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At the November 2019 Open Day conference, the vice-president of JD.com shared his understanding of the role that supplier collaboration played in an uncertain environment. Through 15 years of fast growth, JD.com had become the largest business-to-consumer platform in China with more than 30,000 suppliers. Using a boundless retail strategy, JD.com had to build a seamless channel from supplier to customer, which required a close look at how to collaborate with the suppliers through digital technology. However, working with people from different companies raised many challenges. Without a proper solution, the effectiveness of the supplier collaboration would suffer.

After climbing the ranks among Kenya's financial institutions from 66th to 1st, and toppling a quarter of the market share held by mobile money giant Safaricom, CEO James Mwangi must now guide Equity Bank into its next stage of development beyond "Equity 3.0." Should he continue to chip away at the substantial hold Safaricom still has over the industry, or should he branch out into completely new areas that the company has never dealt with before? The former would mean a long and grueling fight, but the latter could spell disaster if fresh ventures go awry. Is the company's innovative approach on its homefield evidence of a deeper penchant for ingenuity overall, or was Mwangi simply in the right place at the right time with its landmark MVNO Equitel?

Masai Ujiri, the President and General Manager of the Toronto Raptors (Raptors), had an illustrious career on and off the basketball court; he had not shied away from making bold, even controversial, decisions; and he had led his franchise, the Raptors, to the National Basketball Association (NBA) Championship. Following the Raptors' clinching the NBA Championship in 2019, Ujiri faced an altercation with an Officer in Oakland, California. At the height of his success, Ujiri explicitly called out his mistreatment because of his being a Black man, highlighting the racism prevalent against Blacks and minorities. Contemplating his future as an executive, Ujiri would need to decide whether to continue, and if so, how to marry the worlds of sport and activism, charting his own path for social change.

Ucommune was the first co-working space operator in China to submit a prospectus to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. As its basic business, Ucommune provided co-working spaces for members and customers, and gradually formed two specific space operation models: the self-operated model and the asset-light model. Ucommune also offered members comprehensive value-added services and promoted the development of a service business by establishing a service ecosystem. Constant exploration of the co-working space industry had enabled Ucommune to create a unique business model and, through its creation, positively change the industry's old model. Although it had reached certain goals, Ucommune still faced challenges, including problems with achieving profitability, fierce competition, and dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. To transcend the current obstacles, In early 2020, Ucommune had to consider how to further adjust and optimize the business model.

In February 2019, the owner of the Yukon Soaps Company (Yukon Soaps), based in Mayo, Yukon, was contemplating the path forward for her business. Founded in 1998, Yukon Soaps was a provider of hand-crafted artisanal soap featuring Indigenous artwork. Yukon Soaps had been experiencing double-digit annual sales growth over the past several years, and demand was steadily exceeding supply. The owner felt that her business had reached a critical point, and she knew it could not grow without addressing several pressing growth challenges, many unique to its northern context: (1) the cost of sourcing ingredients and shipping them via air freight to Yukon significantly drove up the cost of goods sold; (2) Yukon Soaps' product was currently produced in the owner's basement, which severely limited production capacity; (3) the business currently sold to Yukon retailers, directly to customers through fairs and farmers' markets, and through an online e-commerce platform, and there were significant trade-offs associated with each sales channel. The owner's primary goal was neither revenue nor profit growth, and as the challenges that came with growth threatened her primary goals and values, she was questioning the value of expanding the business. Should she expand Yukon Soaps, or should she remain a small-scale player? How could she address the unique challenges that she faced in Mayo, Yukon?

This case describes the thoughts and reflections of five MBA alumni on their way back to their alma mater for a 20-year reunion event. As invited speakers, they will advise the upcoming graduating class on what to expect after graduation. The case provides a brief background on the career trajectories and family circumstances of each of the five protagonists as well as their personal reflections on their accomplishments and their regrets. The case is an excellent starting point for thought and discussion on the goals and motivations of MBA students, and what they expected to achieve and how they would measure success over the medium to long term. This case would be appropriate either alone or in conjunction with the technical note "Are You Ready? Devising a Personal Strategy for Life after Business School" (UVA-S-0342) as an effective reinforcement exercise.

This case is written from the perspective of a decision-maker at a private equity investment fund. The case is set in India, where a large corpus of capital sourced from the United States was deployed from the early 2000s onwards. It looks at the manner in which a private equity real estate fund evaluates the implications of RERA in India, in particular, the continuation vs. exit decision when a project encounters obstacles that delay its completion.

This case studies the unique traits of a serial entrepreneur through the story of Indian entrepreneur G. M. Rao, Chairman of the GMR Group. It describes Rao's entrepreneurial journey from 1978 to 2003. He started his enterprising journey with small jute, diversified into many new business in the following decades. GMR infrastructure group grew to become the significant player in the energy, airports, highways and urban infrastructure sectors. In 2003, Rao had his eye on an ambitious opportunity. He wanted to make a bid for the Delhi airport modernization project that had been announced by the government. This idea sparked much debate among his senior leadership team. The case explores the challenges that an entrepreneur faces in convincing his team and the board of the company to subscribe to his vision and pursue goals that are based on his gut feeling. This case presents his decision dilemma on whether to bid for the Delhi airport project or not. It also presents the dynamics of Indian Airports sector and emergence of public private partnership policy. It was the beginning of the PPP in airport sector which is also the public utility under service sector. Entrepreneur Ecosystem was evolving, infrastructure financing was at nascent stage. Case presents the dilemma Rao faced who always wanted to create the national asset for India. It's a case presenting the passion and patriotism pushing GM Rao to go for next big challenge.

uBiome provided clinical tests that sequenced the DNA of human microbiome samples, providing data on health conditions directly to consumers or to prescribing physicians. Founded in 2012, the San Francisco-based startup raised $105 million from top-tier venture capital firms and recruited prominent biotech executives and scientists as board members and advisors. In April 2019, the FBI raided uBiome's offices to investigate claims that the company had repeatedly billed individuals without their consent to meet aggressive revenue targets. uBiome's cofounders/co-CEOs resigned soon afterward. The company declared bankruptcy later that year after a board committee concluded that management had indeed pursued policies of questionable legality, including improper insurance billing practices, improper use of a telemedicine physician network, overly aggressive marketing tactics, and the presentation of misleading information in fundraising pitches.

Moderna, Inc. (Moderna), a US biotech start-up, was a contender in the race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. On November 23, 2020, Moderna announced success in the third-stage clinical trial of its COVID-19 vaccine, soon after larger rival Pfizer Inc. (Pfizer), partnering with BioNTech SE, had reported the successful clinical trial results of its own vaccine. However, large-scale vaccine production was a challenge for Moderna, and its chief executive officer acknowledged that scaling production would not be easy. The two other leading vaccine developers, Pfizer and AstraZeneca plc (AstraZeneca), had fewer challenges with manufacturing capacity; however, Pfizer's vaccine required extreme cold storage, and AstraZeneca's vaccine faced issues with its third-stage clinical trial results. On the consumer front, many Americans were unwilling to be vaccinated for COVID-19, leading to anti-vaccination protests on social media and in public. In November 2020, Moderna was planning to apply to the US Food and Drug Administration for Emergency Use Authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccine manufacturers were racing to see whose vaccine was best. Could Moderna produce the most effective COVID-19 vaccine? Given the uncertainty in consumer demand for the vaccine, should Moderna plan its manufacturing capability based on end-consumer demand or focus instead on seeking government contracts?

This case describes the journey of Gucci, a hundred-year-old luxury fashion brand, and how over the years it has reinvented its designs and marketing strategy to grow its market dominance world-wide. In 2015, Gucci's dismal performance over two successive years led the fashion house to rejig its top management, and bring in Marco Bizzarri, as the new President and CEO, and Alessandro Michele as the new creative director. By end-2019, the duo had achieved a remarkable turnaround, having tripled Gucci's sales and quadrupled its profits over 2015. In the process, they had redefined 'luxury', transformed the high-end fashion industry and contemporised the Gucci brand by being avant-garde and embracing new paradigms such as purpose-driven, gender-neutral, cross-generational and digital-oriented strategies. However, despite regaining its position as the world's fastest growing luxury brand, Gucci had clocked a much lower annual growth in 2019 than 2018 and 2017. Did this indicate that the brand was losing its relevance and needed to reinvent itself again? Could Gucci's recent foray into beauty products, making it more accessible and affordable, be diluting its brand equity? Additionally, the outbreak of the global pandemic Covid-19 in 2020 had plunged the luxury industry and the fashion house to new lows. The only silver lining was Gucci' strong digital capability, which helped the brand recover some of its lost ground through an increase in online sales. With the pandemic relenting in China, the luxury market in the country had begun to revive since March 2020. However, it was difficult to predict how other markets would behave post-pandemic. Would consumers be driven by the need to compensate for the lost opportunity to consume, or would the pandemic induce in them values that encouraged cutbacks in discretionary spending? Moreover, if the other markets did not pick up, what would be the effect of an increased dependence of the luxury brands on Chinese consumers?

The case is based on published sources and was written in 2019, before the announcement in April 2021 of a breakaway European Super League. The idea of different formats and financing models for competition football is not new, however. The case explores this from the viewpoint of FC Bayern Munich the best-known and most successful German football club and one of the elite teams in Europe - and its president, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, who has had a number of influential roles in the football world, in a career spanning more than five decades. Revenues from European football competitions have increased constantly over the last decades, with the UEFA European Champions League (UCL) constituting the largest piece of the cake. The big European football clubs, including Bayern Munich, aimed for a bigger share of the increasing revenues and debated a self-organized break-away European Super League (ESL) outside UEFA.

This series of case studies lift the veil of wellness tourism, a popular but relatively niche market. Case A describes how wellness tourism had become more mainstream in recent years. At the foot of the Alps, there is a low-key luxury resort called Grand Resort Bad Ragaz. The resort Group organically combines the tradition of a family business and Swiss innovation in its strategy. On the one hand, all group-level decisions put the protection of the spring with about 800 years history as a prerequisite, and on the other, the resort group explores business opportunities with an open and creative mindset. However, in Europe, where the market was mature and saturated while the population was aging, how could wellness hospitality businesses stand out? Should Bad Ragaz Group keep focusing on loyal European guests who had already visited multiple times, or should they focus on new guests from Asia, especially China who seemed to be willing and able to visit more frequently and spend more in the future?

This case study describes the simultaneous evolution of both Health and Happiness (H&H) International Holdings Limited (referred hereafter as "H&H") and the senior executive protagonist, Laetitia Garnier. The instructor followed the history of company as it evolved from a single-product company in China (then known as Biostime) to a global group encompassing multiple brands following a series of acquisitions. This expansion allowed H&H to gain synergies across their value chain and shared channels in different continents, leading to an impressive growth in revenue and profits. This rapid progression was not without its growing pains, however. The case reveals several problems that H&H was facing with regards to cultural integration, particularly following their largest acquisition of the Australian supplement provider, Swisse. Meanwhile, the company's founder and CEO, Luo Fei, also finds himself wondering whether he should stay on in the CEO role or if it is time for him to relinquish the reigns to someone new like Laetitia Garnier, a female leader with rich experience in business management who has been with the company for almost a decade.

This case describes the movement towards dual-class listings on Asian stock exchanges and the efforts of the Asian Corporate Governance Association (ACGA), a not-for-profit shareholder advocacy group, to discourage this trend. As a not-for-profit organization with no formal regulatory or incentive setting powers, ACGA had been successful in helping to elevate the governance standards in Asian capital markets through its advocacy work, educational efforts, and its biennial publication ("CG Watch") that rated Asian countries' corporate governance quality. With the 2018 decisions by Hong Kong and Singapore to allow for dual-class share listings, which ACGA and its members have previously strongly opposed, ACGA worried about how it could prevent corporate governance standards in the region from deteriorating. Was this a "race to the bottom" by Asian stock exchanges due to their desire to attract listings, or were the proposed safeguards effective in balancing shareholder rights against protecting managers from market pressures? What additional levers of influence should the organization pursue to ensure that shareholder rights were protected or to make corporate governance less of a compliance exercise but more of a value-add in the eyes of corporate managers in Asia?

As late as 2020, the supply chain of the global chocolate industry was characterized by modern slavery and child labour, poverty, dire living conditions and deforestation. While players in the cocoa industry had launched certification and in-house sustainability programmes, experts claimed that these have had limited impact. This failing prompted alternative efforts to change the sector from within. One of them, Tony's Chocolonely, a Dutch brand, set out to challenge the industry and demonstrate that cocoa could be sourced differently. Created in 2005 after an investigative journalist exposed the "dark side" of the industry, Tony's became one of the market leaders in the Netherlands. It operated a fully segregated supply chain "from bean to bar" for all cocoa components in its chocolate, and paid farmers in Africa a higher price for their cocoa beans to help them earn a living income. It described itself as "an impact company that sells chocolate; not a chocolate company trying to make an impact". Its vision - "a cocoa industry with 100% slave-free chocolate" - went beyond its own operations and applied to the global industry, urging the big chocolate players to take responsibility along the entire supply chain. The size of Tony's Chocolonely compared to the global chocolate industry brings an analogy to mind: Could this David defy Goliath? Could a start-up with a social mission change an entire industry from within? To achieve 100% slave-free chocolate meant tackling a host of strategic, tactical and operational issues, many linked with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Executive Chris Ernst uses a unique personal strategy to define his six life roles (spiritual explorer, natural being, development pioneer, global/local citizen, thriving family, true friend) and achieve harmony among them.

In March 2021, Amnon Shashua, co-founder and CEO of Israel-based Mobileye, was preparing to meet with Intel's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, to review plans for the future. Mobileye had been acquired by California-based Intel in 2017, but still operated independently. Mobileye was the global leader in vision technology for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) with a 70% market share and $1 billion in revenue. However, for Shashua, ADAS was just the first step towards his dream of leading the autonomous vehicle (AV) revolution. It was this vision that led Intel to acquire Mobileye for $15.3 billion. Shashua's challenge was that consumer AVs were still years away due to concerns over safety, regulation, cost, and consumer acceptance. A nearer term use case for AVs was the robotaxi market-fully autonomous, driverless taxis. Shashua and his team were excited about the potential of robotaxis to change the future of mobility, projecting that the market would grow to $160 billion globally by 2030. Mobileye believed that it could generate at least $15 billion in annual robotaxi revenue by the end of the decade. Equally important, Shashua viewed robotaxis as a necessary first step toward consumer AVs. Mobileye could use its experience in robotaxis to improve AV technology, address regulatory challenges, and build high definition maps. The long-term question facing Mobileye was whether to: 1) invest billions of dollars to build-out a global, vertically integrated robotaxi business; 2) use robotaxis as an opportunity to learn and then revert back to a horizontal supplier of AV chips and software; and/or 3) do both? During most of Intel's history, the company had been a horizontal semiconductor company which avoided vertically integrating into its customers' businesses.