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In April 2020, the interim president of the 3D printing and digital manufacturing business of HP Inc. was weighing his options in resolving three managerial dilemmas: (1) How should HP promote technology awareness among industrial customers? (2) How should HP scale up its production of 3D printers? (3) How could HP promote shorter technology adoption cycles among industrial customers?

Cantaloupe Systems expected to celebrate its first quarterly profit, and the company's proprietary machine-to-machine communication technology was a hit with owners of vending machines-and investors. Cantaloupe's systems provided real-time sales data, allowing vending machine operators to efficiently pre-pack the exact items needed for each machine before leaving the warehouse that day. But Cantaloupe's auditors threw the company a curve ball during a routine audit, insisting that the revenue recognition policy be changed in a way which would significantly reduce Cantaloupe's revenue growth and profit. Cantaloupe's leaders felt blindsided by this change in revenue recognition-wasn't their current accounting policy a more accurate picture of the firm's economic activities? Most importantly, they wondered how a change in revenue recognition would affect investors' valuation of the company and the incentives of their sales force as well as other aspects of their operations.

In January 2020, Ashwani Gupta took over as COO at Nissan Motor Corporation, and several weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Nissan's Business Continuity Plan (BCP) had been key to the resilience of Nissan's supply chain. It had enabled Nissan to recover from past supply chain disruptions, mainly natural disasters, sooner than its competitors. This case describes the BCP, within the context of Nissan's production methods, organizational principles and current financial position. It relates how Gupta managed the rapidly-evolving restrictions that the coronavirus pandemic required as it spread from China to other countries where Nissan's assembly plants and suppliers were located. Based on his experience with the COVID-19 pandemic, Gupta considers how to improve the BCP. This case also covers a specific situation in India, where Nissan had to quickly find an alternate supplier for a unit of dashboard gauges. The team in India developed four options that can be evaluated by students.

In February 2020, Pan-China Consulting Services Co. Ltd. (Pan-China) was entering its third decade in operation. Pan-China's founder was reviewing the firm's evolution and discussing several key opportunities with his team. Over the previous two decades, the company had shown solid performance in providing financial and capital markets advice to over 200 companies. It had generated strong returns for its key investors, who ensured that every deal was financially secured by the company's auditing, financial, and consulting expertise. However, the founder and his two senior advisers had to make some decisions. Should Pan-China participate in a new round of private placement investment? Should it consider investing in a second opportunity? Which fund issuance would be the best fit for Pan-China? Was its consulting and investment business model sustainable?

In 1989, Tracy Edwards, at age 26, led the first all-female crew in the prestigious and grueling 59,264-kilometre (32,000 nautical mile) Whitbread Round the World Race. Edwards had developed a deep love for sailing in general and for the Whitbread Round the World Race in particular. However, she soon found that it was impossible, as a woman, to participate as a fully integrated member of a crew. Hence, she sought to organize an all-female team to compete in the race. She located, bought, and restored an old racing yacht, which eventually was christened Maiden. The idea of a team of women racing in the Whitbread Round the World Race was unthinkable to many men in and around the world of yacht racing, so the backlash was predictable and intense, and the hurdles to successfully complete the race seemed insurmountable. This six-part case series chronicles the myriad challenges faced by Edwards and her colleagues before and during the race, including rampant sexism and misogyny. Each of the six cases sets the stage for the next challenge Edwards has to overcome.

The case introduces IPOs in Hong Kong from the perspectives of both issuers and investors. Hong Kong was a popular choice among many local and nonlocal companies for listing. It ranked as first globally in terms of total proceeds raised for 5 out of 10 years between 2011 and 2020. The case is set in the fourth quarter of 2020, when the Ant Group entered Hong Kong for its IPO. Students take on the role of Lin Wong, head of the investment team of a new investment fund under Next Capital Investment Limited. Students have the opportunity to learn about IPOs from various perspectives: as pre-IPO investors in a fund's investment that is ready to go public, as retail investors to subscribe for high-profile IPOs in the market, and as potential cornerstone investors to subscribe for a portion in the global offering of an IPO.

In January 2020, Kombi Sports Inc. was at a strategic crossroads in a changing industry. The Montreal-based firm had evolved from a niche provider of alpine performance gloves to a premium Canadian winter apparel brand. Its success could be attributed, at least in part, to its strong collaborative stance and interesting partnerships. However, increasing competition in the industry, particularly among brick-and-mortar retailers, raised questions for Kombi about how and where it should focus its efforts for future growth.

In November 2020, Henry Wilde, co-founder and CEO of Acelero, Inc., must decide whether to change his company's program model for delivering early childhood education to low-income children. One of the only for-profit Head Start providers in the United States, Acelero provided direct services through neighborhood childcare centers and operated a consulting arm to improve the services of other Head Start centers. The company had developed a reputation for excellence and was profitable, pleasing its investors. However, Senior Vice President of Family Engagement Lori Levine urged Wilde to change the company's process for interacting with parents. While Levine's preferred model had the potential to drive deeper social impact, it was not yet a proven success and did not have the potential to make Acelero's business more profitable. Further, if the new model failed, Wilde risked losing the credibility that he and his team had build in the early childhood education field over the company's 19-year history. Wilde and Levine had piloted the model at a single Acelero center, and the early results were promising. At the conclusion of the case, the CEO must decide whether to scale the program model to other centers, or whether to stay the course with his company's existing operations.

Global consumer products powerhouse LSP has found enormous savings in a trial run of a new competitive bidding tool for their procurement organization known as a reverse e-auction. But when Jen Baldwin is asked to achieve the same savings from her suppliers for a product used by her own division, things turn out to be much more complex, revealing the benefits and drawbacks of using the tool to reduce prices, maintain supplier relationship and garner savings for the company.

David Pong, co-founder and CEO of a water technology start-up, had good news to share with his team: after several rounds of pitching and evaluation, they had raised seed funding for their social enterprise, Wateroam. David had started Wateroam as a fresh university graduate with two younger co-founders in August 2014. The trio's mission was to tackle the global problem of water scarcity by providing water filtration systems to the rural poor. As a new start-up, Wateroam faced challenges in funding, product innovation, sales and distribution. Wateroam broke even in its second year of operation. In the four years since its formation, the social enterprise, which is based in Singapore, has provided people in 14 countries with access to clean water. Now, with this round of seed funding, Wateroam was poised to enter its next phase of growth and reach out to more underserved communities that were in dire need of clean water. As CEO, David had many important decisions to make. Chief among them was how he should scale up Wateroam, bearing in mind the latter's double bottom line of profitability and social impact.

The production of tea increased by 10% and the Indian economy experienced an inflation of 5.24% in 2018; the average auction price for tea had been stagnant at Rs. 140 per kg since 2013. The existing auction system was built on an archaic technology and the auction rules were constraining the system. This was triggering the buyers to move away from the auction to private sales, and thus stifling price discovery. The Tea Board of India hired consultants to redesign the auction system based on the principles of design simplicity, ease of use, and sustainability. Three areas for auction design improvement related to the type, closure, and transparency of auctions, were identified. But would they have the desired effect? The case provides an opportunity for students to discuss if the proposed interventions will work from the lens of auction as a pricing mechanism. With increase in adoption of auctions from selling search words, ad-spaces, to surplus inventory, this case should be interesting for students intending to build different pricing/business models. It is also useful for students to understand the mechanism in order to improve the existing auction systems.

For a telecom regulatory authority in a developing country, reducing the digital divide is an important goal, while it maintains net neutrality through the mechanisms it implements or allows to be implemented. The case "The Question of Net Neutrality" presents the dilemma that the Indian telecom regulator, the TRAI, faces while it decides whether to allow a private firm, Facebook, to launch a zero-rating service. The case is set at the time when Facebook Inc. came up with an offer of launching Internet.org as a zero-rating service. Under this plan, Internet.org (later rebranded as Free Basics) would act as a platform to connect a range of content providers (CPs) through which the hitherto unconnected populations would have access to the internet. However, this access would be limited to the content provided by CPs, who tied up with the Free Basics platform. Presenting a comprehensive history of the net neutrality debate, the case offers views of all the stakeholders called by the regulatory authority to present their perspectives. The stakeholders include the ISPs (internet service providers), CPs, end consumers represented by civil society, the regulatory body itself, and the government. The case brings up the issues related to the digital divide, privacy of consumers, competition, freedom of expression, etc., from the perspective of all the stakeholders.

Ashok Leyland (AL) has been a good performer in the commercial vehicle (CV) industry in India, and has emerged as a leading player in the global CV industry. It has done well to survive and grow in a cyclical industry and has overcome many recessions and downturns in the nearly 70 years of its existence. The case describes the efforts of AL in conceptualizing and launching a new initiative called ServiceMandi to garner a greater share of the aftersales service part of the value chain, thus taking AL into a market that was historically dominated by the unorganized sector. The SM initiative comes with its own set of rewards and challenges and confronts AL with tradeoffs whose resolutions are not so obvious. This case presents an insight into the conceptualization of the SM initiative, the approach followed by AL in converting the SM concept into reality, and the progress made so far with this initiative. The case also presents the potential directions that this initiative can take in the future and provides an opportunity for students to think through the various options in terms of the pros and cons and recommend a course of action for AL

The case follows President Linda Oubré (HBS MBA Class of 1984) as she seeks to move Whittier College towards a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive campus. In 2020, the student body of Whittier, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles County, California, is slowly evolving to represent the growing diversity of the surrounding area. Roughly 70 percent of Whittier students are non-white, and 59 percent are female. The college's leadership, however, remains largely white and male. Oubré, who had spent most of her previous career in business, was selected as the college's president in 2018-the first black woman to serve in that role. Almost immediately upon stepping into the role, Oubré set her sights on diversifying the college's staff, administration, and board of trustees; in 2020, the racial reckoning that swept across the United States only heightened the urgency of her task. Oubré knows that sweeping change is needed at Whittier. But change, of course, is hard. How can she continue to push for diversity among faculty, staff, board members, and students? And how can she galvanize support among all of the college's many constituents?

This case profiles the career of Ghana-based chef and entrepreneur, Selassie Atadika. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, she faced many questions about the future, such as: How could she convince Ghanaian consumers to view their native cuisine in a fresh, compelling way? How could she sustain the fine dining arm of Midunu, Atadika's food and lifestyle company, in a nation where the average annual income hovered at USD5,000? Should she expand her chocolate business internationally? As Atadika became an important player on the culinary world stage, what were the best ways to promote her business and capitalize on her increasingly high international profile?

Based in Bengaluru, India, Invento Robotics (Invento) was a start-up that manufactured humanoid robots. In October 2017, Invento received a mandate to develop a humanoid robot to welcome India's prime minister and the US president's senior adviser at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit that year in Hyderabad. It was a high-stakes event for Invento; a positive reception to the robots would mean many leads for the company, while a negative response could mar Invento's reputation. While Invento's time had hitherto been spent on research and development, there was pressure for it to now determine an overall marketing strategy. It was imperative that Invento quickly crystallize ideas about its customers, product positioning, branding, pricing, distribution channels, and promotions.

In 2005, the faculty of the computer science department at Harvey Mudd College reviewed its statistics on gender matriculation. A long-time goal of the department had been to increase the number and proportion of women studying computer science at the school. To their consternation, they discovered that the number of women declaring computer science majors was declining. The case describes the steps the faculty took to redesign their core introductory course as well as the follow-up study that revealed a dramatic, sustainable increase in women's engagement: Harvey Mudd College raised the percentage of women computer science majors to over 50% in less than ten years. The case discusses the transformation of the culture and pedagogy-as well as specific actions taken by the faculty and school leadership-that fomented this change. The focus on the computer science program is set against the broader backdrop of Harvey Mudd College's efforts to attract and retain women students generally. HKS Case 2225.0

In 2008, Zoomlion acquired the Italian company Cifa, a world-leading company in the concrete machinery market. The acquisition bolstered Zoomlion's leadership in this market in China through Cifa's advanced technology. The acquisition also provided Zoomlion fast access to foreign markets, so that it could extend its leadership in the concrete machinery market to Europe, and to emerging markets such as India and Russia. But while much emphasis was given to the noteworthy success of this operation, less has been said so far on the difficulties Cifa managers experienced in their cultural dealings with Zoomlion. Zoomlion's lack of prior international experience and their cultural differences with the Cifa managers led observers to doubt Zoomlion's ability to successfully manage Cifa's operations. What factors were behind the managerial integration? What were the biggest challenges in building a stable working relationship between the two management teams?

In late 2020, Wendy's was an iconic North American fast-food chain with a history of innovation. The corporation's inventive approach to its promotions was particularly apparent in its use of social media, even more so in its unique management of the company's Twitter account. In addition to using Twitter to provide customer support and advertise its products in an online setting - two traditional activities conducted by many a business on Twitter - Wendy's had used the platform to regularly make fun of users and competitors, as well as respond to teasing and other playful challenges issued by Twitter users. Evaluating the company's Twitter strategy proved difficult, however. How could Wendy's chief executive officer determine whether the company's approach on Twitter positively affected sales? How could he improve the company's future social media strategy?