個案總覽

Near the end of November 2013, Lululemon Athletica (Lululemon) became the subject of a viral firestorm after a series of negative events seriously ruptured the company's reputation. The company found itself facing its worst quality control problem to date, with a recall of 17 per cent of its Luon pants due to issues with sheerness. In addition, the company's chief executive officer had stepped down. Was Lululemon destined to follow Blackberry as another example of a failed Canadian company, or could it resurrect its former glory by facing its critics head on?

In the midst of the financial crisis, Barclays (the world's 4th largest bank by assets) is forced by UK regulators to raise more capital. Should it take up the UK government's offer to invest, or take funding from investors from the Middle East? Students may price the two deals to determine which is more expensive, and must decide whether avoiding the constraints of government ownership is worth the extra cost.

Dr. John Anderson plans to license a technology that will be used to develop a device that would help physicians detect early-stage cancers. Patients would breathe directly into the device, which would analyze a user's breath for traces of key compounds associated with the most common cancers. In addition to eliminating the need for invasive biopsy procedures, the screening tool would also be inexpensive, easy to use, and provide immediate results. This case describes a hypothetical entrepreneur who must navigate and analyze a year of transactions including establishing a corporation, establishing a licensing agreement, purchasing machinery, and taking out a bank loan, in addition to preparing financial reports for the year.

In early December 2013, Jim Madsen, co-founder and owner of The Farm Winery was preparing the company's current and longer-term financing needs. Madsen needed to develop plans for fiscal year 2014, which included specific goals that were crucial to the success of the business. First, although the founders had historically contributed capital to meet seasonal cash needs, they were determined to achieve a point of self-sustainability. Next, the business required additional capital expenditures to supplement purchases made at the beginning of the business five years earlier. Finally, the team needed to determine whether to make an investment in additional vineyard development that would require a substantial cash outlay in the coming fiscal year but would not yield any fiscal benefit until nearly a decade later. This case describes The Farm Winery's background, past operating performance, distribution/sales, production, and financing in order to develop plans for fiscal year 2014 and determine the attainability of goals crucial to the success of the business.

Sanford C. Bernstein, a premier sell-side research firm, is expanding globally. Three years after launching Bernstein's Asian business, senior management has appointed Ghislain de Charentenay, a six-year sales veteran of the firm, as director of Asian research in Hong Kong. He is the first director of research Bernstein has put on the ground in Asia. As the firm faces the challenging realities of scaling its Asian business and meeting growing client demand for global products, de Charentenay must figure out how best to support the senior research analysts in leveraging their franchises. And with a recent wave of attrition among Bernstein's research associate ranks in Hong Kong, de Charentenay and the management team must also consider where to focus their recruiting efforts.

This three-part case series examines the marketing challenge encountered by a leading medical technology manufacturer, General Electric (GE) Healthcare - a division of General Electric Company - in India. It follows the development of Lullaby Warmer Prime, an infant warmer that was designed, manufactured and commercialized by the Maternal Infant Care (MIC) division of GE Healthcare India from 2011 to 2014. The case series, together with a PowerPoint slide deck and video link, assesses the main issues that business-to-business (B2B) companies face in their efforts to create and capture value in emerging markets. Case A sets the scene by describing the problem of infant mortality, India's healthcare system and the unique challenges in serving what we refer to as low-resource business customers. It culminates with the realization that there is a tremendous market opportunity, which GE Healthcare decided to exploit. The case also provides an overview of the recent history of GE Healthcare India and its "low-cost, high-value" innovation strategy for developing countries. Case B addresses GE's novel approach to product innovation. In creating a new infant warmer for low-resource business customers, GE decided to employ original and unconventional principles for product design and development. Case C discusses how GE adopted fast commercial prototyping in order to diffuse its innovation in India and other emerging markets. Capturing value is the second and biggest hurdle.

Driverless cars - once the stuff of science fiction - are fast becoming reality. Indeed, some automotive companies have said they expect to sell autonomous vehicles to the public by 2020. The advent of such self-driving vehicles raises numerous ethical and legal questions that will need to be addressed before such cars can hit the road in significant numbers. This case traces the history and evolution of auto safety in the United States, beginning with the very first automotive-related fatality on September 13, 1899 and ending with a coming era in which, some predict, humans will be banned from driving their own vehicles and machines will be obliged to have ethical systems.

Shanghai NSE Electric Co. Ltd. (NSE), a medium-sized manufacturer of marine switch panels, had entered into a joint venture with Schneider Electric under which NSE was Schneider's sole technology licensee in China. NSE felt fortunate because the world shipbuilding market was strong and orders were often full. With comprehensive and close cooperation, NSE was confident in Schneider. Nevertheless, Schneider announced that it would issue a second license to NSE's outsourcing manufacturer, SaierNico Electric & Automation. This meant that a competitor that produced and sold products of the same brand would emerge in the Chinese market. What was worse, this competitor had been cultivated by NSE. The CEO of NSE believed that NSE had three options: (1) continue to cooperate with Schneider; (2) broaden its business and cooperate with other powerful companies; or (3) invest more in local innovation to develop its own brand.

In early January 2013, a product manager with one of the leading insurance companies in Delhi, India, sat in his home office and pondered the strategy he had followed for his personal investment portfolio over the last three years. He was worried that talk of tapering off the U.S. Federal Reserve's Quantitative Easing Program, undertaken in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and the Indian general elections in May 2014 might affect the value of his investments. In order to achieve higher risk-adjusted returns, he was considering diversifying his all-equity portfolio by adding gold. Before he went ahead, he needed to test the data by using past returns, standard deviations and correlations and then use the Sharpe Ratio to compare the risk-adjusted returns of the diversified portfolio (comprising gold and equity) vis-à-vis an all-equity portfolio.

The chief executive officer (CEO) of GENICON is at a crossroads. The private medical device manufacturing business he started over 15 years ago has several acquisition offers as the industry starts to consolidate ahead of changes to the U.S. healthcare system. He can sell it now and make millions for himself and his investors or he can grow the business for a couple more years and, assuming a constant multiple of acquisition price to revenue, make millions more since his business is in fact growing. However, the business needs capital to grow and the CEO does not want to take on more debt. Should he sell the whole company and start his next venture? Or sell it and continue to help the acquirer grow the business? Or sell a part of the company and lose some autonomy and control? The CEO knows he is in a fortunate position but he still has to make a decision and soon.

On Monday, 19 November 2012, during a speech at the Investment Forum in London, Carson Block, the founder and research director of Muddy Waters LLC (MW), challenged Olam International (Olam), a major agricultural trading company on the Singapore Exchange. He questioned the company's huge debts and accounting practices and indicated that he was short selling the stock. Following this news, trading on Olam's stock was immediately suspended at Singapore Exchange. In less than ten minutes after trading resumed, the stock price plummeted by 11%, creating the largest single-day drop in six months. One week later, on Tuesday, 27 November 2012, MW released a 133-page-long research report on Olam, challenging its solvency, business model, accounting practices and capital expenditure. On December 17, Olam's stock price closed at S$1.395. It was the first time since March 2009 that the stock price had fallen below S$1.40. In the month following Block's critique, Olam's stock price fell nearly 20%. The case examines the reasons for the highly negative response to Block's analysis and reviews Olam's responses to the crisis aiming to uncover insights and lessons from the episode.

Anime News Network (ANN) is a Montreal-based news website that provides information and news about anime (Japanese animation) and manga (Japanese comics). The site's primary readership and target audience is North American fans of anime and manga, but it is known and read by fans worldwide as "the world's leading destination for news and information about manga and anime." Under its founder and chief executive officer, ANN has grown from a hobby, staffed entirely by volunteers, to a profitable business with 3.3 million readers, annual sales of US$1 million, seven full-time and five part-time employees, and sister ANN websites in Australia and the United Kingdom. The critical question facing ANN is whether the company has reached its growth potential, given the niche nature of its readership base and a steady decline in the monetary value of the North American anime market.

The Change Foundation is an independent charitable foundation founded in 1996 by the Ontario Hospital Association with the mandate to promote, support and improve health and the delivery of health care in Ontario. In 2006, its board of directors undertook a renewal process to evaluate its strategic directions and measure the value-add of progress to date. A planning session with a variety of key stakeholders had resulted in the development of a draft plan for going forward, which included hiring a new chief executive officer. When she began assessing the plan in January 2007, she faced several major issues and concerns about how the foundation should refocus its activities and transform itself. Before she could start to rebuild, however, she had to decide what its future direction should be.

The world's second largest home appliances company has introduced a change in its global organization structure. Electrolux AB has consolidated its research and development, marketing and design functions at the top to form what is known as the "Innovation Triangle." This change is in tune with the pursuit of innovation as a source of differentiation in a competitive industry. The concept has been tested in Electrolux Brazil for four years before being scaled up globally. The amplified version of the Innovation Triangle has a singular objective: to facilitate innovation enterprise-wide by leveraging cross-functional, cross-geographical and cross-business synergies. The ultimate goal is to launch new products faster, better and in greater number. The unveiling of the new organizational structure presents an opportunity for the company's Innovation team to review the company's ongoing innovation initiatives. The four-member team grapples with issues around improving the company's innovation pipeline.

SNA Educa (previously known as Codesser) is a non-profit organization which was created by the National Association of Farmers (Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura, SNA) in Chile. Its mission included improving the living conditions of people associated with rural activities. One way of doing this was by offering agricultural and technical education to low-income students in rural areas. SNA Educa currently manages around 20 high schools in different regions of Chile. In the early 2000, SNA Educa made a major decision: to buy a school to provide primary and secondary scientific humanistic education, a field in which the organization had neither previous educational experience nor managing skills. Even though the investment decision had proven financially convenient, several issues cast some doubts about the suitability of the decision: inadequate mission fit, low educational test scores of the school, the troublesome political environment related to school reform, child abuse in the school, , among others. After ten years of the acquisition, the board is now debating whether it should reverse its previous decision and sell the school.

Can social enterprises scale and remain sustainable? Many social enterprises, or enterprises in general, face difficulties when scaling due to two competing agendas: social mission and profitability. The Mondragon Corporation is one of the most significant challengers to this status quo. Founded in 1956, the Mondragon Corporation is currently the tenth largest company in Spain, employing 83,000 workers and having nearly 36-billion euros in consolidated assets. Its strategy for growth has been in the development of cooperative groups to attain economies of scale and the creation of support cooperatives to finance growth and provide technical assistance. Its diverse set of cooperatives spans a significant array of product and services, from supermarkets to appliance manufacturers to a polytechnic university to a cooperative bank. However, the Mondragon Corporation is not immune to gravity and the difficult tradeoffs that occur in the social enterprise space. The financial insolvency of Fagor Electrodomésticos (Fagor), its oldest cooperative member, presents the most challenging dilemma in Mondragon's long history. Since 2008, the Mondragon Corporation (through its cooperative members) has injected 300-million euros of debt financing to assist Fagor. However, Fagor has made another financial request for 180-million euros. Txema Gisasola, the President of the Mondragon Corporation needs to decide whether he should recommend financing Fagor's debt or deny the cooperative's request for assistance. While most Mondragon cooperatives in the past have decided on their own to file bankruptcy and reallocate workers, it is a tougher scenario for Fagor, which currently employs 5,600 workers.

This case is used in Darden's "Economics of Water" course elective. Suzanne Apple, senior vice president of private sector engagement at World Wildlife Fund-United States (WWF), was preparing for an important meeting with her counterpart at The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC). The two companies had formed a tremendously successful partnership several years earlier that focused on freshwater conservation and other environmental issues. With the original agreement set to expire, Apple needed to draft recommendations for a new agreement, ensuring that WWF's priorities aligned with TCCC's, and vice versa. But what should the scope and goals of the new partnership be? This case is supported by a teaching note for instructors.