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After four successful years on the market, the founder and chief executive officer of Sanzo Brands Inc. (Sanzo) was looking for ways to continue the momentum and growth of his company. Sanzo was an Asian-inspired flavoured sparkling-water beverage company with an innovative approach to marketing and branding. Rather than promoting its sparkling water through traditional media channels, Sanzo relied on a digital-brand story approach and adopted social-media marketing tools in a mass-marketing environment. Alessandro Roco knew this was the right product at the right time, but his greatest concern was how to maintain the social-media buzz and continue to build the community around the brand. He wondered how Sanzo should manage social media to keep the community engaged and the brand story relevant.

In its effort to fight climate change, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) established its RBC Climate Blueprint, an enterprise strategy to accelerate clean economic growth and support its clients in a socially inclusive transition to net-zero. RBC holds itself accountable to this plan through its Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) Performance Report, which quantifies the bank's climate change actions. Any business activities that contradict RBC's strategy may adversely impact the bank's reputation. This study was carried out in response to a strategic decision-making requirement from RBC regarding Bitcoin and new technology investment. The case discusses the definition of cryptocurrency, the Bitcoin mining process, energy consumption associated with the mining procedure, and the impact of Bitcoin mining on climate change. After thoroughly describing and analyzing each topic, we will draw conclusions about the effects of Bitcoin mining energy consumption on climate change. At the end of the study, we will be able to answer this question: What environment-related reputational risk might RBC face if the bank were to support products and services around Bitcoin?

In early 2022, Rajendra Jaiswal was in a quandary about the future of the collective enterprise Diwak Mata Farmer Producer Company Limited (Diwak Mata), which his organization, Prakriti Foundation for Natural Resources Regeneration (Prakriti), had helped incubate and grow. Since Diwak Mata's registration in 2018, Prakriti had helped it develop connections with various value chain participants and overcome the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. With a supportive Board of Directors (BoD) and an able chief executive officer (CEO) in Rakesh Sen, Diwak Mata was recognized as one of the better-performing producer companies in the region and had growing revenues with fluctuating profits. Looking at the figures of the audited balance sheet, Jaiswal wondered whether Prakriti should withdraw its support to the producer company. Were Diwak Mata's BoD of farmers and the CEO strong enough to chart the organization's own path? Could they create sufficient ownership from the stakeholders for sustained growth in Prakriti's absence? Should Prakriti remain loyal to Diwak Mata or exit and continue its core activities with other communities?

Faraaz Usmani, heir to the family-owned Herbo Drugs & Pharmaceuticals, a small private Unani pharmaceutical company in Prayagraj, India, planned to expand the company's business to other states to cover most parts of India. Before implementing this ambitious plan, Faraaz needed to conduct a feasibility study by applying some popular capital budgeting tools such as net present value, internal rate of return, and profitability index. He first projected the cash flows for ten years with an initial investment of ₹6.5 million financed with 80 per cent equity and 20 per cent debt. He expected sales to grow by 15 per cent annually for the next five years, 10 per cent from year 6 to year 10, and a perpetual growth rate of 5 per cent afterward. Faraaz understood that the estimation of the cost of capital was a key step in his analysis. He discovered that finding the cost of equity for a private firm was tricky because stock return information was not available to estimate beta. The case introduces the basics of cost of capital (i.e., weighted average cost of capital) and capital budgeting. It focuses on the details of how to estimate the cost of equity for a private firm.

The cannabis industry in Canada has experienced unprecedented growth since the Cannabis Act came into effect in 2018. It is widely expected that cannabidiol (CBD) will be classified as a food and natural health ingredient in Canada, the European Union, and other jurisdictions in the near future, which will open up a significant market. In 2023, Dr. Jacqueline Shan, the CEO of PBG BioPharma, made a long-term strategic decision to enter the cannabis consumer health market by launching a series of CBD consumer health products once the cannabis regulations in Canada are relaxed. In preparing to launch its own consumer product line, PBG BioPharma is developing its marketing strategy and analyzing potential challenges in managing its supply chain.

Alliant Credit Union (Alliant) had to decide whether to partner with Upstart Holdings, Inc. (Upstart), a financial technology (fintech) company that offered a platform to connect borrowers and lenders. Upstart's underwriting models used artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) algorithms to analyze both standard financial variables and "alternative data" on borrowers (e.g., their education history). Studies found that Upstart's approach to underwriting resulted in fewer defaults and more approvals relative to conventional models based on credit scores. However, the use of alternative data in the underwriting process raised fair-lending concerns. In 2020, a nonprofit claimed that Upstart's use of educational variables led to discriminatory outcomes. While Upstart disputed this claim, it agreed to reform aspects of its models to ensure fairness. This case requires students to evaluate tradeoffs associated with the use of new data and technology in the underwriting process. On the one hand, Upstart's underwriting models expanded access to credit, particularly benefiting borrowers with limited credit histories. On the other hand, the use of alternative data raised fairness concerns because the variables were often correlated with factors such as race, ethnicity, and age. The case also provides an opportunity to discuss fair lending laws in the United States, the economics of underwriting, and funding models used by fintech firms. At Darden, this case is used as part of a second-year MBA elective on fintech. It is part of a unit that studies applications of fintech to borrowing and lending. The case could also be used in classes on banking and financial institutions or corporate social responsibility.

After selling the PerkinElmer name and several ancillary business units, Prahlad Singh (CEO) and his team at the newly christened Revvity faced a challenge on how best to capitalize on the opportunities ahead for the business and emerge as winners within the Life Sciences and Diagnostics industries. Would the focus on Life Sciences and Diagnostics allow Singh to capture the value in the market that eluded him when PerkinElmer was saddled with other non-core businesses, or would challenges persist by trading at lower multiples than their peers? Singh and the company had a clean slate, and needed to craft a corporate strategy that focused on core strengths and showcased the unpolished gems that Revvity had acquired and polished into a global stable of respected brands.

In the last 70 years, the small island of Taiwan has achieved what many believe to be a "miracle": its economy has grown at a record-setting pace, driven and guided by one of the world's most successful set of industrial policies, and it has become one of the richest and most open nations in the global trading system, with particular sway in the vital semiconductor sector. In more recent decades, however, the authoritarian government that originally led Taiwan's miracle has given way to a more open and pluralistic democracy and the growth of the island's semiconductor industry has slowed. Meanwhile, Taiwan finds itself in 2023 caught in the middle of a trade war between the United States and China, heightened by the threat of invasion from the PRC. Can Taiwan's newly pluralistic political system and plateauing technology sector maintain its miracle in such a vastly different environment?

By August 2023, Re-Match, an artificial turf waste-to-value company, had operations in Denmark and the Netherlands and had recycled over 160,000 tons of waste and plastic fiber. With recent capital injection from the VC firm Verdane and a dual revenue business model, the company wanted to expand its operation to become the global leader in turf recycling. However, stakeholders were divided between rapid U.S. market entry and refining their proven model to generate more downstream revenue. This case study delineates Re-Match's business model and assesses the carbon reduction potential of recycling in comparison to landfilling or incineration. Additionally, it raises the question of whether to prioritize market dominance or operational efficiency and how to identify the most receptive market for Re-Match's recycling solution.

It was the height of the summer in 2022, and Michel Doukeris, the CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), and Peter Kraemer, the company's Chief Supply Officer, gazed across the vast desert surrounding Zacatecas, Mexico. They were visiting their Grupo Modelo Brewery, AB InBev's largest and the highest-volume producer in the world, to contemplate their goal of increasing sales while reducing the company's impact on the natural environment. This case documents how company executives led an organizational transformation designed to help the firm balance growth and sustainability and achieve two benchmarks: becoming the number-one consumer packaged goods company for top-line growth and achieving their 2025 sustainability target, referred to as 100+ goals, and composed of smart agriculture, water stewardship, circular packaging, and climate action. The case illuminates the key decisions AB InBev executives needed to make, including making capital-intensive investments into the supply chain that drive sustainability and growth, reinventing processes and an overarching business model that had remained largely the same for hundreds of years, as well as changing how people work in a culture steeped in tradition.

In December 2022, Loris's executive team considered their go-to-market strategy. Loris was an artificial intelligence (AI) software startup for the customer service industry with two products on the market: 1) Agent Assist which provided customer service agents (CSAs) with empathetic, on-brand responses to text-based live chat (live chat) conversations, and 2) Insights which provided customer experience (CX) leaders with CSA performance and customer satisfaction (CSAT) data. Loris was also developing a third product: Automated Quality Assurance (AQA) which analyzed quality assurance in customers' email and live chat conversations. The Loris team faced challenges to growth with prospective clients cutting costs through laying off their CX leaders and automating customer conversations through chatbots including the recently-released ChatGPT generative AI chatbot. To increase marketplace traction in preparation for raising a Series B round, the Loris team was reevaluating two aspects of its go-to-market strategy. First was sales approach: Loris previously used a sales-led growth model with robust marketing and sales teams, but had begun experimenting with product-led growth (PLG) which focused on developing exceptional products so that word of mouth would drive quick and exponential sales. Loris's PLG efforts had little success, though, and the team wondered if they should continue with PLG, revert to sales-led growth, or pursue pay-for-performance where clients only paid for Loris products upon Loris's achieving agreed-upon revenue or cost savings. Second, was product strategy: Loris had been offering Agent Assist and Insights as a bundled suite, but was considering using one of those products or AQA as a foot-in-the-door approach to cross-sell and upsell other products. Which sales and product strategy would help Loris grow, especially given the threat from ChatGPT which both raised awareness of AI tools like Loris and served as competition to Loris?

FARM Rio, a twenty-six year old Brazilian fashion brand, had recently put down roots in the U.S. The brand, known for its bold, colorful, nature-inspired tropical prints, was testing the waters in Europe to assess if and how the brand should further expand globally. Balancing two different geographic markets was proving to be more challenging than expected and the team had needed to make changes to the brand's name and positioning, price points, and its product quality, styles, and fits to accommodate the needs of retailers and consumers in the U.S. Before deciding on a European investment strategy, the team was assessing the return-on-investment of the U.S. launch and determining if the company had achieved a sufficient level of product-market fit so that they could adjust if necessary. They were also working to optimize the distribution channel mix among its own branded stores, e-commerce, and wholesale partnerships. With the U.S. still requiring significant investment to fuel an aggressive growth path, the company would have to decide where to place its bets: in its initial market of Brazil where it was a market leader, in the U.S., which was showing strong initial promise, or in the untested waters of Europe, home to the world's fashion capitals. As they evaluated global expansion possibilities, the team had to coordinate with their colleagues who were busy managing the brand back at home at the company's headquarters in Rio de Janeiro.

Sajjan Jindal, Chairman & Managing Director of JSW Steel, India's largest steel producer by market capitalization, was facing a dilemma. Steel demand in India was expected to grow exponentially over the next decade. However, given its traditional reliance on carbon, steel was a "hard to abate" sector and was one of the most highly polluting industries globally. It was particularly polluting in India, where its production relied heavily on the use of coal. Given investor's increasing focus on sustainability, and global regulatory changes that were likely to penalize high emitters, Jindal was acutely aware of the need to decarbonize production. But investing in these technologies required heavy capital expenditure. Moreover, technology was fast evolving and there was considerable uncertainty about which one would be the ultimate "winner." Jindal and his team needed to make decisions. What kind of emissions intensity should it target, how much should it allocate towards decarbonization strategies, and which technologies should it bet on?

This disguised case set in April 2016, based on true events, describes an existential crisis faced by an English law firm operating in Italy. English law firms entered Italy in the 1990s through alliances with reputed Italian firms. The intention was to gain access to the lucrative Italian legal market. When they started operations, these firms aimed to achieve a leading position in the Italian market (top three strategy). Hence, their Italian operations were afforded a high degree of autonomy and preserved their distinctive Italian identity. But later, in the 2000s, English law firms started adopting a one-firm strategy to integrate their Italian operations into the global network. This created a great deal of tension and complexity, as Italian professional logic differed radically from the English logic. Subsequently, alliances and mergers between the English and Italian firms unravelled quickly, resulting in an existential crisis for the English law firms in Italy after over a decade of operations. The case presents such a situation through the eyes of partner John Smith, of the firm Smith and Jones, who must determine how to avert such a crisis while taking into account the Italian legal approach, and without diluting the global nature of his firm.

For CEO Elon Musk, Tesla's mission required not only new technologies to create electric vehicles, but innovation on the software that connected every aspect of the organization. Tesla was founded in 2003 with the goal of revolutionizing the automotive industry, by producing electric vehicles that would help accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. Twenty years later, Tesla had achieved remarkable progress across multiple dimensions such as production capacity, innovative electric vehicles, customer experience, and financial performance. The case study offers unique insights by Tesla leaders into the company's journey to create a system and a process that would revolutionize the global automotive sector. To achieve its goals, Tesla had to deliver a dramatically different-and superior-customer experience to accompany the company's innovative electric vehicles. The case describes how Tesla's IT team set about custom-building a vertically integrated system operating system (OS) that connected and bound every aspect of the company's operations. In fact, the Tesla OS, a custom-built ecosystem, was far more expansive than a typical company's OS in that it powered all aspects of business planning and customer experiences-this enabled Tesla to go directly to the consumer, and bypass the traditional automotive dealership networks.

Automation, robots, and artificial intelligence (AI) were driving massive change by the 2020s-and it was perhaps only a matter of time before the planet had billions of digital workers executing standardized, repetitive tasks. In the 20 years since its founding, Automation Anywhere had laid a solid foundation in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which helped companies be more efficient via application user interfaces, application programming interfaces, and database access. In 2023 the global RPA market was around $3 billion-and analysts projected this would hit $24 billion to $30 billion by 2030. Mihir Shukla, CEO of Automation Anywhere, had seen the potential to transform how companies and people worked by letting technology take on repetitive tasks. Shukla had helped pioneer the technology that automated business processes with intelligent software bots - AI powered digital workers. And Shukla had led the company from its early days selling a low-cost software product, to its pivot towards the enterprise market and SaaS model. The company timed its series A funding round in 2018, positioning itself to be a leader in bringing new advances and AI applications to millions of people. By 2023, large and small organizations alike were increasingly open to adopting new technologies-and many companies believed the tipping point for AI had occurred with the emergence of the large language models and ChatGPT. The next five years promised to be exciting. What would Automation Anywhere tackle next in the fast-evolving intelligent automation market? How would it win the innovation battle, and brainstorm the path forward to build enterprise value?

This case is written to help students explore how companies can maintain and develop trust while innovating, how to identify and respond effectively to warning signs that they may not be as trusted as they believe, and how being trusted can aid in expanding and growing a business. In June 2021, Mikhail Lomtadze, co-founder and CEO of Kaspi.kz (Kaspi), the number one player in digital payments, fintech, and online commerce in Kazakhstan, was weighing paths to future growth. In the fourteen years since he became CEO, Lomtadze had transformed the business from a commercial bank into a leading technology company. By 2014, Kaspi had built an impressive ecosystem of three planforms: fintech products, digital payment products, and an online marketplace. Yet that same year, a bank run fueled by misinformation made it clear to Lomtadze that Kaspi wasn't as trusted as he thought. In 2017, Kaspi unrolled a super-app, fulfilling a vision they'd had from the get-go of being a one-stop shop for all the products and services they offered. In 2020, Kaspi turned its attention to new customers, creating a suite of products to make merchants' lives easier, and collaborated with the government to begin digitalizing the most used public services. Kaspi's products enjoyed widespread adoption and were used by about 50 percent of Kazakhstan's population that year. As Lomtadze considered expanding outside of Kazakhstan, he wondered if Kaspi could successfully export its company culture and approach to building trust, and how Kaspi's image as a homegrown brand could be used as an asset to its expansion strategy. In addition to the main case, two short cases on management's response to the 2014 bank run, designed to be taught in class, provide a striking example of a successful response to a trust crisis and show how lessons learned can help companies become even more trusted by customers and employees.

The case is set in April 2023, soon after DBS Bank Limited (DBS) reported a 20% net profit growth of US$6.02 billion. The bank's CEO Piyush Gupta had attributed this growth to the company's continuing digital transformation journey that had started more than a decade ago. Central to this journey was the bank's adaptation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to improve and diversify products and services. To become AI-fuelled, DBS had created a "Data First" culture and hired hundreds of technology professionals to build its technology capabilities. In addition, the bank had set aside substantial budgets to allow for experimentation, motivated individual departments to build and deploy AI-based applications, implemented an automation strategy to guide solution building, and embedded AI into nearly every part of the customer journey. Prior to the transformation, DBS was sometimes irreverently referred to as 'Damm Bloody Slow' due to its poor customer service, but had emerged as a customer-savvy, market-responsive, AI-fuelled company with more successes than failures, diversified lines of business, and dramatic growth in revenues. However, the financial services sector was seeing increased competition due to the entry of purely technology companies like Grab, PayPal, Alibaba, etc. with innovative solutions. How could DBS compete in a rapidly changing banking marketplace? Had the 'All in on AI' approach given the bank a competitive advantage? Could DBS's prior 10 years of successful efforts with digitalisation, analytics and AI position it to take advantage of the newest generation of Generative AI in an accelerated manner?

In 2023, Luciano Bueno, CEO and founder of plant cell culture agriculture company GALY, was considering the best path forward for his company as he planned to pitch Series B investors. GALY, founded in 2019, aimed to produce cotton and other crops from cells grown in the lab. The company hoped to create 500,000 tons of products by 2030, and by 2023, had produced proof of concepts of cotton, coffee, and cacao. Bueno had a number of decisions to make. How should the company scale? Where should it locate production? Should it build its own production facilities, or license its intellectual property to partner firms? Should the company continue operating an office in Brazil, or centralize operations in Boston? The answers to these questions would point the way forward, but which path was best?

In July 2021, the CEO of AB InBev's European operations and his team strategized to position the company for success post-pandemic. As the world's largest beer company, boasting over 500 brands, revenue of $46 billion, and a workforce of 160,000 in 2020, AB InBev grappled with the repercussions of the pandemic, particularly the adverse effects on on-trade customers like bars and restaurants. Historically a traditional firm in a conventional industry, AB InBev had begun a substantial digital transformation in recent years. This strategic shift was aimed at leveraging data and market insights more effectively. A key component of this transformation was the creation of the Growth Analytics Center (GAC) in India in 2016, a move designed to embed advanced forecasting and analytics into their business model. As the pandemic unfolded, management increasingly relied on the GAC's analytics and forecasts to navigate the evolving crisis. With pandemic restrictions starting to relax in mid-2021, the company began considering substantial investments in the struggling on-trade sector to gain market share. The company considered offering grants in the form of pre-paid discounts to pubs and restaurants that needed capital to reopen after the pandemic. The dilemma was whether to proactively reinvest in the on-trade sector or take a cautious approach. The decision rested on interpreting GAC data and the company's financial outlook.