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In 2007, the owner and director of marketing and research and development at Jaga was preparing for a meeting. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the future of the Belgian company's Uchronia project (an online community and playground for creativity and product development). Over the previous 15 years, Jaga had transformed from a production-based radiator company to a highly innovative organization with a focus on the premium market. The owner, who had succeeded his father as chief executive officer during the 1990s, had managed this transformation. As an anthropologist with a unique view of the world, he saw the economy, innovation, and management as integral parts of his vision. Jaga had developed three major innovation projects in recent years. The first two were inexpensive projects and focused on direct benefits for the company. The third, the Uchronia project, was a larger and a more expensive project initiated at the Burning Man festival in 2006 that gained worldwide media attention. However, the Uchronia online community that resulted from the project had not grown as expected, leaving its founder to have to make a decision about the project's future.

In 2012, Fastjet acquired Fly540, a low-cost airline with operations in Tanzania, Kenya, Angola, and Ghana, and began operating as a low-cost carrier with the goal to become the most successful pan-African low-cost airline. Since starting operations, Fastjet had grown tremendously, achieving strong market acceptance and a reputation for reliability and punctuality. Although yield per passenger had increased over its first two years, Fastjet had continued to report operating losses due to its poorly performing operations in Kenya, Angola, and Ghana. In September 2014, Fastjet had the opportunity to expand into other African regions, and the company's chief executive officer needed to consider his options to successfully grow the company's operations.

In February 2013, John Carroll and Alexander Whittemore, both managing directors at Summit Partners (Summit), are considering an investment in RoboSoft, LLC (RoboSoft), a provider of data-center automation, business intelligence, and security software solutions, primarily for the IBM i operating system. Summit had previously invested in RoboSoft, and did well when it exited the company in 2007. Over the ensuing years, Summit had followed RoboSoft and was considering a second investment in the company when it was put up for sale again in late 2012. This time, Summit planned to invest $103.6 million from its growth equity fund and $43.9 million from its subordinated debt fund to buy out the company. This case is designed to introduce students to mezzanine investments. Because the deal involves both an equity and a subordinated debt investment, students can compare the investment considerations and return expectations of both types of investors. The case contains the actual deal team's investment memorandum summarizing the merits of the RoboSoft investment. The students are asked to qualitatively evaluate the potential benefits and risks of the investment from the perspective of a debt investor and an equity investor, and to quantitatively calculate the internal rate of returns (IRRs) and cash-on-cash returns (CoCs) of Summit's equity and subordinated debt fund investments. This case is appropriate for classes that survey private equity investments, or for corporate financing classes that wish to compare the risk and return of equity and debt investments. It is assumed that students have taken valuation courses and understand residual equity cash flow valuation methods. There are Excel files-one for students, one for instructors-to support analysis of this case.

Care Unlimited was a start-up in Kolkata, India, engaged in providing support and services to elderly customers whose children lived far away. The venture, four years old, had garnered a clientele who strongly believed in supporting the well-being of their elderly parents. The start-up endeavoured to change the experience of old age by supporting its customers in various chores, and by meaningfully engaging them in the various activities they enjoyed. By April 2018, the set-up had captured a share of the early market in Kolkata; however, the concept that the needs of elderly people extended beyond a need for emergency services had yet to gain wide-scale acceptance. Should the founder consider adding emergency services? Or should he continue to focus on driving home the point that elderly people needed far more than emergency services? Was there a need to explore alternative ways of earning revenue and diversifying his business?

In 2016, Somany Ceramics Limited (SCL), a ceramic tile manufacturing company in India, needed industry-ready workers to meet the company's expansion plan; however, the whole ceramics industry was affected by a shortage of labour. Most of the technically competent ceramics and construction personnel in India preferred to work in the construction industry or join other sectors such as information technology. The company's human resources team needed to develop a strategy to hire an adequate number of skilled employees and to retain them as the competitors also attempted to take advantage of growth opportunities in the global ceramics industry.

Headquartered in Gurgaon, India, Vaidam Health Private Limited (Vaidam) was an online medical-value-travel (MVT) facilitator that had been hosting overseas patients travelling to India for medical treatment since its inception in January 2016. It had partnered with over 100 world-class health care facilities across the major cities in the country. Given the improved attractiveness of the MVT services, the founders of Vaidam realized that they would face tough competition in their attempt to further leverage this massive unaddressed business opportunity. Although they had successfully bootstrapped and come this far, they now had a tougher challenge to face in May 2018: as an MVT facilitator, how could Vaidam continuously offer value to medical travellers so that they would continue to choose Vaidam to plan their treatment and travel to India?

LendingClub was founded in 2006 as an alternative, peer-to-eer lending model to connect individual borrowers to individual investor-lenders through an online platform. Since 2014 the company has worked with institutional investors at scale. While the company assigns grades and sub-grades to each application using its own risk evaluation model, it also makes detailed data on each loan applications available to both kinds of investors for their own analyses. The case follows MBA graduate Emily Figel as she researches LendingClub as a potential investment vehicle for the small wealth management firm she will join in the fall. Using LendingClub's historical data, she learns the fundamentals of predictive analytics to see whether she can build models to predict whether a borrower will repay or, ultimately, default on the obligation. This first case (A) presents students will relevant, detailed data about how the LendingClub model works. This includes LendingClub's business model, the grading of loans, the unique opportunities and risks. It also follows Figel as she dives into the data to use it to build a model. In the B and C cases, Figel explores several specific techniques for training models. Technical topics include: understanding the data, data preparation, balanced and unbalanced data sets, constructing training-validation-holdout sets, cross-validation, predictions and target leakage.

This case follows Bill Booth, marketing manager of a regional wine distributor, as he applies unsupervised learning on data about his customers' purchases to better understand their preferences. Specifically, he uses the K-means clustering technique to identify groups of customers who have purchased any number of 32 specific "deals" Booth offered over the year, differentiated by the wine varietal as well as its country of origin and a minimum number of bottles to purchase. Insights from this analysis may help him understand themes across the deals that can inform construction of new deals in the future. Topics include: Unsupervised learning; similarity and proximity; K-means clustering, with measures of Euclidean distance and cosine similarity; Gaussian mixture models; interpreting clusters.

Brown Bag Films produced programming for Disney, Amazon, BBC, and Nickelodeon, reaching an audience of more than 100 million pre-school children around the world. This case examines the development of Brown Bag Films, which began in 1994 as a partnership between two art school students in Ireland who had a passion for making animated children's films-but no business plan, and only a few thousand pounds of borrowed funds. Early successes like an Oscar nomination meant name recognition, but the company had a decidedly non-linear track before it became known for producing popular animated series. The company pivoted a number of times, yet still saw itself as a start-up, a technology venture that was also a creative venture, at the cutting edge of 3D animation. Topics discussed include strategic thinking, mission alignment, management training, and corporate culture.

Lexoo, a UK-based online marketplace for legal services, was facing the strategic choice of how to grow from early start-up to mature platform. Daniel van Binsbergen, Lexoo's CEO, and web developer Chris O'Sullivan, CTO, had set up Lexoo to help Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) to find legal advice at low prices. At the time of the case in 2018, Lexoo had just started attracting larger companies in need of specialized legal advice as new customers. Larger companies had higher value and more frequent needs. Lexoo could become their "go-to" place across a broad range of legal services. Nevertheless, larger companies also required a more personalized approach and were more difficult to acquire than SMEs. Van Binsbergen and O'Sullivan were debating whether Lexoo should diversify to serve both SMEs and larger companies, or whether to pivot their focus toward larger companies altogether.

On a sunny Monday morning, Rev. Morgan-Thomas walked into her newly acquired hat factory thinking, "What have I gotten myself into? Things are worse than I imagined. Can I ever turn this company around given all of the known and unknown problems? Can I make it profitable?"

In May 2018, Berkshire Hathaway announced an unprecedented loss of more than $1 billion for the first quarter of 2018. Warren Buffett blamed this loss on the new accounting rules for equity securities which he criticized. In the case 'Fair Value Accounting at Berkshire Hathaway, Inc.' students will evaluate the impact of a new rule related to the fair value accounting as it pertains to Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet. Students will debate the topic of relevance and reliability in fair value accounting as compared to historical cost accounting and discuss the intended purposes of the balance sheet and income statement (with particular attention to net income). Students will also have a chance to review the business model of Berkshire Hathaway to debate how to measure and report the economic performance of Berkshire Hathaway.

Three months into her job as secretary of health for Washington State in 1999-a position which had been vacant for nearly a year following the previous secretary's resignation-Mary Selecky read a newspaper story that the state's largest and most influential health jurisdiction, Public Health Seattle King County, reported three unconnected people in the county had been infected with salmonella, a common foodborne bacteria that makes people sick and can lead to severe illness and even death in some instances if untreated. While Department of Health epidemiologists had already serotyped the bacteria, which they traced to fruit smoothies from a Seattle chain, this was the first time that Selecky had heard anything about the outbreak. Clearly, she mused, no one in the state working on the matter thought the state secretary of health needed to know about it. Selecky, who had previously run a poorly resourced, rural county health district in Washington State, did not yet understand how state-level public health laboratories and other resources interacted with Public Health Seattle King County, health labs in other states, or federal agencies and resources. She was not even sure of her role vis à vis the State Department of Health's own epidemiology team when it came to routine foodborne outbreaks. However, Selecky did know that foodborne pathogens could sicken and kill, and had no respect for man-made borders. What if anything should Selecky do? What does she need to know? What is her role in what staff consider routine communicable disease investigations. How should she go about discovering it? How does one decide what is and what is not routine?

The 8.9 magnitude earthquake that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, unleashed a 30-foot tsunami along Japan's Pacific Coast that damaged nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear complex. The crippled reactors leaked radiation into the sea and atmosphere, contaminating the local environment and sending a radioactive plume across the Pacific Ocean toward North America some 5,000 miles away. Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire soon asked State Secretary of Health Mary Selecky for the State Department of Health's action plan for the crisis, directing the seasoned health officer to "handle it!" Although the health risks posed to west coast communities by the incoming radiation was low, the public's anxiety about possible health consequences was high. Round-the-clock news coverage of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and its fallout inadvertently stoked what Selecky described as "an epidemic of fear" as residents sought to protect themselves from potential radiation contamination in water, shellfish, and dairy products. Nearly three weeks into the crisis, Selecky received an unexpected phone call from Governor Gregoire, whom New York Times reporters had just contacted for comment on radiation found in a Washington State milk sample. "What milk sample?" Selecky replied, hearing the news for the first time. What should Selecky do? How should she and her staff respond to the March 11 disaster? How should she proceed following revelations of radiation in a Washington State milk sample? How should she and her department handle the public's concerns about contaminated debris washing up on Washington's shores and other disaster-related issues in months and years to come?

In 2013, GE implemented the FastWorks program, an initiative that utilized tools and methods adapted from start-up methodologies to make the company more customer centric, lean and agile. With the spread of FastWorks within GE, a startling conclusion became evident - the existing performance management system might no longer be fit for the company's new direction. This case series follows the journey of GE's new performance management system, Performance Development, and its PD@GE app. By utilizing FastWorks in its development process, the HR team was able to leverage customer feedback and rapid prototyping to build a new system with unique features, such as instantaneous feedback, upward feedback and removal of employee ratings.

Quentin Bell, the owner of a small oil extraction firm, BE Oil, owns the rights to drill on six different wells. Drilling requires substantial up-front costs, and each well has different drilling costs and production capability. Bell's challenge is to decide which wells to drill based on his expectation of the price of oil when it is extracted. The case was written for use in Darden's global economies and markets (GEM) core course during a class on the economics of competitive markets. The concepts of supply, demand, and equilibrium are often obscure to students at this early stage in the course, and this case provides a concrete example of how a firm in a competitive commodity market determines how much oil to produce. Students are asked to derive the firm's supply curve, relate that to the oil market supply curve, and ultimately recommend how much oil the firm should plan to produce. The plan pushes students to think about marginal cost/ marginal benefit analysis, implicitly at first and explicitly at the end of class. Students are also asked to consider how exogenous variables in the oil market affect the oil price and the firm's decision.

Chinese Pharmaceuticals (HK) Limited, a private, family-owned business in Hong Kong that supplies Chinese medicine products to retailers in Hong Kong and Macau, faces a situation where additional cash is needed for additional inventory. Jason Kwok, the General Manager is challenged to maintain adequate inventory levels of Noto37, a Chinese herbal medicine used to control cholesterol and blood pressure levels. Without compromising the company's cash flow needs, Jason has to implement better systems internally, by improving sales forecasting and prudent inventory management, to avoid shortages of the product.

Founder of Trade Without Borders (TWB), Joseph Fernandez, set up the organization purely for charitable purposes. TWB's mission is to extend trading services to non-government organizations (NGOs) in developing regions of the world. To execute the mission in a financially viable and sustainable manner, Joseph was thinking to establish a base of operations in Hong Kong, which was close to Chinese manufacturers of the products that were traded. A lot of questions came to Joseph's mind: what type of organization would TWB incorporate? And prior to this, what would be the strategy and daily operations of the proposed Hong Kong entity? How could TWB ensure the proposed operations would contribute to instead of hindering the primary social mission of the organization?

This case traces the sustainable development (SD) journey undertaken by Hong Kong's flagship carrier, Cathay Pacific Airways, to bring environmental issues from the periphery to the core of the organization. In 2012, the airline set 20 SD targets to be achieved by 2020. It soon realized that integrating sustainable practices into the overall strategy was vital for the long-term viability of the business. The key challenge for the airline's Environmental Affairs Department was twofold-to embed sustainability into the mainstream thinking of the organization, and to align environmental and social initiatives that cut across all departments with the overall business goals of the airline.

Many people take identity for granted, confident that they can prove they are who they say they are by using a driver's license or other ID card. For many millions of people, this is not the case. They possess not only no driver's license, but also no birth certificate which could be used to gain a driver's license and prove they are who they claim to be. As a result, they can sometimes appear invisible to the state, unable to receive aid or participate in critical programs. Indeed, as Nandan Nilekani argues, "unless a person can identify himself or herself and have some sort of proof of existence, you can't even talk about him owning property." This case explores the development and implementation of Aadhaar, an ambitious biometric identity system implemented in India. The system requires every Indian citizen to undergo a fingerprint and retinal scan to create a massive central database that can uniquely identify every person in the country. Supporters say such an identity management system has enormous potential to facilitate government services, reduce corruption, and enable hundreds of millions of Indians to enter the formal economy. To its critics, Aadhaar represents either an estate project that consumes enormous resources that will never reach its potential, or worse, the core infrastructure for a surveillance state that can better monitor and track many things its citizens do.