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KeHE Distributors LLC., a $5.5 billion in revenues Illinois-based B Corp certified supplier of natural and organic food products across North America conducted a pilot study in 2020-2021 involving switching to shore power (using electricity instead of a truck's engine power) in bringing the temperature to desired levels in the refrigerated containers in their trucking fleet. The switch would have a positive effect on the environment in terms of lower carbon emissions in addition to cost savings. Tom Harden, KeHE's Senior Manager of Fleet Assets along with Laura McCord, the organization's Executive Director of Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility, had to decide on whether to seek approval for the project using both financial and sustainability metrics or to conduct an additional pilot study to better understand the controllable and uncontrollable factors that led to cost savings. The company had done poorly on the environmental dimension in the 2020 certification. Two factors made the decision both urgent and important. One was the necessity of applying early to receive rebates from state agencies that would help lower the capital cost of the project. The second was the fact that the company was facing a B Corp certification process in two years' time that involved more stringent criteria on the environmental front.

Shanghai Forest Cabin Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (Forest Cabin) was a skin care product manufacturer and retailer that had focused on developing offline stores. At the beginning of 2020, however, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic stagnated offline sales activities. Half of Forest Cabin’s offline stores closed at that time, and the existing stores had few customers, slowing the offline sales business. Forest Cabin rapidly initiated live streaming sales based on the digital foundation the company had built in its earlier stages. In this way, the company successfully responded to pandemic-related challenges and gained user traffic to realize revenue growth. However, with COVID-19 slowing down, people were resuming offline activities. Forest Cabin’s offline stores had provided a competitive advantage to the company. But the company had been able to leverage online live streaming, bringing explosive growth and enabling the company to survive a crisis. Should Forest Cabin focus on online development or offline development going forward?

Shanghai Forest Cabin Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (Forest Cabin) was a skin care product manufacturer and retailer that had focused on developing offline stores. At the beginning of 2020, however, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic stagnated offline sales activities. Half of Forest Cabin's offline stores closed at that time, and the existing stores had few customers, slowing the offline sales business. Forest Cabin rapidly initiated live streaming sales based on the digital foundation the company had built in its earlier stages. In this way, the company successfully responded to pandemic-related challenges and gained user traffic to realize revenue growth. However, with COVID-19 slowing down, people were resuming offline activities. Forest Cabin's offline stores had provided a competitive advantage to the company. But the company had been able to leverage online live streaming, bringing explosive growth and enabling the company to survive a crisis. Should Forest Cabin focus on online development or offline development going forward?

This case presents the evolution of Nintendo's gaming technology and discusses the history of the video gaming sector over eight generations of releases. It illustrates how industry dynamics shift over time and how different phases of the competitive life cycle place different demands upon those firms that are all vying for the top position. The case provides history and context for students to discuss an age-old question: How do firms sustain a competitive advantage over time? Based on public sources and written from the perspective of Aya Kyogoku, the manager of Entertainment Planning and Development (EPD) Production Group No. 5, the case offers a launching point into a discussion of how different product strategies can become dominant at different times, an insight that has implications for future strategies. The case also includes sales, stock prices, consumer spending, and product release data that allow for calculations and discussions of the performance of the broader market. The case opens with Kyogoku pondering the future of the entire gaming industry-one facing explosive growth-and Nintendo's place within it. She reflects on the company's need to continue to experiment and innovate and wonders where Nintendo should focus its creative spirit going forward. The case is targeted to MBA students and executives who are building a foundation for analyzing and developing competitive strategies. It is used in the required core Strategy course at the Darden School of Business, where it is employed to highlight industry evolution and the changing nature of competitive dynamics within an evolving context. It would also be suitable for any course on disruptive strategy or digital transformation.

In August 2022, EnergyNow co-founder and CEO Stuart MacWilliam (MBA 2015) considers the company strategy for building solar panels to provide power in South Africa's recently deregulated energy market.

In April 2021, the chair and managing director of India's JSW Steel Limited (JSW Steel) was facing questions about how to encourage sustainability in an expanding company. JSW Steel was the flagship company of the JSW Group, which started with a small steel plant in 1982 and grew into a conglomerate with interests in steel, cement, infrastructure, energy, paints, and sports. Steelmaking had numerous impacts on the environment. To offset the impact on the environment, JSW Steel had decided to use its by-product, slag, to manufacture cement. The managing director was acutely aware of sustainability concerns and was focused on making his sustainability vision a reality. JSW Steel was at the cusp of a large capacity expansion that would come from existing projects as well as inorganic growth through acquisitions, and both modes of expansion posed challenges for sustainability at JSW Steel.

On September 24, 2021, the Singapore Multi-Ministry Task Force (MTF) that spearheaded the national COVID-19 pandemic response decided to act more decisively to ensure that its endemic strategy would not be derailed by the infections which had been escalating since late August. In the weeks that followed, the MTF tightened measures on social interaction, encouraged work-from-home as the default mode of working and simplified its testing and isolation protocols. The third vaccination (booster shot) programme was also quickly rolled out. The public had become discontented due to the rising infections and deaths of the elderly, as well as the ever-changing restrictions, protocols, and proclaimed phases that had been introduced since April 2021. There also existed an issue of perceived discrimination that arose from the segmented access according to vaccination status. As a public health analyst, David Chong had been assessing Singapore's COVID-19 endemic strategy - to ascertain the areas that Singapore had done well, as well as those they could do better. How should Chong advise other countries to plan an endemic strategy?

This case features a woman entrepreneur whose early-stage company has achieved some regional success creating craft beer in a highly competitive, male-dominated beverage industry. Jennifer Newman, co-founder and CEO of Young Lion Brewing Company (YLBC), had entered the business not as a craft beer technician, as nearly all brewers do, but as a seasoned entrepreneur and business analyst. Newman recognizes that people may doubt her ability to produce a quality craft beer successfully. The reason? She is a woman, and they assume her beer can't be as good as beer brewed by men, or that women wouldn't be interested in craft beers and, therefore, wouldn't have the expertise or palate to judge a quality brew. Now, after her company has established itself, Newman ponders how to scale. What kind of marketing can improve YLBC's standing? For example, should she focus on being a woman-owned company selling beer targeted to other women? Or, should she emphasize that female-led Young Lion rises to the challenge of a market historically dominated by men? Newman herself was the primary information source for this case, sharing her professional background, experience at YLBC, and personal feelings and passion around being a woman in a predominantly male-dominated industry. This brings authenticity and an emotional connection that can motivate students.

Presans was founded in Paris, France in 2008 as an an open innovation intermediary, often referred to as an “innomediary.” Using a specific business model that combined open innovation services with state-of-the-art data-mining technology, Presans leveraged a network of over six million experts worldwide to solve problems for its corporate clients. In February 2017, the chief executive officer of Presans had to make some strategic decisions. Based on interviews with clients, he was considering diversifying the portfolio of products. In addition to the company’s classic approach of Call for Excellence, he was considering launching a new approach called Synergy Factory, where different companies could jointly tackle technical topics with experts, and another approach called La Conciergerie, which was a simplification of the Call for Expertise and required a platform-based, rather than a service-based, go-to-market strategy.

Founded in 2013 by sisters Shelby, Jackie, and Amy Zitelman, Philadelphia-based Soom Foods (Soom) aimed to educate US consumers on tahini and make the product a staple in US pantries. By 2021, the business had grown into a multimillion-dollar revenue company and had achieved national distribution through an omni-channel sales effort. However, Soom’s reliance on the single-source Ethiopian Humera sesame seed to prepare its high-quality tahini had begun to pose challenges. When Ethiopia’s inter-ethnic conflicts emerged in 2020, the Zitelman sisters foresaw possible disruptions and uncertainties in their business, especially when those challenges were combined with the supply-chain logistics issues that emerged as a result of the global pandemic in 2021. Soom was forced to reconsider its long-term business strategy: Given the threat of a potentially insufficient future sesame seed supply, should Soom use diversification in its supply chain? If so, how should diversification be applied across the supply chain while still maintaining a good return on investment? Furthermore, how could all of this be done before the next harvesting cycle?

In January 2022, Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Inc. (Activision) for US$68.7 billion. With a growing franchise of games, and with Microsoft’s apparent ambitions for the games console market, Activision was an attractive acquisition target. Activision owned some of the most popular games in the world and had a $54 billion market value in 2020. The acquisition would also take Microsoft a step closer to expansion into the metaverse, where—along with the cloud gaming and video game software industries—it hoped to gain an edge. However, gaming was a small part of Microsoft’s business. So why had Microsoft pursued the acquisition? What advantages did Microsoft see in it? And what would the move mean for Sony Interactive Entertainment (Sony), the market leader in the video games industry? Finally, how should Microsoft address the allegations of harassment and other employee complaints that had arisen at Activision and set right the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues that had arisen at Activision?

This case study is set in June 2022, two and a half years since Raffles Quay Asset Management (RQAM) had rolled out its new vision in preparation for positioning itself for the workplace of the future. RQAM had been established in 2001 to manage and market the commercial properties developed by Asia's leading developers. The new vision provided the 'north star' for the whole organisation and transformed how RQAM managed tenant relationships. It also revolutionised RQAM's approach to commercial real estate management. The new vision leveraged technology opportunities and addressed the needs of RQAM's various stakeholders from its tenants to the community. The RQAM leaders crafted a strategy to deliver the vision within five years. To support the implementation of the vision, the leaders drove significant interventions, of which, one intervention was to align employees across the whole organisation with the 'strategy on a page'.

In 2018, the legacy business of Somedia AG (Somedia)—traditional media such as newspapers, radio, and TV—was in structural decline. While its business portfolio still delivered positive financial results, it became clear that this would only be the case for a few more years. Susanne Lebrument and Thomas Kundert, the two main figures in charge as this pivotal moment in the firm’s history emerged, tasked themselves with finding new business areas that would secure sustained profitable growth and, thus, compensate the declining legacy business. The firm had a rich history and was a well-respected institution in southeastern Switzerland; as such, Somedia’s existing resources and capabilities would provide points of departure for new business development and diversification. Lebrument and Kundert’s key strategic challenge was to change the current business trajectory toward sustained profitable growth that would compensate for the decline and eventual disappearance of Somedia’s legacy business.

The brief case 'Donna Wilde and the Weathermen' sets the stage for a discussion of how to lead teams in an environment undergoing exponential change. The team has spent years working on a project about which they are passionate, but the CEO is skeptical and it gets put on ice. Wilde is left pondering if and how they can exert the leadership needed to bring the project back to life. The case is based on the experiences of a real team and company (whose identities are disguised).

Case Supplement for Case IN1847

Whenever someone makes a decision that affects other human beings, their inherent biases and motivations are invisible. Whether it's an HR manager deciding which candidates to interview or a bank loan officer deciding who should receive a loan, chances are, people are not being treated equally. That might be about to change. The authors of Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence argue that if artificial intelligence (AI) can be placed at the heart of such decisions, objective benchmarks can be achieved, because AI cannot have explicit motivations to treat people differently. The authors see the potential for AIs to reduce discrimination in all sorts of decisions, from education to healthcare, banking and policing.

With a growing range of virtual interfaces continuously evolving around us, reality isn't what it used to be. The author argues that leaders across sectors and industries must familiarize themselves with the emerging 'metaverse' and be able to draw distinctions between the various digitally mediated formats that span the virtual reality spectrum. These include augmented reality (AR), virtual reality VR), mixed reality (MR) and diminished reality (DR). Understanding how these technologies can-and will-affect your business model is a first step towards being prepared for what lies ahead.

Not convinced that ESG matters to investors? Think again: The authors share research from McKinsey & Company, showing that 86 percent of institutional investors believe companies with strong ESG performance (environmental, social, governance) will feel a direct impact on analyst recommendations. And 90 per cent cite that since the pandemic started, they attach even greater importance to ESG performance when it comes to their investment strategy and decision-making. They present three principles that all organizations must embrace going forward and argue for a new approach to disclosure - one that shines a greater light on the kind of prosperity investors now value most of all.

On social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok, value is created by individuals who are only loosely bound to the platform-and as a result, this type of organization requires very thoughtful oversight by its leaders. In this article, the authors present three governance mechanisms that should be thought-through and addressed in order to regulate user behaviour on social media. These include content moderation and user identification. They then present some of the key challenges and opportunities for platform leaders within each mechanism.