個案總覽

After a successful career in research and academia, Joel Dawson, decided to pursue entrepreneurship in the semiconductor industry. Together with several others, Joel Dawson co-founded Eta Devices in 2014 based on new technology developed at MIT to improve the efficiency of radio transmitter devices.

In the spring of 2016, the chief executive officer of Agoda Company Pte. Ltd. (Agoda), a subsidiary of The Priceline Group, Inc., wanted to transform the firm's human resource practices using data analytics. The idea was not just to get more data, but to use this data to help managers gain insights to make better decisions. The three main focal areas of this exercise were recruitment, performance evaluation, and compensation. As key executives worked at transforming Agoda into an organization that emphasized people and development, they faced various challenges related to collecting, managing, and leveraging large volumes of data.

Tech Talk is an electronic content publishing portal that publishes articles on information and communication technologies. The articles cover specialized areas such as business analytics, e-governance, e-commerce, web technologies, big data analytics, software project management, telecommunication systems, business management theories, service science, e-payments, and Internet marketing. As a growth strategy, the co- founder of Tech Talk wants to draw traffic by creating a larger social media presence. He wants to use established strategies, and has the following questions: How should he strategize the interaction with readers on social media? With so many platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, which ones should he focus on? Should he manage the social media marketing in-house or outsource it?

A family-owned grocery business, Askew's Foods Inc. (Askew's), had to decide how to handle the threat of a Wal-Mart Superstore, which included a grocery department, coming into its market area. Before the news of Wal-Mart's potential arrival, Askew's had already purchased a site on which to build a second store in the city's uptown area, and the board needed to approve the design for the new building. Askew's had a long-standing tradition of being an environmentally sensitive, socially responsible, and community-minded retailer, and the board wanted to uphold those corporate values in the design and operation of the new Askew's store; however, the pending arrival of this low-cost competitor had to be considered in the decision. Was it fiscally responsible for Askew's to stay true to its principles and build a state-of-the-art, sustainable grocery store, or, given the new threat to its market share and profitability, as well as limited funding from its bank, should it opt for the more conservative and less expensive standard box option? Was cost the only consideration?

Starbucks has noted rapid growth in China, targeting 70% growth in three years. Although popular among a Chinese clientele, it is facing a number of internal and external challenges related to the Chinese economic slowdown, and issues associated with the paradox of growth. As a leader in innovation, it has developed and implemented top-notch solutions across domains such as HR, R&D, CRM, design, digital, product development, supply chain, electronic payment, etc., and needs to continue the innovation process to stay ahead of the competition. What can it do to expand and innovate continuously? As growth reduces elasticity, what should it do to retain the flexibility to address market demands and interruptions quickly?

This case puts students in the shoes of the Ebola response leadership teams of Firestone Liberia and its parent company, Bridgestone Americas, as they worked together to respond to the deadly 2014 Ebola epidemic. While the companies had received positive press for their containment of the virus on their rubber farm in Liberia, which was home to 8,000 employees and 80,000 Liberian citizens, the situation off the property was worsening. With death counts rising and hospitals across the nation closing as staff caught the virus, the Liberian government declared a national state of emergency. The teams now faced the possibility that the government might attempt to take control of the farm's medical center. How could they balance their duty to care effectively for employees against the demands of the Liberian government? Should they try to fend off the government or cooperate to meet the government's demands? Students will learn how to do a methodical situation analysis that considers ethical obligations and strategic implications, and to distill their recommendation into a briefing for senior leadership.

In 2008, the marketing manager for Nestlé Japan's confectionery business and his team were struggling to redefine the KITKAT brand within the Japanese market. KITKAT as a brand faced a real threat as the retail environment rapidly shifted toward increasingly powerful convenience store chains and consumer preferences shifted toward more novel consumable products. With more than 200 companies competing within Japan's crowded and relatively stable confectionery market, Nestlé Japan was facing the harsh realities of Japan's famed position as the world's toughest consumer market. To address these challenges, Nestlé Japan worked over 15 years to instill deep meaning in the KITKAT brand and then, based upon this foundation, created a comprehensive product portfolio. How can KITKAT capitalize on its past success as it moves forward?

In 2012, Ingersoll Rand India added the position of senior director of engineering for its engineering and technology centres, which were originally established to support the product development activities of the company. The new position was established to lead the currently low-performing engineering and technology centres to a new, more efficient and effective path. Projects had been missing their delivery targets, and there were major differences in the understanding of the requirements among the strategic business unit teams. This all led to continuous changes in deliverables and resulted in customer dissatisfaction. Key employees were unhappy, and some high-performing team members had left the organization. The new senior director of engineering needed to assess the situation and determine whether he had the right organizational configuration to grow and sustain the engineering for its engineering and technology centres in Ingersoll Rand India. The case comprises two parts: Part A describes the challenges faced by the organization overall, and Part B discusses the progress between 2012 and 2015.

For years, Chinese manufacturers displaced Western companies by offering lower prices. More recently they began to disrupt by challenging existing business models. Displacement was easy to combat by improving processes and lowering costs but fighting disruption required innovation along business models, which entailed transformation of business processes as well as reformulation of value propositions. With iPhone generating about two thirds of its revenue, Apple was trying to boost its service and other product lines. It had also invested in solar powered energy systemsas well as a wind turbine technology in China. The Company also ventured with Didi (the company which outdid Uber in China) to develop self-driving vehicles. Exploring new strategic pastures, however, Apple had to ensure the success of iPhone 8 while further leveraging its platform ecosystem. It was not clear how Apple could reposition itself to sustain the pushback by the Chinese brands while exploring new strategic pastures in light of possible tightening of the Sino-U.S. economic relations.

Founded in 1999, by Matthew Spacie to give poor children an opportunity to play, Magic Bus had evolved to a leading social enterprise engaged in sports for development, holistic childhood development, and livelihood training for youth between the ages of 6 to 18. By 2017, there were 400,000 children in its various programs. The organization had been through three phases of growth. The case poses the question what the fourth phase should look like.

In October 2016, Timothy Sloan, the newly appointed CEO of American banking giant Wells Fargo, faced a massive public-relations crisis. A few weeks earlier, a United States government agency had announced the results of its regulatory review of the bank and exposed a shocking practice common in the retail division, in which aggressive community bankers had created more than a million fraudulent accounts and credit card applications on behalf of unaware customers for the past several years. Over the next few weeks, the bank-and Sloan's predecessor, John Stumpf, in particular-suffered from harsh criticism from politicians, journalists, and former employees alike, ultimately forcing Stumpf's resignation. As Sloan sought to minimize the public-image backlash and restore general trust in Wells Fargo, he struggled to construct the best communication strategy for the bank's next chapter.

The material in this case presents Progressive Insurance as it faced important decisions regarding how to proceed with its usage-based insurance (UBI) initiatives, including the Snapshot device and related patents. Progressive had a head start on its competitors employing UBI pricing, but several competing insurance companies had been testing the waters with their own UBI products. In the case, Progressive considers a number of alternative uses of its patents for students to address.

Be Well Hospitals - a multi-specialty secondary healthcare chain of hospitals is set up in the suburbs, industrial towns and district headquarters of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The hospital chain co-founded by Dr. C.J.Vetrievel in 2011, fulfills the need of quality healthcare services in secondary healthcare market segment. They provide access to high-quality primary and secondary healthcare services at affordable price to the semi-urban and rural population through their chain of multi-specialty hospitals. In the four and half years, since its founding, Be Well has set up eight hospitals with a combined capacity of more than 280 beds and has treated close to 500,000 patients. The case describes Be Well's operations and the marketing initiatives it deployed to increase the adoption of its service concept in a two -tiered market. it provides information about the content of Be Well's past advertising communications and the media choices it made to build its brand. The management is grappling with the dilemma of brand building and educating potential customers about the high quality of care available at Be Well in a format that had a smaller footprint than its big city rivals. A complicating factor is creating a three-tier market with the limited resources in a setting where the customers are used to a two-tier service structure. They face a resource allocation challenge with regard to the mix of media-based and non-media based communication platforms. The management needs to decided on the choice of service attributes or dimensions around which the Be Well brand to be built and whether to focus on local branding of each hospital or develop a unified and common brand across all its facilities in the state.

In early 2017, after launching its successful "Greenhouse-in-a-Box" pilot project in India with fifteen smallholder farmers, Kheyti, a non-profit agricultural technology (AgTech) social enterprise, was struggling with several decisions in developing and growing its business. Kheyti was launched in 2015 to help smallholder farmers battle poverty and income variability by providing affordable technologies bundled with services. Over eighteen months, the team had developed a low-cost and modular greenhouse product to which it added financing, inputs, training, and market linkages to create a comprehensive "full-stack" solution for small farmers. The pilot project was a success in many ways, but Saumya, Kheyti's co-founder and head of product, was concerned that it revealed shortcomings that could severely affect the viability and scalability of Kheyti's solution. Saumya had some important decisions to make. Should Kheyti redesign the product from scratch, or find other ways to reduce the cost for early adopters? Should it rely on upfront revenues from sales of the greenhouse, or consider developing an innovative financing or contract farming model? Kheyti's dwindling cash reserves meant that these decisions were urgent and critical. The path chosen now would determine whether the startup would move beyond the pilot stage and achieve its vision of serving 1 million farmers by 2025.

In October 2015, two senior California officials: Marybel Batjer, Secretary for Government Operations, and Michael Wilkening, Undersecretary for the Health and Human Services Agency seized on an idea that had the potential to turn the state's long dysfunctional technology procurement process on its head. After years of planning, California was about to request bids for a new child welfare management system to replace a twenty-year-old technology that, as part of the country's largest child welfare program, was accessed by approximately 25,000 state and county employees, to serve millions of California's children. The request for bids called for a "waterfall" approach to software development, where all aspects of the project would follow a pre-ordained sequence and likely cost the state nearly half a billion dollars. Just weeks before the request was to be released Batjer and Wilkening met with former U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and members of a tech nonprofit, Code for America, who warned that both the waterfall approach and the large size of the project posed significant risks. First, they proposed an alternative "architecture" that would break up the "monolith" proposal into its component parts. Rather than build and replace one giant system with another, why not replace the system in parts-or in modules? Second, for each of these modules, teams of programmers and social workers could work together to build a prototype and iterate till the final product satisfied the needs of the state-in a process known as "agile" development. But could California's bureaucracy, with its stringent procurement rules pivot to a modular approach? And could Batjer and Wilkening convince state staff and county partners to experiment with agile development, a methodology never attempted in California government before? Case number 2101.0

Dilli Haat started in 1994 with the objective of providing infrastructure to craftspeople from across India to sell their traditional crafts in an urban marketplace and prevent their exploitation by intermediaries. The marketplace, set up in the heart of Delhi, the capital of India, was a one-stop shop for visitors seeking authentic India handicrafts and handloomed products. Dilli Haat provided a unique shopping experience in a well-laid-out area, where shopping was combined with cultural extravaganzas and food courts offering cuisine from all the states of India. It became a sought-after destination not only for shopping but also as a meeting place, where families and friends could spend time together. After rising to its glory, Dilli Haat witnessed a decrease in visits and was losing its spirit. In January 2016, the manager was faced with the challenge of restoring Dilli Haat to its former glory.

This case chronicles Go-Jek's journey as Indonesia's first unicorn tech startup, which has been named by Fortune Magazine as one of the top 50 companies that "change the world". It highlights how Go-Jek leveraged on its on-demand mobile platform - arguably, the most complete ecosystem in South East Asia to create significant social and economic value for Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country. It also reveals how Go-Jek capitalized on its local business understanding and data analytics to outmanoeuvre bigger competitors such Uber and Grab in Indonesia. Go-Jek has a saying: money can't buy time, but Go-Jek can buy you time. In particular, Go-Jek's motorbike delivery and ride-sharing app has enabled businesses and individuals to circumvent Jakarta's gridlock and achieve desired outcomes of increased sales and higher productivity. This has led to the positive effect of spurring the growth of Jakarta's informal economy.

Stephane Kasriel, the new CEO of Upwork, the leading platform for freelance labor, needs to decide on how to redesign business model. While the firm has been growing rapidly since the merger of Odesk and eLance, the newly combined firm continue face problems of clients "circumventing" the Upwork platform after an initial match. This case explores a variety of options for how Kasriel might prevent circumvention and reach his ambitious growth goals.