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After a remarkable success in Japan, the producer of the Japanese female singing group AKB48 evaluates market opportunities overseas for his artistic creation. This case introduces the business model behind the AKB48 concept and allows students to identify what geographic market - China, Indonesia, Taiwan, The Philippines, Thailand or South Korea - is more suitable for AKB48's first move overseas. During the discussion, students also identify the geographic limits of a product and what changes, if any, should be done to adapt it to a chosen market. Given high levels of piracy in the music industry, students are not only able to explore the value creation aspects of AKB48 but also the value capture features of its business model.

A global environmental service provider goes through major changes to offer integrated solutions and reach out to new countries.

This case provides four examples of organizations with very different business strategies: Walmart, Starbucks, Harvard Business School, and Google. To support their varying strategies, each of these organizations requires a specific configuration to provide the most value to their primary customer. Configurations examined include the Low Price, Local Value Creation, Global Standard of Excellence, Dedicated Service Relationship and the Expert Knowledge designs. Students are asked to analyze the configurations used in each of these examples and then to apply the analysis to a company with which they are familiar.

Set in early-2017, this case examines widespread sales misconduct at Wells Fargo Community Bank. Wells Fargo's governance and controls are described in the leadup to the September 2016 announcement that Wells Fargo had settled with regulators for $185 million in relation to the years-long period of misconduct in sales. Subsequent investigations, terminations, compensation clawbacks, and other consequences are described.

This case requires students to evaluate alternative dual-share-class corporate structures that allow companies and entrepreneurs to pursue profit with purpose. The case explores Impact Makers, an IT consulting company based in Richmond, Virginia. While original founders of the firm hold all voting rights, the cash flow rights belong to two nonprofits setting the stage for a Newman's Own model of management consulting. The case discusses whether and how the alternative corporate structure aids the firm's overall strategy to attract top-quality employees, pay them competitive salaries, and provide superior service to its clients while donating 100% of its lifetime value to charitable causes, largely through partnerships with various nonprofit organizations. More importantly, the case asks students to evaluate how such a dual-share-class and dual-purpose company can raise capital to fund continued growth. The case opens with CEO Michael Pirron reminding himself of all the questions he had run through to execute a strategy to further grow Impact Makers' consulting business both through expanding a menu of services and through conquering new geographical markets. To do either, or both, the company needed a cash infusion. Internal cash was limited, as up to 40% of it flowed to charitable partners, demonstrating Impact Makers' commitment to its mission. Raising debt for a company without fixed assets was challenging and time consuming. Complicating it all was that being structured as a nonstock corporation rendered equity raising difficult. Could Impact Makers raise money to grow and stay true to community values at the same time?

The owner of Hamilton's has provided his CPA with all the company's invoices, bank statements, and a lot of other miscellaneous business-related information for the company's second year. He has asked the CPA to reconstruct, in summary form, all the company's second-year transactions and to create an income statement for its second year of operations and a balance sheet at the end of that year.

This case traces the sexual assault scandal that rocked the United States Air Force Academy in 2003. Over a period of several months, dozens of current and former female students came forward to the media and government representatives about being sexually assaulted by their male peers on campus. Several victims also implicated the Academy's leadership for not doing enough to address the problem. When the scandal broke, Lieutenant General John Dallager was the Academy Superintendent (equal to President of a civilian university). The Academy's decade-old sexual assault program guaranteed confidentiality for victims of sexual assault. The program also offered a slew of prevention and support services. Many Academy staff regarded the sexual assault program as the "gold standard." But the rising number of allegations shined a harsh light on the Academy's culture and immediately cast doubts on Dallager's leadership. Why had he and other senior officials at the Academy failed to notice the scale of the problem? Or had they willfully ignored it? Case number 2098.0

In 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama called on Congress to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.10. To the surprise of no one, Congressional Republicans blocked the move, as they had a similar proposal the year before. Seeing little hope of federal action, wage activists turned their sights on state and local governments. Riding a tide of popular support, dozens of jurisdictions voted in hikes in their own state and city minimum wage levels between 2012 and 2016. Focusing especially on the American South, which had historically opposed the minimum wage, the case uses this wage struggle as the point of departure for a review of the issues and arguments raised in this longstanding public policy controversy. Presented as a friendly overview of economic thinking for non-economists, the case explains why liberals and conservatives view the issue of income inequality so differently, why they disagree about basic wage data, and why they vigorously dispute the impact of minimum wage laws on low-income wage earners. Case number 2099.0

This paper compares different types of shared mobility solutions, in particular carsharing and ride hailing, the two most prevalent forms today. It describes the major trends prompting OEMs to engage in the mobility industry, such as urbanization, shifting consumer preference from 'owning' to 'sharing', and various technological advances. With that understanding in mind, the authors examine the current state of the shared mobility industry in more detail, taking a closer look at growth, profitability, and strategies for the different solutions. The study also considers the impact that highly automated vehicles might have on these mobility businesses, and suggests that carsharing will ultimately fold into ride hailing. Based on those analyses, the paper discusses forward directions for automakers, such as investments vs. partnerships, criteria for market selection, and synergies with other industry trends.

Audio Advice was a brick-and-mortar audio specialty retailer with two stores in North Carolina. Traditionally, audiophile components were only sold through specialty stores. However, this practice was shifting, with a growing portion of sales occurring online. Audio Advice wanted to capture a portion of this growing channel, so started online as an Amazon Marketplace seller. Though this channel resulted in quick revenue growth without a great deal of initial investment, it was not suitable long term. Audio Advice's management had a bigger vision. In planning their transition to their own e-commerce site, Audio Advice needed to consider branding: should they extend their existing brand, use a sub-brand, or develop a new one? How would each option affect in-store sales, Audio Advice's reputation, and the willingness of audiophile brands to allow online sales of their products?

In 2016, Hong Kong-based Maxim's Group hired a store manager to run its high-end French bakery, Paper Stone, located in mainland China. The company's aim was to eventually expand Paper Stone to additional cities throughout China. The store manager was preparing to present his vision for Paper Stone to a senior executive from Maxim's Group but needed to determine his position on some key questions: What kind of employees should he hire, and how should he go about managing the employees? What management structure should he recommend? How should he market the Paper Stone brand?

In October 2015, three senior managers at BNP Paribas Fortis, the leader in retail banking in Belgium and a subsidiary of the BNP Paribas Group, were discussing how to take the bank's latest service, "James," to the next level and grow its customer base fivefold by the end of 2016. Launched in 2009, James was a unique investment portfolio advice service that substituted web conferencing technology for face-to-face interaction between advisors and affluent banking customers. An important feature of the James banking experience was that each customer mainly interacted with the same advisor, and was able to do so from virtually any location, outside regular office hours. The use of technology to build strong customer relationships from a distance proved beneficial for both the customers and the bank. Now the BNP Paribas Fortis managers had to decide how to expand James' customer base, outpace the competition, and organize for growth. How could they grow the country's current base of nearly 20,000 James customers to 100,000 in just one year?

In March 2016, the senior director of logistics and fulfillment at ShopClues.com, a leading online marketplace headquartered in Gurgaon, India, reflected on the positive turnaround in the company's logistics strategy. Until 2014, the company had depended on air transport for shipment delivery, which limited it to Tier 1, Tier 2, and a few Tier 3 cities. It had relied entirely on the few national courier services available. These services had high logistics costs and could not reach customers in some tier 3 and tier 4 cities, preventing these customers from placing orders and leading to dissatisfaction. ShopClues.com switched to surface transport and a network of third-party logistics service providers to meet its requirements in a cost-effective manner. With evolving customer expectations for online retail sales and fierce competition in the e-commerce market, could ShopClues.com become the first profitable e-commerce company with third-party logistics partnerships as the key enabler?

In 2016, India witnessed an intense war for talent acquisition in consulting when Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India LLP (Deloitte) poached 20 partners and their teams-around 300 people in total-from KPMG India (KPMG). Deloitte offered a higher compensation to attract KPMG executives and lured partners with a salary jump in proportion to the number of team members they could bring from KPMG. The rivalry between the firms was fuelled by their desire to challenge Ernst & Young Global Limited, the market leader, which had 125 partners in its advisory vertical. This was the biggest poaching attempt in the industry since 2011 and the third time in the span of a year that KPMG partners had quit to join rival companies. For KPMG, it was a big blow, as the company lost many partners from the vertical that was leading its growth globally. KPMG management was now confronted with the challenge of defending against any such future poaching attempts by its competitors and retaining existing employees. The firm needed to engage its existing employees and boost their motivation to avoid further damage.

Suncrest Agribusiness Company (Suncrest), an agribusiness firm based in the Midwestern United States, was one of the largest seed manufacturers in the world. Seed corn (i.e., the seed that farmers purchased to grow corn in their fields) was the company's largest business segment in the North American market; yet the seed corn market was subject to both demand and supply uncertainty. Farmers chose whether to grow corn or a different crop based on the predicted prices for corn post-harvest, making the demand uncertain. The supply was similarly uncertain because the amount of seed that firms obtained from their fields was subject to random variations. In this challenging environment, Suncrest needed to develop a forecasting model that exploited available data to determine the optimal capacity to grow seed corn.

The owner and operator of two stores that sold organic groceries and fair-trade goods in Edmonton, Alberta was proud of what he had built; however he was worried about the financial sustainability of his downtown location. Since its opening in 2014, the downtown store had constantly struggled to remain profitable in the face of extremely high overhead costs. The original Whyte Avenue location of Earth's General Store, highly popular with its loyal patrons, had been subsidizing the downtown store just to keep its doors open. This practice was certainly not a long-term solution, and in early 2016, the owner needed to create a new business strategy that would balance his company's financial needs with its social and environmental missions.

In December 2016, Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon), the largest online retailer, entered the offline retailing industry by launching its first Amazon Go store in Seattle. Previously, the company had entered the food, diaper, and housekeeping product manufacturing industries with its Amazon Elements brand. The company had not been profitable until 2001 and was still facing some financial difficulties, but it was named the fourth most valuable public company in the United States in 2016. In 2015, it surpassed Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (Walmart) as the most valuable online retailer in the country. Given its current competitive advantages in the online retail business, could Amazon reproduce this success in offline markets? Did Amazon's diversification into offline retailing make sense considering its existing resources and capabilities, the presence of established traditional retailers such as Walmart, and a market trend that was increasingly moving toward online stores?

In late 2015, Apigee, a fast-growing technology firm, faced competitive pressures. It needed to scale up rapidly, which included hiring additional staff. At the regional office in India, some members of the senior leadership team wondered whether the company would need to modify its human resources practices. The firm had been operating in a unique organizational culture that encouraged employees' openness and freedom, in keeping with its core values of passion, a bias for action, and respect. How could Apigee integrate its unique culture with the organization's growth plans? The senior leadership team needed to decide how Apigee could retain its personalized approach, culture of freedom, and high levels of employee empowerment, as the company expanded both in size and scope.

The founder of bKash Limited (bKash), a successful mobile financial services (MFS) model pioneered in Bangladesh, built the company from scratch, targeting services at the lower socioeconomic segment of society and eventually acquiring 26 million customers. bKash has had a positive impact on the lives of countless poor people and has gained worldwide recognition for its innovative business model. The model required close collaboration with telecommunications operators, banks, non-governmental organizations, and regulators. In particular, the Bangladesh central bank supported the venture, allowing experimentation in MFS to address poverty through financial inclusion. By the end of 2016, the founder was concerned about future regulations and looking to strengthen the foundation of his disruptive business to make it more robust. How could the company continue to grow while maintaining its financial inclusion objective?