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Clover Network's founders didn't see the curveball coming at the end of 2012. The two-year-old start-up had just nine employees. It had dumped its first business idea, pivoted from its second, and was working hard on a new product: a tablet-based cash register with built-in credit card processing. Large credit card payment processing companies had started noticing Clover and one had just agreed to pre-order $2 million of Clover hardware. It was Clover's first such deal. But around Thanksgiving, Clover learned that First Data-the card processing industry's 800-pound gorilla-also was interested in Clover's technology. If it could bring First Data on as a customer, Clover would have a pipeline to a huge number of retailers. In early December, one of Clover's founders received a 2½-page letter from First Data. He had expected a proposal to buy and distribute Clover equipment, maybe with a small equity investment. Instead, First Data said it wanted to acquire "no less than 75 percent" of Clover, and close the deal by December 31. Was it time to sell Clover? The case highlights how a start-up decides to respond to an unexpected buyout offer and how it proposes to structure the deal.

Antara Senior Living, a first-of-its-kind senior living community targeted at people in their mid-fifties and older, had been planned as a community, grounded in the principles of service and hospitality, and built specifically to ensure that its residents gained the maximum benefit from their environment. Built on a unique design philosophy that encouraged the highest quality of living, it aimed to provide for the care of the resident's physical health as well as their mind and spirit. The case, set in January 2017, describes the challenges facing Tara Vachani, the young CEO of Antara, as she watches her dream project take form and the project delivery date draws closer. Like any other startup, Antara was faced with the challenges of working in a new category with a unique product offering. Would Antara be able to establish a business model that would deliver on its commitments on service excellence? What should their operating strategy be? Should Antara look at any possible innovative service extensions that could be offered to seniors as a market at large? It was faced with the choice of either protecting its long-term vision of delivering a high-quality senior living offering or changing aspects of the product to bring it closer to traditional real estate offerings, thereby increasing the sales velocity and financial metrics of the business in the short term.

By almost any measure, Charles Schwab Corp. appeared to be killing it in 2017. The wealth management, banking, custody and brokerage firm's stock was trading near its all-time high. It was posting unprecedented levels of new client accounts, net new client assets, revenues and profits and had a record $3.12 trillion in client assets under management. Schwab was taking customers and assets from old-line wire houses like Morgan Stanley, while fending off challenges from young Fintech upstarts by being a fast follower. Despite its relatively large size, Schwab saw itself as a disruptor. Schwab was attracting more net new assets than any other publicly traded full-service investment firm and its operating costs were lower than competitors like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. Still, there was no doubt that challenges loomed on the horizon. For example, how could Schwab maintain or improve trust in an era of intense cyber-threats and increasingly sophisticated technology that some consumers found invasive or even creepy? Were its products elegant and simple enough? In the era of Uber and Amazon, customers' expectations were rising. And what if a big tech company like Google or Amazon started to move onto Schwab's turf? Key to staying ahead, CEO Walt Bettinger felt, was maintaining a laser focus on the customer, and being willing to cannibalize Schwab itself to find new growth. Schwab, he thought, had repeatedly proved its willingness to do so over the previous four decades, most recently by introducing a robo-advising product. "Disruption occurs when someone listens more carefully to customers, or better anticipates what customers might want before they even realize it themselves. Most companies are disrupted because they lack the will and courage to disrupt themselves first," Bettinger said. Could Schwab stay vigilant and keep up that courage? Or was it already being disrupted and didn't realize it?

Bahwan Cybertek (BCT) was an IP-enabled technology company founded in 1999 by Sheikah Hind Bahwan (Hind) and S. Durgaprasad (DP). Over the years, it had grown into a global provider of innovative software products and services and become a $242 million company with more than 2800 business and technology professionals. BCT was privately held, based in Chennai, India, with operations in the United States, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. BCT had worked with more than 550 customers, including Fortune 500 companies, and delivered its innovative software solutions to companies in North America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. In 2016, BCT created a holding company for capitalizing on the great and growing amount of IP it had created. The move seemed a natural progression for the company. "From day one we were building our IP," said Hind, "and that is why we are moving all our IP to the separate company, and that is the company that will go public or get investors: BCT Digital. It is already registered as a separate company. So now we need to restructure and move." One year later, in late 2017, BCT Digital had been established and BCT's top management was considering the strategic and organizational challenges they confronted in further developing and leading the newly-formed company.

The Medium Corporation seeks to change how people author, consume and engage with content on the Internet. Founded by Ev Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter, the company developed a digital publishing platform and set of social network tools that allow people to spend substantive time with weighty issues facing society, business and politics. Fighting the trend of quick engagement with short-form content on the Internet, Medium wrestles with how to deliver an experience that advances important topics with ease, flexibility, and meaning, while working to build a large and successful company. The challenges of building a successful digital media company, balancing tool development with content curation, and developing a successful monetization model are the core topics facing the firm's leadership team.

Be Well Hospitals - a multi-specialty secondary healthcare chain of hospitals is set up in the suburbs, industrial towns and district headquarters of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The hospital chain co-founded by Dr. C.J.Vetrievel in 2011, fulfills the need of quality healthcare services in secondary healthcare market segment. They provide access to high-quality primary and secondary healthcare services at affordable price to the semi-urban and rural population through their chain of multi-specialty hospitals. In the four and half years, since its founding, Be Well has set up eight hospitals with a combined capacity of more than 280 beds and has treated close to 500,000 patients. The case describes Be Well's operations and the marketing initiatives it deployed to increase the adoption of its service concept in a two -tiered market. it provides information about the content of Be Well's past advertising communications and the media choices it made to build its brand. The management is grappling with the dilemma of brand building and educating potential customers about the high quality of care available at Be Well in a format that had a smaller footprint than its big city rivals. A complicating factor is creating a three-tier market with the limited resources in a setting where the customers are used to a two-tier service structure. They face a resource allocation challenge with regard to the mix of media-based and non-media based communication platforms. The management needs to decided on the choice of service attributes or dimensions around which the Be Well brand to be built and whether to focus on local branding of each hospital or develop a unified and common brand across all its facilities in the state.

In the spring of 2016, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or SFMOMA, opened its doors for a series of celebrations following a three-year closure. The museum had much to rejoice: a $305 million renovation that included a spectacular new ten-story addition that almost tripled gallery space; the 100-year loan of the renowned 1,100-work Doris and Donald Fisher Collection of postwar and contemporary art; the success of the "Campaign for Art," which saw generous donors gift or promise approximately 3,000 artworks; and the opening of the new Pritzker Center for Photography, the largest gallery and research space for photography in the United States. Reviews that rolled out in the wake of the celebrations proved largely laudatory. The Boston Globe, for instance, said SFMOMA was not only bigger, it was "also better-to such a degree, and in so many interesting, potentially game-changing ways, that for the next six months museum directors everywhere are going to be driven crazy fielding the same question: 'Have you seen what they've done in San Francisco?'" But once SFMOMA re-opened to the public on May 14, Director Neal Benezra and his colleagues had to get down to the business of running what was in many regards a brand-new museum. Most crucially, perhaps, they had to determine how to best continue fulfilling Benezra's oft-repeated pledge: to make SFMOMA mean more to more people. This case, based on interviews with Benezra, his colleagues, and SFMOMA Board President Robert J. Fisher and Board Chairman Charles R. Schwab, explores SFMOMA's effort to fulfill Benezra's pledge.

Customer experience is heralded as the competitive battleground; however, it is defined so broadly that companies often struggle to define, implement, and measure it. Based on the experiences of the Royal Bank of Scotland, this article develops an effective approach to scoping and managing customer experience, identifying typical pitfalls, and providing guidance to organizations trying to understand where to start.

Hamburguesas El Corral is a Colombian hamburger fast food chain founded in 1983. From the beginning, Hamburguesas El Corral was recognized as a traditional Colombian brand, positioning itself with the motto "the original recipe" as a provider with focus on fresh and highest quality products. The case allows students to examine the service encounter design of Hamburguesas El Corral and to compare it with McDonald's, which entered the Colombian market in 1995 and took over market leadership from Hamburguesas El Corral in 2012. The case furthermore tackles the trend towards delivery services in the fast food sector, addressing the specific service encounter design components of this delivery mode as well as its potential benefits and risks within the context of a changing competitive environment. The case finally asks students to analyze potential responses of El Corral's management to regain market share and market leadership, leading to the following question: Should El Corral hold firm to its traditional "no-delivery-service" policy or should it adapt to a major market trend and create a new brand, "El Corral Home", as a 100% home-delivery chain?

Supplement to cases ISB070 and ISB071.

Sahaj e-Village Limited, an initiative of SREI Infrastructure Finance Ltd, hoped to answer the need of the Indian government's National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) to set up 100,000 Common Service Centres (CSCs) across rural India in 2006. This figure was subsequently revised to 250,000 CSCs in 2009. Sahaj aimed to bridge the digital divide between urban and rural India and set up one of the largest brick and mortar --and human --networks in rural India. With close to 27,000 IT-backed centers in villages with a population of less than 10,000 and 50 critical services in the domains of microinsurance, education, utility and government-to-citizen (G2C) services to over 300,000,000 rural people, Sahaj e-Village was literally taking urban services to the remotest nooks of rural India. Sahaj CSCs would provide rural consumers with direct access to modern, state-of-the-art technological facilities and computer education, thus dovetailing with its long-term plans of providing Internet connectivity across rural India. Case B moves ahead from the challenge described in Case A and outlines Sahaj's transformation process. Starting August 2010, Sahaj guided its troops through an ideological transformation that would take the organization from being primarily a government service provider to an enterprising business entity capable of fending for itself. In order to achieve this goal, Sahaj took the important first step of understanding the intricacies and dynamics of the relationships among the various stakeholders involved in the project. This, in a sense, proved to be a breakthrough in the organization's transformation process.

Sahaj e-Village Limited, an initiative of SREI Infrastructure Finance Ltd, hoped to answer the need of the Indian government's National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) to set up 100,000 Common Service Centres (CSCs) across rural India in 2006. This figure was subsequently revised to 250,000 CSCs in 2009. Sahaj aimed to bridge the digital divide between urban and rural India and set up one of the largest brick and mortar --and human --networks in rural India. With close to 27,000 IT-backed centers in villages with a population of less than 10,000 and 50 critical services in the domains of microinsurance, education, utility and government-to-citizen (G2C) services to over 300,000,000 rural people, Sahaj e-Village was literally taking urban services to the remotest nooks of rural India. Sahaj CSCs would provide rural consumers with direct access to modern, state-of-the-art technological facilities and computer education, thus dovetailing with its long-term plans of providing Internet connectivity across rural India. Case A, set in July 2010, presents the tough challenge that the top management at Sahaj e-Village Ltd had on its hands. It was serving a virtually untouched rural market through a greenfield project with a jittery workforce in place and was justifiably concerned about the viability and sustainability of the business.

The most successful companies don't just have good products and strong distribution systems-they have a deep understanding of customers. That naturally requires lots of marketing data, but the authors say it also takes an "insights engine"-a set of structures, people, and processes that can translate data into actionable strategy. How do high-performing organizations achieve this kind of customer centricity? Extensive research by the lead author's firm indicates that seven operational characteristics are critical for a superior insights and analytics group: It must be adept at synthesizing data, independent from other functions, integrally involved in business planning, collaborative, willing to experiment with new technologies and programs, future oriented, and active in strategic decision making. In addition, the people who are part of the insights engine share three key traits: They have a whole-brain mindset (they think creatively as well as analytically), they focus on business growth, and they are effective at getting their messages across with engaging storytelling rather than dry recitations of data. The authors discuss each characteristic in turn, using the consumer goods giant Unilever as a case study. Unilever's Consumer Markets and Insights group, the epitome of a powerful insights engine, has helped the company generate impressive revenue and sales growth.

The Chairman of the Priceline Group is considering the actions he must take to confront an evolving external environment, new direct competition, disintermediation and substitute offerings. Does his response require an increased coordination of each historically autonomous division or some other approach?

This book asks: (1) How is the service sector growing; (2) what is service innovation; (3) what are the drivers of service innovation; and (4) how can organizations innovate service in a structured way? The book views service as the value-creating activity of customers. The role of a company is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation. We develop a model of service innovation. We also develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective: how should an organization view its customers to be successful, what does a service development process look like, and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service orientation. In Chapter 1, the authors review the definition of service and the narrowing difference between goods and service. They argue that the subjects of service innovation and service itself are vital and understudied. They believe that understanding service differently will influence both what we believe an innovation is and how it is created.

This book asks: (1) How is the service sector growing; (2) what is service innovation; (3) what are the drivers of service innovation; and (4) how can organizations innovate service in a structured way? The book views service as the value-creating activity of customers. The role of a company is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation. We develop a model of service innovation. We also develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective: how should an organization view its customers to be successful, what does a service development process look like, and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service orientation. In Chapter 2, the authors describe service innovation and what distinguishes it from new product development focused on goods or hardware. They argue that service innovation involves a wider and more holistic approach to innovation, comprising process, experience, social aspects, and behavioral and business models or what creates value for customers. They review and categorize different types of service innovations and illustrate them with examples, including Ikea and Skype.

This book asks: (1) How is the service sector growing; (2) what is service innovation; (3) what are the drivers of service innovation; and (4) how can organizations innovate service in a structured way? The book views service as the value-creating activity of customers. The role of a company is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation. We develop a model of service innovation. We also develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective: how should an organization view its customers to be successful, what does a service development process look like, and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service orientation. Chapter 3 focuses on the importance of understanding "value in use"-the value-creation process of the customer. Questionnaires, focus groups, and even in-depth interviews rely on a customer's memory of this process. Research shows, however, that people are not very good at remembering such activities in detail. Organizations must therefore utilize user research methods that uncover needs and be customer-oriented in order to meet those needs.

This book asks: (1) How is the service sector growing; (2) what is service innovation; (3) what are the drivers of service innovation; and (4) how can organizations innovate service in a structured way? The book views service as the value-creating activity of customers. The role of a company is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation. We develop a model of service innovation. We also develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective: how should an organization view its customers to be successful, what does a service development process look like, and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service orientation. Chapter 4 covers the service innovation process and what an organization must do to create a com¬plete offering. Service innovation is more iterative and less structured than product-development processes for goods. They suggest that a service innovation process can be divided into three steps: focus (on the development project), understand (the customer), and build (a structure that facilitates delivery of customer value). Because services are easier and quicker to copy than physical products, the chapter concludes by discussing how a company can create unique offerings.

This book asks: (1) How is the service sector growing; (2) what is service innovation; (3) what are the drivers of service innovation; and (4) how can organizations innovate service in a structured way? The book views service as the value-creating activity of customers. The role of a company is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation. We develop a model of service innovation. We also develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective: how should an organization view its customers to be successful, what does a service development process look like, and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service orientation. Chapter 5 covers customers taking active roles in service innovation. The most pertinent example of active customers is lead users, who innovate what they are most in need of. Lead users are those who stand to most benefit from product advances, but are often identified by the fact that they are already innovating. Customer involvement encompasses how companies may identify and cooperate with those customers who possess a potential for innovation. The chapter also discusses ethnography, a research method used to understand the customer's value-creation processes in depth.

This book asks: (1) How is the service sector growing; (2) what is service innovation; (3) what are the drivers of service innovation; and (4) how can organizations innovate service in a structured way? The book views service as the value-creating activity of customers. The role of a company is to provide the resources and knowledge to enable value creation. We develop a model of service innovation. We also develop guidelines for what is required from the organizational perspective: how should an organization view its customers to be successful, what does a service development process look like, and how to transform an organization that has a product focus to a service orientation. Chapter 6 covers service innovation in firms with a goods-centric mindset. Even some traditional service organizations view their standardized services like goods and can be considered goods-centric. In health care, goods-centricity is often used to produce care as efficient and profitable as possible. The authors briefly discuss why and how these "goods-centric" or "product focused" firms try to increase the share of services and how they use service innovation to differentiate their offerings. They also consider various service strategies and how firms can change their business models to charge for services that they previously offered for free.