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This case presents an example of the challenges faced by a firm when a new technological option is available. The case is set in the real estate industry in a developing nation (India). The case considers the perspective of Ravindra Pai, Managing Director of Century Real Estate. Ravindra Pai has to choose, for a part of a new project, between two technologies of building construction: the existing and proven conventional reinforced cement concrete (RCC) method of construction and the new and unproven pre-fabricated construction technology for an upcoming residential project in Bangalore (IT city of India). The case explores the benefits and consequences of choosing either technology and presents an example to understand the challenges faced by firms while deciding whether to invest in a new technology.

The case describes the journey of the Dainik Bhaskar (DB) group towards becoming the largest newspaper group in India. Starting from one Hindi state, the group successfully entered other Hindi states and then non-Hindi speaking states in tier II markets (cities with population between 1 and 4 million) using its innovative twin customer contact model of launch. The innovative launch strategy ensured that DB procured subscriptions from consumers even before its paper was available in the market. The group pioneered hyper local journalism ensuring high customer connect. The case describes the distribution strategy, brand-building initiatives, editorial policy, and advertising strategy of the group. The case describes its successful launch in a non-Hindi state - Maharashtra with strong incumbents. The management of DB has to make a decision of which market to enter next to sustain the high growth trajectory of the group.

Established in 1983, Apollo Hospitals is one of India's largest hospital chains. In 2014, Apollo had 32 hospitals spread across the country. The focus of this case is of the Apollo Hospital at Bangalore. The quality head, Dr. Ananth Rao was worried about the food bill that accounted for 4% of the total cost and wanted to develop a forecasting model to estimate the demand for food and beverages being served to its patients for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Accurate forecasting will help them to minimize the wastage of food resulting in reduction of food bill. Apollo served approximately 120 food items from its kitchen. Dr Rao believed that the demand for food was dependent on the occupancy level (number of in-patients) of the hospital. Moreover, he also expected a short-term trend in the food requirement because patients are likely to order similar food during their course of stay in the hospital - this is because of dietary restrictions as also the fact that people would generally not wish to experiment with food in a hospital environment. The profile of the patients in the hospital is unlikely to vary significantly over a period of time and so it is expected that the food trend will not change much with time.

Auto Finance Ltd. was a part of one of India's large conglomerates. The conglomerate was a major player in the two-wheeler business in India. Many of the people buying two-wheelers belonged to the lower middle class of India and did not have access to enough capital to buy the two-wheelers outright - typically costing between twenty-five to hundred thousand Indian Rupees (at the time of the setting of this case, i.e., January 2007, 1 USD ~ 50 INR). For this reason, Auto Finance used to extend loans, typically on a fixed interest rate for 3 5 years, to enable cash-strapped customers to buy the vehicles. The loan facility enabled the two-wheeler division to reach out to a section of consumers that had hitherto not been able to purchase two-wheelers. However, the increased penetration was being achieved at a cost as there were a significant number of people defaulting on their loans. Auto Finance Ltd. was interested in developing and implementing a credit scoring approach to screen out risky consumers from the pool of applicants and improve profitability.

Gisele Rodriguez, MPH, moved back to her hometown, East Point, in the fictional U.S. state of Columbia, after graduate school and joined the Columbia Department of Public Health (CDPH). Working with a marketing firm, Gisele and colleagues set out to create an obesity prevention campaign; however, the resulting product is met with community and national backlash for its stigmatizing messages and images. At the end of the story, CDPH releases a request for proposals to invite applications from community agencies to develop a new campaign that is both evidence-based and solicitous of community ideas and input, thus more likely to be effective and engender community-wide acceptance and support.

Bill Hurt, the new CEO of Hillside Hospital, knew that the forecast was grim. The hospital's service volumes and market share were dropping precipitously. The direct causes of the problems were numerous, but an indirect cause-and major barrier to addressing the declines-lay in the poor relationship between Hillside's management and its physicians. To engage the physicians in problem-solving, he considered a consultant's suggestion: turning the clinical planning process over to the physicians, with management involved only at their request. This approach was risky but Bill thought sometimes you got power by giving it up.

"This patient might have died from complications related to her TPN (total parenteral nutrition) infusion," said Dr. Isaac Johnson, Chief Medical Officer at Acme Medical Center (AMC). He was referring to problems that occurred during the treatment of a 16-year old colitis patient, Susan, who had recently been admitted to the hospital on a Friday afternoon with acute abdominal pain. At that time, Susan was taken to the Operating Room (OR) for placement of a Broviac catheter. The line was placed without incident and TPN was begun. Several hours later a nurse noticed a precipitate in the tubing and a tendency for the line to clog. Susan had to be returned to the operating room for removal of the clogged line and the insertion of a new one. She recovered uneventfully and tolerated her further TPN without incident. As required by the hospital, the incident was entered into the Adverse Incident Monitoring System and a root cause analysis performed. Dr. Johnson's review identified weaknesses in the hospital's medication management system, but also suggested that his team's efforts to get every employee engaged in quality improvement were inadequate. He wondered how to hardwire QI into the institution and make it part of the culture.

Dr. Osnat Levtzion-Korach was the newly appointed Director of the Hadassah University Hospital-Mt. Scopus, a 350-bed academic community hospital located in the crowded, ethnically mixed neighborhood of northeastern Jerusalem. Mt. Scopus was one of two hospitals in the Hadassah Medical Organization; the larger 850-bed hospital, Ein Kerem, was located about 30 minutes away across Jerusalem. In the past, the two Hadassah hospitals had been centrally managed with the two on-site directors acting primarily as COOs. A new Director General of the system now wanted to de-centralize responsibilities, and Osnat, the first female head of a Hadassah hospital, had been promised much greater control over the finances and management of the hospital than her predecessor had enjoyed. The staff at Mt. Scopus pinned a great deal of hope on their new director to bring resources and a renewed sense of vision to the hospital, but Osnat knew her ability to do this depended in large part on her ability to manage costs as well as change a culture that had always prided itself on providing the best care but had not been held accountable for monitoring expenses or budgets.

An education-gaming firm that has relied largely on volunteer developers has to rethink this strategy as it prepares to pitch investors for a new round of funding. Expert commentary comes from Noam Bardin, CEO of the crowdsourced-mapping company Waze, and Verena Delius, cofounder and managing partner of Fox & Sheep, a company that develops apps for kids.

An education-gaming firm that has relied largely on volunteer developers has to rethink this strategy as it prepares to pitch investors for a new round of funding. Expert commentary comes from Noam Bardin, CEO of the crowdsourced-mapping company Waze, and Verena Delius, cofounder and managing partner of Fox & Sheep, a company that develops apps for kids.

An education-gaming firm that has relied largely on volunteer developers has to rethink this strategy as it prepares to pitch investors for a new round of funding. Expert commentary comes from Noam Bardin, CEO of the crowdsourced-mapping company Waze, and Verena Delius, cofounder and managing partner of Fox & Sheep, a company that develops apps for kids.

It is March 2012 and Janice Chan, the senior director of digital marketing and distribution for Starwood Asia Pacific Hotels, is responsible for delivering a digital marketing campaign strategy to the sales and marketing team at the W Singapore - Sentosa Cove. The hotel, which is set to open in just six months, needs a solid online advertising campaign that is sure to bring in 15-20% of the hotel's booked room nights from the first month. Chan and her team have a limited budget of US$44,000 for the campaign. She recognises that a proper budget allocation across different advertising platforms, as well as selecting the right feeder markets into Singapore, will be critical to success. It will take some creativity, but Chan is confident that her team will recommend a winning strategy that is sure to fill rooms when the W opens in September 2012. This case has been developed to illustrate digital marketing options, specifically, as it pertains to launching a new hotel. Students will learn how to best utilise a limited budget to drive room bookings. In addition, they will understand the role of digital marketing in creating brand awareness, supporting positive evaluation and driving sales. The advantage of focusing on the hospitality industry is that it provides clearly measurable outcomes, where room bookings and revenue can be matched to how and where the digital marketing budget is allocated. Students will also benefit from the Asian context in which the case takes place. This is important because it highlights different digital usage patterns and effectiveness parameters across regions.

In January 2012, the Jane Addams Hull House Association--one of Chicago's largest and oldest social service agencies and arguably its most iconic--announced that it might have to close in the spring due to financial difficulties. Just days later, the 122-year-old organization stunned the philanthropic world when it laid off its employees without notice, declared its intention to liquidate in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and shut its doors forever. In the weeks that followed, more and more people began to ask: What had happened to the board? Had bankruptcy really been inevitable? This case chronicles the organization's final decade and enables students to step into the shoes of the chairman of the board, Steve Saunders, as he led the board through its last two years. Students will examine the roles and responsibilities of effective boards and determine how internal and external factors contributed to Hull House's demise.

By the mid-2000s, Washington State's Department of Health (DOH) had earned a national reputation as an innovative and effective agency. But beginning in 2005, when newly elected Governor Christine Gregoire introduced a state-level performance management system - Government Management Accountability and Performance (GMAP) - DOH and other state entities found themselves having to regularly explain and justify their work through the newly established forum. Based on two similar, but smaller-scale programs - CompStat (created by the New York Police Department in 1994) and CitiStat (used by the City of Baltimore) - GMAP challenged public officials to analyze data in new ways and to rethink the kinds of results that they were accountable for delivering. This case provides background on GMAP's origins and on the general ways in which the initiative was managed, but it focuses primarily on DOH's efforts to comply with the new performance measurement requirements and to meet the expectations of the governor, her staff, and GMAP leadership. In exploring the benefits and challenges of the department's experience with GMAP, the case also raises questions about the applicability and usefulness of such a system for public health, which tends to address complex issues with objectives that are often difficult to quantify. Case number 1994.0

This case has two parts, a text-based case and a supplemental PowerPoint presentation. The case traces the evolution of an evidence-based research study on the education sector in Pakistan. In 2003, Atish (fictionalized character), a Pakistan-born, Harvard educated economist returns to his native Pakistan to help reform a lagging education system. But Atish unearths conflicting information on the state of education in his country. Despite large investments, government-run schools are failing to provide quality education. And international media coverage asserts that the educational void in Pakistan is rapidly being filled by madrassas, or religious schools, that are designed to train children in extremism. Upon closer scrutiny, Atish finds holes in the madrassa enrollment numbers. Similarly, Atish learns that affordable private schools have sprung up across the country, yet no nationwide analysis on the quality of education they provide exists. In rural Pakistan, he also learns to suspect conventional wisdom regarding parental involvement and interest in educating their children. Before he can develop policy recommendations, Atish will have to separate fact from anecdotal information to understand the education landscape in Pakistan. Case number 2003.0

The December 26, 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami caused tremendous damage and suffering on several continents, with Indonesia's Aceh Province (located on the far northern tip of Sumatra Island) experiencing the very worst. In the tsunami's wake - and with offers of billions of dollars of aid coming from all corners of the globe- the Indonesian government faced the daunting task of implementing a massive recovery effort that could meet the expectations of donors and survivors alike. With this in mind, Indonesia's president established in April 2005 a national-level, ad hoc agency -- known by its acronym, BRR -- to coordinate reconstruction activities across the province. This case examines some of the core challenges BRR's leaders encountered as they moved to set up the agency and then proceeded to coordinate and execute a recovery process involving hundreds of domestic and international partner organizations and thousands of independent reconstruction projects. Case Number 2010.0

In June, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the federal Defense of Marriage Act violated the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection of equal liberty, effectively overturning the law. Pennsylvania, however, banned same-sex marriage. Despite the state law, D. Bruce Hanes, a register of wills in Pennsylvania, agreed to honor a request from two women seeking a same-sex marriage license-an act of official disobedience that immediately threw Hanes under a national spotlight. Citing his oath to uphold both the Pennsylvania and U.S. constitutions and noting that the two were "diametrically opposed" on the issue, Hanes said: "I decided to come down on the right side of history and the law." Officials in Texas were also struggling with the ruling. Soon after the ruling, the Department of Defense (DOD) instructed federal military facilities to begin enrolling same-sex spouses of military service members in military benefits programs. In Texas, however, where state law prohibited same-sex marriage, Texas Military Forces (TMF) indicated it would not comply with the DOD directive. Because TMF was a state agency, the commanding general said the agency would be unable to process benefits for same-sex couples. TMF members took an oath to defend both the U.S. and Texas constitutions, setting the stage for the conflict. Using the context of contemporary same-sex marriage laws, the case explores two sides of the same coin: in states where same-sex marriage is illegal, one official decides to defy the law while another chooses to refuse to comply with a federal directive to do so. The case asks students to consider if and when official disobedience-the refusal by a public official, acting in an official capacity, to follow the law-is justified. Case Number 2014.0

A management consulting team has been hired to advise HuStream Technologies on a new business model and target market. HuStream operates a service-based business model, providing customers with fully produced interactive video content. In the founders' efforts to transition to a product-based business, they have built a cloud-based platform to provide easy accessibility to their company's products and services. Using that platform, clients can produce their own interactive content. HuStream faces the challenge of transitioning from an entirely service- based business model to an entirely product-based business model. The consultancy's task is to identify HuStream's top business and marketing opportunities using the service-based business model and keeping within the constraints of limited funding.

In December 2012, the CEO of the professional services company Business Systems Group (BSG) called his management team together to evaluate the firm's continued sponsorship of the BSG Triathlon Series. The previous five years of the sponsorship were considered a worthwhile investment by the business, although the relationship with Triathlon South Africa (TSA) was becoming increasingly strained. The case charts the growth of BSG's business in South Africa and the United Kingdom, as well as the evolution of the sponsorship and relationship with TSA. The decisions facing BSG were whether to renew the sponsorship and build towards the Rio Olympics in 2016, continue with the BSG Triathlon Series without TSA sanction or exit the firm's involvement in the sport.

In 2006, Burberry appointed a new chief executive officer (CEO) with many years of experience in senior positions in the fashion and luxury industries. Though Burberry had enjoyed continued year over year growth, the sales growth was not on par with the growth seen within the personal luxury industry. Big changes within Burberry were expected to come as the new CEO took the reins in July 2006. What were the transformations and changes that Burberry would need to make in order to successfully adapt to the dynamic and innovative global business environment of the luxury industry?