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Located in Bengaluru, India, Xoxoday.com was an online marketplace for experiential gifting. The company started by offering social gifting, and selecting corporations as its target market. In 2013, the company decided to cater to both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets and entered into the niche sector of experiential gifting. The value proposition of the start-up was to provide the best gifting solutions for customers while delivering an experience that would build memories. Heading into 2016, Xoxoday.com aimed to grow by acquiring new customers. It promoted its experiences extensively on social media platforms, but the company's hard work was not paying off. Xoxoday.com needed to figure out what changes needed to be made to its social media plan in order to attract new customers.

Sun Quan Education Inc. faced a variety of challenges on its path to expanding its customer base and building profitability through the operation of the We-GO club, a strategic business unit aimed at promoting education and training about the Go game in southern Ontario. Some of these challenges came from the low awareness of Go compared to other more popular intellectual products in Canada, the relatively late entry to the market of educational services, and more critically, the need for the company to develop a comprehensive and effective marketing plan starting with a clearly defined target segment. What was the right direction for the company's marketing plan?

DuckDuckGo, a late entrant in the search engine industry, was founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg with the main purpose of protecting users' online privacy and raising the standard of trust online. DuckDuckGo earned a reputation for being "the search engine that doesn't track you," and despite initial hurdles, by 2017, it had emerged as one of the top 10 search engines in the world. DuckDuckGo had managed to successfully leverage increasing privacy concerns amid accusations of tracking made against other search engines. Weinberg was now contemplating how to compete against organizations with massive resources and reach the maximum number of people who were concerned about privacy yet unaware of the existence of his search engine.

The case describes Cummins India's journey of implementing a large scale change to bring about gender diversity and inclusion (D&I) in their organization. The case underscores how this journey from 7% female representation (professional cadre) in 2005 to over 30% representation in the span of 12 years necessitated some tough decisions and a strong push by the top leadership. Now that Cummins India has been able to achieve a balance in their workforce gender representation, it faces the challenge of creating a strong systemic and cultural transformation for a truly inclusive culture.

The case centres around the challenges faced by Paytm, India's largest e-wallet, in its transition from a mobile wallet to a payments bank. The shift was the result of a push by Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the central bank of India and regulator of the banking system, in 2015, pending the approval of the new Payments Bill. The transition from Paytm mobile wallet to Paytm Payments Bank had added to the complexity of business for Paytm. Paytm Payments Bank had a target to increase its customer base from 180 million to 500 million by 2020. The road to achieving this target was far from smooth. Paytm Payments Bank had come under the scrutiny of RBI for not abiding by the prescribed Know Your Customer (KYC) norms and for the cashbacks it had offered customers to bring them on board. There were other regulatory challenges that Paytm Payments Bank had to deal with as well. One, the Supreme Court of India had struck down sections of the Aadhaar Act that required the use of Aadhaar cards for online verification and transactions. Two, regulatory uncertainty prevailed with new payments regulation, namely the Payments and Settlement Systems Act, 2018, looming on the horizon. And three, in October 2018, RBI had released guidelines on interoperability among prepaid instruments and bank accounts, creating barriers for the adoption of Paytm Payments Bank. It was in this challenging environment that Paytm Payments Bank had to acquire customers and persuade them to transact actively using its services and to grow from an online financial technology (FinTech) firm in the payments space to a one-stop destination for a FinTech firm in India. The case revolves around the future strategy and marketing tactics that Paytm Payments Bank would have to adopt to become self-sustainable and profitable in the face of various regulatory and customer adoption challenges.

In April 2019, Asesh Sarkar, co-founder and chief executive of Salary Finance Limited, a London-based FinTech, faced tough choices. Sarkar had founded Salary Finance with Dan Cobley and Daniel Shakhani in 2015. The company's value proposition was quite simple: partner with employers to offer employees affordable loans that were repaid through automatic payroll deductions. Taking repayments directly from salary, and collecting those repayments in one transaction from the employer, dramatically reduced costs, saving employees large amounts of interest when compared to market alternatives like credit cards or payday lenders. For improving access to affordable credit, Salary Finance garnered considerable praise in the media, being named one of the UK's most socially responsible and innovative FinTech companies. Since the beginning of 2018, Salary Finance had introduced a savings product and an earned income advance product that were linked to employee salary. In September 2018, they expanded to the United States, in partnership with the United Way, opening an office in Boston, Massachusetts. Sarkar was excited by the progress but was still pondering how best to accelerate further growth and improve the business. First there was the question of geographic expansion. Did it make sense to pursue other markets like India? Or, should he focus on building Salary Finance's position in the UK and US? In these markets, should he prioritize attracting new employers to the platform or adding new products such as mortgages or investments? Should he register as a bank, tapping into low cost deposits and reducing the dependence on commercial borrowing to fund loans? Finally, he was concerned about how to best maintain Salary Finance's culture - "For People Not Numbers" - during rapid growth. These questions and more weighed heavily on Sarkar's mind as he considered the company's future.

The founder of Osaro saw the potential of deep reinforcement learning to allow robots to be applied in a wide range of new applications. Osaro targeted warehousing, already a dynamic industry for robotics and automation, for its initial product - a system which allowed robotic arms to "pick and place" individual items into boxes for shipment to consumers. Despite receiving significant attention in the robotics space, the problem of universal "picking" had not been solved. Osaro believed deep reinforcement learning would provide the solution by allowing robots to handle the complexity involved in perceiving and grasping a wide range of objects. The case discussion will focus on the decision to choose the warehouse automation market, provide an overview of key machine learning concepts, and introduce students to some of the contours of competing in the machine learning space during the late 2010s. The case also introduces key concepts for thinking about how the combination of artificial intelligence and robotics will change work in the future.

The case is based on the fixed income investment team at Value Partners Group Limited (VP), a publicly-listed, Hong Kong-based fund and asset management company founded in 1993, focusing primarily on Greater China and Asian investments and following an investing approach referred to as value investing. Set in December 2014, the cumulative returns from September to November 2014 for the Value Partners Greater China High Yield Income Fund (The Fund)-the firm's flagship fixed income fund-were negative. The year had started out slowly, but momentum picked up in the summer until a number of external events affected returns, including: Occupy Central in Hong Kong; the market's concern about the end of the US Federal Reserve's quantitative easing; Chairman Xi's anticorruption campaign in Beijing; and the Chinese property market suffering from excess inventory. Investors reacted to these events by pulling their money out of The Fund, and September returns for The Fund were down 2.2% for the month. The December bond market movement was drastic enough that Gordon Ip, Fixed Income Fund Manager for VP, and his team needed to react. Ip was under intense pressure to increase performance, since December was the last month of the year and investors would more closely scrutinize his performance. He needed to make a decision.

This case depicts a financial analyst trying to make sense of Starbucks' finances and drawing from recent projects of the IASB and FASB to identify lease accounting as a key issue for the firm. The case underscores the importance of having a full picture of a company's obligations in order to understand its overall performance. In reviewing the case, students examine Starbucks' extensive use of leases and use spreadsheet tools to understand the full extent of the corporation's indebtedness. Although heavy users of leases such as Starbucks have argued that lease accounting is complex, an estimation of lease indebtedness can be made using relatively simple tools that are easy for students to understand. The case allows issues of high-level accounting standards to be elucidated, using a well-known company with which students identify. The case illustrates the real-world consequences of accounting policy choices.

The CEO of a computer peripherals manufacturer considers whether to invest in innovation or focus on the core. This fictional case study by Richard Hamermesh features expert commentary by Vijay Sankaran and Carine Clark.

The CEO of a computer peripherals manufacturer considers whether to invest in innovation or focus on the core. This fictional case study by Richard Hamermesh features expert commentary by Vijay Sankaran and Carine Clark.

The CEO of a computer peripherals manufacturer considers whether to invest in innovation or focus on the core. This fictional case study by Richard Hamermesh features expert commentary by Vijay Sankaran and Carine Clark.

Baldor Specialty Foods, a family owned, New York City-based food intermediary, served business customers in the country's north east corridor. A key activity that Baldor performed, called the "Fresh Cuts" program, was sourcing and preparing various vegetables for use by its customers. An outgrowth of Fresh Cuts was the approximately 150,000 pounds per week of produce scraps generated that was unfit for sale. Thomas McQuillan, Baldor's Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Culture, and Sustainability was charged with the disposal of these scraps in an environmentally friendly way that would also help the company's bottom line. After McQuillan designated Baldor's food scraps as "SparCs," ("scraps" spelled backwards) he and the company had early success in selling "SparCs" primarily for animal consumption and partly for human use. However, in 2018, waste disposal continued to be a significant cost for the company. At an upcoming offsite company retreat, McQuillan had to present a plan to address Baldor's food waste disposal that would help the company both financially and, in its sustainability standing.

Brita's Stephen Curry sponsorship splash is set in the U.S. water filtration industry in the first nine months of 2016. The case study documents the initial period of market-leader Brita's sponsorship of the NBA's Golden State Warriors' point guard Stephen Curry. Curry was regarded as one of the greatest basketball shooters of all time, had recently won his second Most Valuable Player (MVP) award from the NBA League, and was ranked as the ninth most powerful celebrity endorser in the United States. Although the announcement of the sponsorship deal had generated substantial and positive media reaction, sales of Brita products were still declining nine months into the period of the sponsorship deal, after several years of sluggish growth. By August 2016, Brita had experienced a 7.2 percent annual decline in total sales, including its well-known water pitchers and filters. The case documents the communication activities related to the Curry sponsorship undertaken by Brita's Director of Marketing, Tad Kittredge, during 2016. Given the pressure to deliver weekly sales and the regular NBA season scheduled to begin in just three weeks' time, Kittredge needed to find a way to use the Curry sponsorship to contribute to a sales turnaround in the coming months. The case offers four strategic alternatives that Kittredge was considering in October 2016 to change the way Brita used Curry.

This case is from the point of view of Peter Clarke, Vice President of Mergers and Acquisitions for Lockheed Martin's Information Systems and Global solutions (IS&GS) division. Clarke has a personal decision to make about keeping his substantial Lockheed stock holding or converting to the partner company (Leidos Holdings) stock. About a year prior to the decision point in the case, Lockheed made a strategic decision to divest its IS&GS division, which engaged in consulting (largely defense and other governmental agency consulting). Clarke reviews Lockheed's actions which led up to the decision to divest the IS&GS division through a Reverse Morris Trust (RMT), which included rejecting a more conventional spin-off or outright sale. The RMT, a complex transaction which required the creating of a new company and a merger with a second company, Leidos Holdings, allowed the divestiture to be tax-free. There were a number of rules required for this transaction; for example, former Lockheed shareholders needed to own more than 50% of the resulting company. Clarke believed the enterprise IT, cybersecurity, intelligence, health IT, and engineering business was a good growth area. Clarke needed first understand this unusual financial transaction and make a personal decision about whether keeping his Lockheed shares or exchanging them for Leidos shares would be the best decision for him.

The decision focuses on sustainable green retailing strategies surrounding meat donations by Giant Foods in their meat rescue pilot program called "Meat the Needs." John MacDonald needs to decide whether to expand or to eliminate the pilot program, now that the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank (CPFB) will no longer be picking up the meat after 2012. Green retailing strategies include opportunities and risks. The opportunities include reducing food waste by increasing food donations; risks include risk to brand, cost, and logistics for safe food handling. Will Giant Foods' disposition decision fit with the company's new focus on zero-waste and its desired edict of "Living Here, Giving Here"? Are the risks and costs too much for the future of the program? MacDonald and his team need to work through these important sustainability issues. This case is complemented with video components throughout the written narrative. The videos are accessed by students clicking on links imbedded in the case which take the student to the appropriate video available in youtube.

CEO Lisa Sedlar was two weeks from the start of meetings with venture capital funders to raise $10 million for a West Coast expansion of her urban, convenience-store startup - Green Zebra Grocery. Delivering a healthy take on the traditional c-store assortment, Sedlar was positioned to leverage growth trends that signaled a shift from the traditional fuel fill-ups that defined the c-store industry, toward urban food retailing. However, a massive oversupply of retail square footage dedicated to grocery, had made investors skittish about putting money behind another brick and mortar retail chain. On top of that, Amazon had just announced plans for a 3,000-store national rollout of Amazon-Go, their high-tech, self-serve concept store, described as the future of c-store retailing. To preempt investor concerns, Sedlar was considering using a content analysis of customer reviews to let shoppers speak for themselves. She needed evidence that either validated the Green Zebra 'healthy convenience' positioning or customer insights that would help her decide how to pivot her customer value proposition to create a differentiated positioning relative to key c-store competitors.

It is March 2019, and Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's newly elected president, is deciding what to do about Brazil's participation in the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change. Bolsonaro must weigh the economic and political costs and benefits of taking drastic action to curb environmentalism and environmental protections in Brazil. Exiting from the Paris Agreement would provide far greater freedom to reboot Brazil's economy, which is one of Bolsonaro's campaign promises. Ignoring climate change would enhance Bolsonaro's ability to roll back fines and regulations aimed at protecting the Amazon Basin, the world's largest carbon sink. This move would likely boost his popularity with the agribusiness sector, but draw ire from social and labor groups in Brazil that have fought long and hard to improve environmental protection throughout the country. And there are broader international considerations: Would leaving Paris mean objections from trading partners and the broader global community?

The case highlights the differing trajectories of two, contemporaneous models of microfinance in India. The well-known Grameen MFI Model made inroads in the mid-90s, primarily in the four southern states of India. This was in a setting where there was an extensive network of a pre-existing indigenously developed group lending model, called the Self-Help Group Bank Linkage (SHG Bank Linkage) model. Today, the Indian microfinance story stands at a crucial juncture with respect to these two models. The SHG model, while being recognized as a key player in changing the financial inclusion discourse in India, is no longer salient in the current financial inclusion narratives. Grameen MFIs on the other hand, are on their way to being "mainstreamed" as banks, pretty much along the lines of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Using the dramaturgical approach of the sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982), the case differentiates the two models based on the front-stage (borrower-groups) and back-stage (organizations, investors, and the State). This distinction is useful for our microfinance narrative because while the front-stage is steeped in discourses of community, and poverty alleviation; the back-stage revolves around the hard-nosed financial ratios, fund disbursement and recovery pressures, break-even analyses around lender-borrower relations - which are unrelated or even detrimental to the front-stage discourse. Differentiating between the front-stage and back-stage interactions thus allows us to reveal processes that played out very differently for both these microfinance models. It helps us parse out a key question: did the more globally attuned model Grameen Model end up gobbling the clunkier and local SHG Bank Linkage Model?

The case follows social entrepreneur Wilma Rodriguez's journey of three decades as she creates and grows Saahas Zero Waste. Wilma wants to address the social issue and seeks various forms of solutioning, partnership, and organizational structure to take advantage of whatever opportunities arise along the way. The case spotlights Saahas when it faces the challenges of increasing scale as part of achieving product market fit. Saahas delivers value that cannot easily be quantified, to first-time large customers who do not understand the quantum and impact of the waste they generate. Saahas needs to communicate the value it delivers. It also needs to determine how to scale further.