個案總覽

By the spring of 2021, My Sisters’ Place, a safe, welcoming, and inclusive support centre for women in London, Ontario, had welcomed countless women to Buchan House, a historic Victorian mansion located in downtown London, that had been generously donated by a local family. While it had become a safe haven for so many people in the community, the building’s age and heritage status also meant frequent and high maintenance costs, and the recent roofing repair bill was just another item on a long list of expenses. With strong community support, My Sisters’ Place had many plans for future programs and initiatives, but the organization’s manager was feeling a little overwhelmed by mounting financial needs, including the unexpected roof repair cost. As the manager of a not-for-profit social enterprise with limited funding, she understood that proceeding with the repair would translate into a painful cut somewhere—a reduction in services or in staff hours. Both would heavily impact the vulnerable population the organization was designed to serve, but the manager had to make a choice.

lebua Hotels & Resorts, based in Bangkok, Thailand, and headed by chief executive officer Deepak Ohri, is a much awarded luxury hotel chain. Since the early 2000s, it exposed the traditionally slow-moving luxury hospitality industry to a slew of path-breaking innovations. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Ohri had taken unorthodox paths to defining luxury hospitality. However, as the pandemic began to ebb, he had to convince the industry of his vision of what luxury hospitality was and should continue to be. His positioning strategy for lebua had been very effective, and having won numerous awards in the luxury category, Ohri was contemplating, with his executive team, the next level of innovations needed to bring the company to the top of its post-pandemic peer group.

Ye Ji had a dream: to build a unicorn enterprise. Ji, a serial entrepreneur in his forties, had the experience of setting up three businesses as an entrepreneur. From 2010 to 2014, he owned and managed Dalian Lingdong Technology Development Co. Ltd. (Lingdong), which specialized in developing e-commerce systems. From 2014 to 2017, he was the agent for Baidu Waimai’s Dalian operations. In 2017, he set up Flashfood.Shop, a company providing office workers with affordable and convenient fresh meals, twenty-four hours a day. However, Flashfood.Shop was almost brought to a halt by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. By April 2021, Ji had yet to realize his entrepreneurial dream of building a unicorn enterprise. The time had come for him to make a decision. Should he stick with Flashfood.Shop’s operation and wait for a turnaround? Should he close Flashfood.Shop and return to Lingdong, a business with which he was more familiar? Or should he start over with a new venture? Ji needed to seriously consider how to choose his next step.

On July 15, 2021, the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Loctek Ergonomic Technology Corp. (Loctek), located in Ningbo, China, was reviewing the mid-year financial report of his company. Loctek was a global leader in manufacturing and exporting office furniture—primarily monitor brackets and height-adjustable desks. Figures in the report portrayed the company’s solid growth in the midst of the global pandemic; the contribution from Loctek’s cross-border e-business was hard to miss. These figures assured the CEO that transforming Loctek from a traditional exporting business to a cross-border e-business was both correct and rewarding, despite some painful bumps and detours in the process. The CEO now had to decide whether to continue expanding Loctek’s overseas warehouses. If such an expansion were to occur, the resultant warehouse system could be opened to other small and mid-sized firms where international business had been strangled by limited storage capacity abroad. This idea, though never intended, had emerged during Loctek’s digital transformation. Considerable investments—in the millions of dollars—were at stake.

In 2007, JTD Group (JTD) was founded in the port city of Xiamen, China. Within two years, the founder began pursuing business opportunities in Africa. By 2020, JTD owned a 300-square-kilometre stone mine in South Africa. It was one of Africa’s biggest Chinese companies in the stone industry. From 2018, JTD had started to increase its investment in the neighbouring country of Namibia. Despite COVID-19-related challenges, Chinese market demand for stone, especially premium products, was booming in 2020. The founder had been thinking about how to better capture the market opportunity. Many issues needed attention, including the investment decision in Namibia, human resources policy in Africa, and being a responsible community member in both Africa and China.

台灣大車隊發展平台組織架構與領導

The founder and executive director of Allswell Productions (Allswell), an amateur musical theatre company based in London, Ontario, and her team had seen tremendous success with their inaugural production, and they needed to determine what show to stage next. With a wide assortment of theatregoers in the London area, she needed to refine her target market and plan a production for the next season. She had to determine which show to stage, in which theatre space to stage it, how to price the tickets, and how to promote the show.

King’s Hawaiian Bakery, West Inc. (King’s Hawaiian), a beloved and highly regarded company, produced a line of bread products dating back to the 1950s and was inspired by a Portuguese sweet bread. The business had grown over time, adding more production facilities and expanding from Hawaii to the mainland United States in 1977. King’s Hawaiian had done minimal consumer research related to its development of new products before it hired Troy Figgins as its new head of consumer insights. In October 2018, Figgins was tasked with creating a new consumer insights department; what this department looked like and how it functioned were entirely up to him. He was eager to design a best-in-class insights team to work with new strategies, tools, and partners. King’s Hawaiian knew it had to conduct market research to uncover insights to keep pace with evolving customer needs—but how? Figgins considered his problem and possible solutions to deliver great insights.

In May 2022, a consultant with global management consulting firm Kearney was working on a project for a private equity client, OPW Partners Inc. (OPW). The client was looking to acquire a high-end wine producer in Oregon and had engaged Kearney to complete an operational due diligence of its wine-making operations. The consultant and his team would be flying to Oregon to complete a series of site visits and ask questions directly to the wine-making team. These meetings would allow the consultant to confirm his assumptions and would provide him with an opportunity to investigate possible operational constraints and identify potential solutions. Kearney's due diligence report was expected to evaluate potential longer-term operational issues, specifically whether Silverton would have sufficient capacity to support OPW’s expansion plans, which were expected to start in the 2023 harvest season.

In May 2021, the founder of Yardstick Educational Initiatives Private Limited, a provider of experiential learning programs in India and the United Arab Emirates, was facing various business challenges. The company was started in India in 2008 but had been increasingly focused on the more profitable Middle East market since 2012. Attempting to stay current with technology advancements in educational products, it made considerable investments to develop new products and enhance its flagship learning product, the Yardstick Experiential Learning Program. However, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 caused a major setback for the company. Cash flow issues and reduced working capital were forcing the founder to decide which client segment to continue serving and which products to support. With only three months left in the peak sales season before the next academic year, the founder had to make important decisions.

A recent master of business administration degree graduate, had discovered a problem with inventory management in her family’s business. Agrawal Kitchenware Distributors (Agrawal), a wholesaler and distributor of kitchenware items, appeared to be well-off according to its financials, but when she had toured the company’s warehouse, she discovered several problems with the inventory, and there was no management system that could identify, track, or resolve the inventory problems. Because Agrawal was a family business, the changes needed to be acceptable to both brothers who owned and managed the business, and the changes needed to be fairly simple to implement and maintain. What inventory management technique would be suitable in these circumstances?

The founder of Jucai Human Resources Development Co., Ltd. had witnessed the development of China’s human resources service industry over the previous 20 years. In the company’s early stages, it had mainly relied on the advantage of information asymmetry of the Internet to carry out online recruitment services. But from 2015, the founder became interested in and confident about the prospects of providing a talent assessment service for public institutions and thus decided to start such a service. After five years of development, the company had become a leading enterprise in the domestic talent assessment service for public institutions. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, talent assessment services for public institutions suddenly stagnated. The founder realized that this service was too dependent on government policy support, although income from this service accounted for 70 per cent of its revenue. If public institutions shifted their talent assessment business from outsourcing assessment to independent assessment, the company would face a severe challenge. Therefore, the founder had to consider how his company could reduce its dependence on policies and achieve sustainable development by using existing data resources.

In 2021, SunSource Energy was evaluating its growth strategy options. An entrepreneurial venture in the renewable energy sector, it was about to receive a second round of large funding. SunSource Energy had to decide whether it should exploit its expertise in India and other known locales, or whether it should explore new possibilities. It needed to apply organizational ambidexterity and a fresh approach to design thinking, especially during uncertain times in a global context. What strategy should the company use to leverage its new funding for growing the business?

A former software developer founded INK PPT in 2015 in Gurgaon, Haryana, India, after realizing that he enjoyed designing presentations. However, the market for developing corporate presentations was still in its nascent stage in India, and there was strong reluctance among organizations to outsource this work. The founder faced various hurdles growing his company, including the initial challenge of attracting customers. The situation became more challenging after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. During the resulting lockdowns, INK PPT’s regular clients cut costs by reducing their presentation projects. As the pandemic continued, attracting new clients seemed almost impossible. The founder was told, both by friends and by a successful entrepreneur, that INK PPT was too far ahead of its time. The founder had to decide if he should continue to grow INK PPT, the start-up that he had devoted all his efforts in developing, or if it was time to move on to a new venture.

The owner and founder of a quickly-growing small business selling gluten-free, naturally sweetened, vegan protein snacks across Canada, had to decide how to move forward. She was a passionate entrepreneur but also worked full-time as a teacher. The company had grown rapidly in only two years and she now needed a strategy to ensure growth and success. Her time was limited, and she needed a strategy to increase both the business’s demand and its supply capacity. She had to decide how to scale the business she enjoyed while remaining committed to her full-time teaching job.

In June 2021, as Toronto-based Flashfood Inc. (Flashfood) continued to grow dramatically, its founder and chief executive officer was facing critical questions about how to manage both the firm’s mission and its business model. Flashfood partnered with grocery chains to sell near-expiry food to consumers via an app, and it had an expanding network of locations in Canada and the United States. The firm had a clear sustainability-driven objective: to reduce food waste and feed people more affordably. But how should the firm focus its ongoing investment and scarce resources—both strategically, in terms of market development and service offerings, and tactically, in terms of product pricing and app improvement? Could the firm achieve sustained success while avoiding any potential tendency to drift from that mission? Note to instructors: This case also includes a supplemental student spreadsheet. See "Supporting Materials" section below to download.

The success of Antiga Confeitaria de Belém had been built around the uniqueness of its signature product. Many comparable custard cakes, known as pastéis de nata, were available, but the bakery had established its Pastel de Belém as a distinct product with the power to attract tourists from all over the world. The Pastel de Belém stood out because its recipe had been a well-kept secret for decades. The 2020 COVID-19 crisis propelled Antiga Confeitaria de Belém to try new ways of selling its product outside of its single shop location, and this experiment could trigger new business opportunities. Now, the strategic challenge for the bakery's chief executive officer was to assess whether the exclusive nature of the Pastel de Belém allowed for new business development.

FunctionFox Systems Inc. (FunctionFox) was a small company headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, specializing in project management and timesheet tracking software. Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing restrictions, FunctionFox decided to move to 100 per cent remote work in late 2020 and sold the building where its office had been located. In early 2022, when the pandemic appeared to be subsiding, the president of FunctionFox was considering whether the company should continue with fully remote work, return to in-person work, or find a hybrid mode. She had to consider the pros and cons of each alternative and prepare a recommendation for her colleagues.

Confecciones La Montaña (CLM), a social business founded by former Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) combatants in rural Colombia, emerged out of the peace deal signed between FARC and the Colombian government in 2016. The business was part of the effort of former combatants to rejoin civilian life and help alleviate poverty in conflict-affected areas, thereby nurturing appropriate conditions to sustain peace in the country. However, the workshop had a limited productive capacity, which hindered its ability to grow, and, in 2021, the general manager had to determine the best way to increase capacity and ensure the sustainability of the business. Should CLM outsource some of its manufacturing to others in the area, or should it support the development of other clothing workshops created by former combatants across the country?

Founded in California in 2012, Ravel Law Inc. (Ravel) was a legal tech start-up that developed groundbreaking legal analytics products. In 2017, Ravel’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) was deciding between two very different paths to take the company—a decision that would shape Ravel’s future and ultimately determine how the CEO would exit the company. One path would lead Ravel to an acquisition or sale, and the other would allow the company to further develop its technology and eventually lead to an initial public offering (IPO). Should the CEO sell Ravel now and harvest its existing value, or should he hold on to the company and raise money to build internal capital for a future IPO? As the leader of Ravel, the CEO had to weigh the benefits and costs of fundraising for a third round of investor money against the benefits and costs of selling Ravel. While doing so, he also had to consider what would bring the most value to Ravel’s stakeholders as well as satisfy his personal interests in the venture and in an exit.