free in exchange for being exposed to ads a few minutes every hour or pay a small monthly fee to access it without ads, without interruptions and with a certain number of benefits in terms of the quality and accessibility of music. Spotify has seen meteoric growth since it was founded: it has a presence in 58 countries and has 75 million users, 20 million of whom are paying subscribers. Despite this, the company has not yet turned a profit. Plus the compensation it pays to rights holders for the use of their music has been criticized as being insufficient. However, this problem is not exclusive to Spotify; it affects most businesses that try to monetize music.

Wang Jianlin, founder and Chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group (Wanda) kept close tabs on one of his flagship projects going up on the shores of the Yellow Sea. There construction was underway on Wanda Studios Qingdao, the largest film and production facility in the world. The studio was a key initiative of Wang, a central player in the country's rapidly growing movie business. Wanda was already the largest theatrical exhibitor in the world, but the studio represented an enormous bet on a less familiar part of the value network of the film industry. Its vertically-integrated approach was also quite different from the Hollywood of today, which has evolved to a much more specialized division of labor.

In June 2015, Peter Phillips, Chief Operating Officer of Frontier Services Group (FSG), was preparing an update for the board on how operations would support the company's new strategy. Given the ongoing decline in the price of oil and the extractive industries, the outlook had changed for FSG. His aim was to steer a new course to becoming the leading pan-African logistics provider. Founded in March 2014 by Erik Prince, a former U.S. Navy Seal and ex-CEO of Blackwater, a private security firm, FSG was a logistics and transportation company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with a market capitalization in excess of $200 million. Headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, the company employed more than 340 staff in its head office and regional subsidiaries in Hong Kong, Beijing, Dubai, and Malta. In addition to traditional logistics solutions like transporting personnel, materials, supplies, and humanitarian aid, FSG provided civil engineering and support services such as in-house construction, facilities management, and workforce accommodation. Its mission was to build and maintain the infrastructure, installations and platforms its client organizations required to operate in Africa. Although the new approach would open up significant growth opportunities, a number of operational challenges remained. The lack of trained and skilled labor in Africa, coupled with the limited competence of the logistics sector would, if not addressed, impede the future growth of the company. The case traces the evolution of FSG since its inception in 2014 as a Kenyan air charter and freight services company. It offers an overview of the company's recent development and current strategy, notably how it handles the logistics needs of customers across the vast and very diverse African continent.

This case tracks Turkish Airlines' transition from regional player to global powerhouse. With an order for 212 aircraft in the first half of 2013, the airline had moved to double its size and become one of the industry's top-ten players. Growing its fleet would allow Turkish Airlines to fly many more destinations, boost revenues, increase aircraft utilization, and achieve higher cost efficiency. But it would also increase the already intense competition with European giants like Lufthansa, Air France, British Airways, and the fast-growth Gulf airlines Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways. Critical questions faced CEO Temel Kotil and his team: How would Turkish Airlines keep growing without jeopardizing profitability? How would it manage the operational complexities and other external factors? Recruit the best people? Continue to differentiate itself in a fiercely competitive industry?

T Nexus was incorporated in 2000 and in 2013 became a leader in cloud-based supply-chain management solutions. Born as a technology platform dedicated to the shipping industry and in particular to facilitating supply-chain management for major international carriers, in 2002 GT Nexus became in an SaaS (software as a service) provider, integrating analytics software on its platform. The Global Trade Platform introduced by GT Nexus was a major innovation in the shipping industry: it offered a standardized interface to shippers seeking to book cargo space with major carriers and allowed carriers to manage a far larger customer volume. Over time, the GTN platform became a non-industry specific supply-chain solution, used by some of the largest MNCs (multi-national corporations). GT Nexus expanded its product offering and platform, designing its own software solutions, such as the Trade Solution platform for financing, by partnering with other software companies, such as MicroStrategy and Flagship Custom Service, or by directly acquiring competitors, in the case of Metaship AG in Europe. A final merger with TradeCard in 2013 made GT Nexus the market leader in cloud-based supply-chain management software with over US$100 billion of international trade transactions managed on the platform. After the merger with TradeCard, GT Nexus offered a complete procure-to-pay solution on the cloud, covering every aspect of supply-chain management. The company experienced brisk growth as a pioneer of cloud-computing technology applied to supply chains.

A viral video is every marketer's dream. Social viewers--people who watch shared content rather than videos they've found by browsing--are far more likely to buy a product and recommend it to others. But it remains a mystery to most companies why some videos catch fire and others just sputter out. Unruly, a marketing technology company, offers an answer. Its analysis of 430 billion video views and 100,000 consumer data points reveals the two most powerful drivers of viral success: psychological response (how the content makes you feel) and social motivation (why you want to share it).

Consumer product returns in the United States are approaching three-hundred billion dollars annually. In the majority of cases, the returned products are perfectly functional convenience returns. Managers have a multi-billion dollar profit opportunity to reuse the products by strategically employing remanufacturing. Yet, remanufacturing has multiple barriers that must be understood and addressed. This article addresses several key managerial issues regarding remanufactured consumer products. First, will consumers buy remanufactured products? Second, will the green consumer segment desire remanufactured products? Third, will remanufactured product sales cannibalize new product sales? Finally, this article provides guidance regarding pricing and cannibalization mitigation strategies.

"Alameda Health System" (AHS) describes a county-owned safety net health system adapting to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and an increasingly competitive health delivery environment. It takes the perspective of senior management, specifically the Chief Medical Officer for the system, who has been in his job for just over one year. The case begins in late 2014, when the CEO of 9 years announced that he was leaving AHS to become CEO of a Detroit health system. He was leaving behind a senior management team that had been in place for 1-2 years, and had turned over several times throughout his tenure. At the same time, the system was experiencing a financial downturn, brought on in part by the loss of many low-income, formerly county indigent patients who selected subsidized private health insurance plans on the new state health exchange that contracted primarily with AHS's two largest competitors. AHS also had yet to integrate clinically or administratively with two community hospitals, both of which were in poor financial health, recently acquired as part of a strategy to diversify the AHS payer mix. The system faced operating challenges common to many publicly-owned safety net hospitals, including: a unionized workforce; an independent, mission-driven medical staff that had grown weary of administrative turnover; a poorly functioning revenue collection system; unprofitable contracts with managed care plans; relatively few commercially insured patients or contracts; long wait times for care; lack of telephone and transportation access to providers; and a low-income population with multiple poorly managed chronic diseases, including mental illness and substance abuse, as well as a high rate of violent crime. The case requires that students understand key aspects of the ACA and can synthesize other relevant environmental and organizational trends in order to recommend and evaluate the actions that senior management should take.

Southcoast Health System consists of three hospitals in southeastern Massachusetts: St. Luke's in New Bedford, Charlton Memorial in Fall River, and Tobey in Wareham, as well as numerous affiliated entities. But how did the merger that created the Southcoast system came about? "Basically, we merged because we wanted to, not because we needed to," said John Day, President and CEO of Southcoast Health System (formerly the CEO of St. Luke's Hospital). "We wanted to avoid a divide and conquer situation. As community hospitals, we needed to be able to serve the long-term interests of our communities." "We decided it was ridiculous to be competing with each other," added Ron Goodspeed, MD, President of Southcoast Hospitals Group and Executive Vice President of Southcoast Health System (formerly the CEO of Charlton Memorial). A mix of events and environmental conditions set the stage for the three hospitals to consider merging. One of the most critical of these was a turnover in Charlton's CEO position. Meanwhile, the health care environment was becoming increasingly volatile and competitive, and the focus in the business community was shifting away from city-specific planning and toward developing the larger southeastern area of the state. The predominant goal of the management and boards at all three hospitals was to find a way to best serve the interests of their communities. They decided on a full asset merger: building a single executive management team and board of trustees to oversee the organization.

In early 1996, Charlton Memorial, St. Luke's, and Tobey Hospitals were contemplating a full asset merger, something that had never been done before in Massachusetts. The logistics of the merger and its impact on the finances of the hospitals were among the many unknowns that the boards of trustees and management were facing. But, as Ron Goodspeed, MD, CEO of Charlton at the time, explained, "We had a fundamental desire to make it work. We expected hurdles - we knew there would be difficulties - but that is not a reason to back away...We took one step at time, taking care of hurdles as they appeared."

PepsiCo's CEO Indra Nooyi believes that each PepsiCo product must engage customers so directly and personally that they fall in love with it. So in 2012 she hired renowned designer Mauro Porcini as PepsiCo's first chief design officer. What Nooyi calls "design thinking" now informs nearly everything the company does, from product creation, to the look on the shelf, to how consumers interact with a product after they buy it. HBR Editor in Chief Adi Ignatius interviews Nooyi about how she transformed the company's strategy, its products, and its organizational culture by placing design at the center. The article also includes a sidebar, written by Mauro Porcini, called "How Design Can Thrive."

In late spring 2013, Nakedwines.com (NWC) founder and CEO Rowan Gormley brought his team together to prioritize initiatives and formulate a strategy. Five years earlier, Gormley and other Virgin Wines' veterans founded NWC in the United Kingdom, with significant backing from a German family wine company. Naked Wines' business model involved raising money directly from subscribers via the Internet, using these revenues to fund winemakers around the world, who in turn created new brands, which were consigned to NWC and then sold directly via the Internet to subscribers ("Angels") at a discount and to non-subscribers at a premium. Some industry observers considered NWC's business model "disruptive" with respect to how wine was traditionally marketed and sold, i.e. via distributors and retailers. Others opined that NWC was little more than a traditional wine club that used crowdfunding and social media technologies. NWC expanded to Australia and the United States in 2012, at which time NWC leased a Napa office and a Kenwood (Sonoma), California winery for wine production, storage, shipment, and wine tastings. NWC's Angels, who represented 95 percent of NWC's customers, had exclusive access to a mobile application to rate and purchase wines. By spring 2013, NWC had reached breakeven, signed up over 100,000 Angels, and forecasted reaching 200,000 Angels and $96 million in sales by year's end. While NWC's management was pondering which of the initiatives deserved the highest priority (acquiring new customers, retaining customers, or rethinking the mobile app strategy), the most pressing issues involved capacity and capital to grow. The case is intended as a lead-off case for a strategic management course, but also works well in information technology courses.

M-Changa was one of the fastest-growing fundraising platforms in Kenya, allowing Kenyans to use text messages on their mobile phones to send, receive, and track donated funds as well as solicit donations from family and friends. The young cofounders, Kyai Mullei and David Mark, had grown the company quickly by leveraging partnerships with large banks, mobile money operators, and NGOs. By April 2015, M-Changa had a team of five people serving 25,000 users. Now, it stood at a crossroads. M-Changa's board members had expressed concern that its multitude of partnerships may have spread the company too thin. The board urged Mullei and Mark to focus on the partnerships that would reap the most value for the company in the long run. Should M-Changa pursue partnerships with mobile money operators and banks that made it possible for users to transfer money conveniently and at a low cost, or instead focus on partners that allowed M-Changa to test new customer segments and increase sales? In addition, there was an estimated US$7 billion fundraising market across East Africa, so Mullei was tempted to test neighboring markets. Students will step into the shoes of Kyai Mullei as he and his team refine their partnership strategy at a crucial point in time for the venture.

The race to lightweighting is well underway with the introduction of the aluminum body Ford F150. Raj Reddy, vice president of strategy for global rolled products at Alcoa, one of the biggest aluminum manufacturers in the world, knows, however, that the competition in the aluminum market will get stiffer with the introduction of more stringent CAFE standards. The company could look to newer bonding technologies and customization of services for its prized clients like Ford to diversify or invest in R&D to increase the ductility and strength of its core products. Students are asked to find strategies to define and boost Alcoa's value proposition.

Established in 2007, JD Capital was able to quickly gain a strong foothold in the Chinese private equity (PE) market by massively investing in pre-IPO deals and taking advantage of the high valuation offered by the ChiNext Board. JD Capital has engaged in a "factory-style" operational model. The firm has approximately 60 branch locations across China with more than 300 employees, where each local office is responsible for local deal sourcing and for strengthening communications with local governments, banks, and securities firms. Chinese private equity market has experienced drastic changes since 2012. The issuance of new IPOs slowed down and was later suspended, the opportunities for exit have greatly narrowed, and the raised funds have rapidly decreased. JD Capital's early success had enabled it to obtain a large portfolio of deals, most of which are pre-IPO projects, the slowdown and suspension of IPOs imposed serious exit challenges. Can JD Capital's past investment strategy and business model continue to be effective? Is listing on the New OTC Board a lifesaving solution? As China's capital market has become more mature, how should JD Capital transform itself to stay competitive in the industry?

By 2015, there had been an upsurge in activist shareholders arguing for radical changes in companies' corporate strategies. Personalities like Carl Icahn, Bill Ackman, and Daniel Loeb were feared and loathed in some quarters, celebrated in others. With nearly $120 billion in assets under management in 2014, and big players like Icahn Enterprises managing $22.3 billion, Pershing Square managing $13.4 billion, and Third Point managing $8.3 billion, activist hedge funds had become a prominent feature of the corporate landscape, escaping some of their earlier approbation as corporate raiders or, even worse, "greenmailers." Activism covered a range of approaches-from proxy votes and demands for Board seats, to full blown takeover attempts-and sought to pressure changes on a wide range of issues-from corporate governance and executive pay, to strategic direction and excessive corporate overhead. Yet one of the most common concerned the scope of the corporation. In many cases, activists demanded the splitting up of the corporate entity, or the spinning off or sale of part of the company to another owner.

In early 2020 Walmart Stores, Inc., the world's largest retailer, faced several strategic challenges. The company had just been ranked number one on the Fortune 500 list, but its growth rate lagged its competition. International expansion had turned out to yield uneven results, and Walmart lagged in online sales. To foster continued growth, the company was considering a strategic shift: looking outside the store's traditional customer base to attract more upscale consumers. Walmart's past efforts to move upscale had not been successful. What are the strategic risks and benefits of the company's latest efforts to improve sales?

In February 2021, Amazon announced 2020 operating profits of $22,899 million, up from $2,233 million in 2015, on sales of $386 billion, up from $107 billion five years earlier (see Exhibit 1). The shareholders expressed their satisfaction (see Exhibit 2), but not all were happy with Amazon's meteoric rise. Many traditional retailers in the United States were going bankrupt, while major competitors such as Walmart and Best Buy were forced to invest aggressively in online retailing to prevent their market share from eroding. Every retail sector appeared to be under threat, fueling anxieties that Amazon and America's other tech giants were becoming too big and powerful. These anxieties were only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Amazon grew rapidly, while most traditional retailers foundered. Amazon's increasingly clear ambitions in healthcare and autonomous vehicles were also causing concern. In early 2021, Amazon was drawing criticism from across the political spectrum in the United States, with calls for it to be broken up. The European Union was also investigating its practices. Meanwhile, on February 2, 2021, Amazon reported that company founder and CEO Jeff Bezos would step down from his role and become executive chairman of the board. Andy Jassy, the leader of Amazon Web Services (AWS) would become the new CEO. How would Jassy navigate the many challenges to come and continue Amazon's record of success?