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V-Cola is a six-party exercise that simulates a negotiation between a boutique advertising agency and a beverage company that is launching a new product. Each of the six parties has different incentives and information, which leads to a complex, realistic simulation about agency issues, misaligned incentives, and the (mis)use of contingent contracts.

Protagonist leads an apple industry association that hopes to develop a market for New England apple slices to improve demand for apple products. Apples grown for slicing have characteristics that differ from most apples grown in New England. Case allows students to examine whether it makes sense for a farmer to begin to grow apples for slicing. The case also describes the distribution of apples and apple products so that students can examine how a market for sliced apples might get developed and which industry participants might enjoy a position of power in the market.

Gary Hirshberg and Stonyfield Farm is the story of one entrepreneur's vision and journey to create a market-leading, environmentally responsible business founded on the principles of product quality, organizational alignment and sustainability. A former environmental activist, Hirshberg built Stonyfield Farm, (an organic yogurt maker based in New Hampshire), up from a seven cow-operation into a business that in 2010 had $360 million in annual revenues. The narrative pays particular attention to the early, turbulent years of the yogurt company and the excitement and uncertainty of entrepreneurial life. The case also details the supple, innovative marketing the company created to expand its customer base, the means it devised to cultivate and maintain customer loyalty, and the strategies it employed to penetrate the highly competitive yogurt and dairy categories nationwide. Throughout, readers will encounter the challenges that Hirshberg, his colleagues and his family confronted as they (all) worked to create a business with a firm commitment to both sustainability and high quality--a commitment rooted in Hirshberg's dedication to spreading the "gospel" of organic production to consumers.

The case is about the San Francisco-based law firm, Paragon Legal, founded by lawyer and entrepreneur Mae O'Malley. Paragon Legal gave high-level attorneys the opportunity to have a flexible schedule and work 10 to 40 hours a week. This was in the context of an industry that typically required very long hours and had inflexible schedules and serious penalties for stepping out of the field for any length of time. Eighty-five percent of Paragon Legal attorneys were women with children, but the firm also attracted women and men without children who wanted to find a work/life balance. Paragon Legal lawyers were contract workers and received competitive compensation. In addition to discussing Paragon Legal, the case details the landscape of the legal industry, including challenges and pressures on all attorneys and the additional challenges for women. By the summer of 2010, Paragon Legal had become successful in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the question posed in the (A) case is whether the company should scale within the region and/or geographically. And if so, what would that look like? Other topics of discussion in the case include: the nature of contract work, entrepreneurship (and female entrepreneurship), and redesigning work for a better work/life balance.

The chief financial officer (CFO) of TELUS Corporation (Telus) has just been informed that Moody's, a bond rating service, has downgraded the firm's credit rating to one notch below investment grade. The CFO's challenge is to determine what specific actions, if any, to recommend to the firm's audit committee. First, this case facilitates a discussion on how changes in capital structure impact a firm's earnings, stock price and flexibility to carry out plan. Second, students learn about how bond ratings are set and how a firm's bond rating affects its bond yield. Last, by focusing on the situation faced by Telus during challenging market conditions in 2002, students learn how to manage relationships with investors while in the midst of change.

Companies in every industry are attempting to reduce their use of chemicals, particularly synthetic organic compounds, where there is a perception of harm to human health or the environment. The industrial and commercial floor-cleaning equipment industry is no different, with many equipment manufacturers seeking to reduce their use of harsh cleaning chemicals such as petroleum solvents. But with every competitor pursuing similar greening efforts in a mature market, companies find it difficult to differentiate their offers to customers. Tennant Company chose to differentiate itself through a technology-driven business strategy based on chemical-free cleaning. Instead of reducing the use of harsh cleaning chemicals, or reducing the harshness of those chemicals, Tennant offered its customers a cleaning solution that used ionized tap water to clean and disinfect surfaces, thereby eliminating harsh chemicals altogether. The benefits to customers were numerous, including lower total cost of ownership and improved health and safety, while maintaining cleaning performance relative to conventional chemical-based products. This case helps to illustrate the challenge of profitably going beyond incremental "greening" efforts (aimed at doing less harm) to offer a disruptive step-change in environmental performance as the central argument for the company's value proposition.

A company seen as having a core business that is environmentally harmful by its very nature - in this case selling pesticides - faces unique challenges in its transformation to a sustainable enterprise. Even when innovation leads to new green products, processes, technologies and business models, the leadership of the company must cope with the daunting task of engaging employees and customers in the idea that green can be effective and profitable.

This case illustrates the process and challenges of designing a new product and then making it a reality. It examines a myriad of product development, manufacturing and launch challenges confronting entrepreneurs with resource constraints. It does this from two perspectives: that of a product designer and that of an entrepreneur and business owner. Thus, the issues are both creative and practical.

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In January 2000, World Championship Wrestling (WCW)'s executive VP is faced with a challenging decision. He had been appointed the executive VP just three months ago, and was tasked with restoring the company to a profitable position. However, WCW's onscreen product was suffering; ratings for the flagship WCW Monday Nitro (Nitro) program had fallen to their lowest levels in nearly three-and-a-half years. WCW was losing its market leadership position, its viewing audience and even some of its on-screen talent to its major competitor, the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). The executive VP faced problems on a number of fronts: a talent roster low on motivation and morale, turnover among both the writing staff and company leadership, and a rapidly shrinking audience. Furthermore, the current instability in leadership meant that another major change would seriously impact the already-low morale among WCW's on-screen talent and support staff.

Bihar State Milk Cooperative Federation (COMPFED) had been marketing its milk and milk related products under the brand name of Sudha in the Bihar and Jharkhand regions of India for three decades. They operated through six unions and two dairies to process the milk collected from nearly 4,000 village level cooperatives. On the surface, COMPFED appeared to have a competitive advantage for its supply of milk since it maintained the largest network for milk procurement, which spanned a wide geography over these two regions and was unmatched by its competitors. However, due to various environmental forces, the ability to procure an adequate supply had diminished in the last two years, which negatively affected the overall profitability of the organization.The marketing manager of COMPFED had been facing a difficult challenge in serving the growing demand and maintaining profitability. Since he operated in an industry with high fixed costs, the declining supply of milk procurement meant lower sales. As a result, there was no opportunity to significantly lower operating costs to match the limited supply.The marketing manager thought of two reasons present in the external environment that contributed to this situation. First, a series of incessant floods had caused damages to grazing land and livestock operations in many of the villages that were the source for milk. Additionally, private players were disrupting the supply chain by offering short term higher payments to some suppliers/farmers on a case by case basis. These players did not face the same regulatory and hygienic guidelines that COMPFED did and operated outside the normal infrastructure. His options included two very different alternatives; trying to work with these agents or securing a process to minimize or eradicate their activities.

How do you make money when you tell your customers 'don't buy our stuff unless you really need it?'" This was the question that Yvon Chouinard, founder of the clothing company Patagonia, asked himself as he considered developing a new partnership with eBay in which customers would buy and sell used Patagonia gear on eBay rather than buy it new. As he considered this new partnership, Chouinard would have to balance the environmental priorities upon which Patagonia was founded with its financial well-being. This is a two-part case. Part A presents the decision which Chouinard is considering, while Part B presents the decision that Chouinard chose. The A and B cases were written by graduate students Allyson Johnson, Courtney Lee, Steven Rippberger, and Morgane Treanton, under the supervision of Professor Andrew Hoffman.

The case illustrates how a leading German hospital group has invested deeply in the measurement of patient-level outcomes and costs, the foundations of a health care value framework. The company launches a pilot project to use time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) for measuring the cost of total knee replacements. The costing project complements an existing initiative for comprehensive outcomes measurement. The combination of accurate measurement of outcomes and costs empowers local personnel - physicians, nurses, and administrators - to improve the value of care they deliver. It also permits benchmarking across the group's multiple hospital sites to identify best practices that can be shared. The case concludes with a decision on using outcome and cost measurement to inform the adoption of a new recuperative approach that promises to dramatically lower post-surgical length-of-stays.

Foro Energy developed proprietary and patent-pending fiber-laser technologies that could disrupt existing processes and services for the exploration and production of oil and natural gas. These breakthrough laser technologies were protected by a strong intellectual property (IP) portfolio, which provided Foro with the flexibility to pursue a number of different business models. The market potential for oilfield applications was large, as global spending in the O&G E&P industry was expected to approach $600 billion in 2012.

The Schon Klinik is a private, for-profit German hospital group trying to establish itself as a premium health care provider in a competitive German market. The case details Schon Klinik's founding, its early focus on measurement and improvement, and the design and implementation of a system-wide structure for measuring and reporting actual health outcomes. The case details the care cycle for eating disorder patients and highlights the role outcomes measurement has played in improving eating disorder care over time. It ends with a discussion of Schon's innovative bundled reimbursement models and challenges the reader to explore how to develop new pricing and care delivery models that encourage integration of care around patient medical conditions. The case also discusses the German health care system, its regulatory constraints, and Schon's attempts to change the paradigm of competition in the sector.

This case is a two-part series on Dunia. Case A is set in 2008, where founder CEO Rajeev Kakar has just spent 20 months setting up Dunia, a finance company in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The enterprise originated from a partnership between his former employer, Fullerton Financial Holdings (FFH) and a couple of key entities in the UAE that were keen on building a financial presence in the region. On September 15, 2008 - as the Dunia team is preparing to announce the opening of its first branch in Abu Dhabi - news breaks on the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. For Kakar, it means that the product programmes he has lined up, as well as his funding assumptions for Dunia, have crashed. Dunia A deals with the time frame before the launch of the company and covers factors such as pricing risk and uncertainty, along with a broader view that covers the struggles presented with new ventures and entrepreneurship.

Nawaal Motlekar is the managing director of Kwenta Media and founding editor of Mamas & Papas, a recently launched parenting magazine in Southern Africa. From her early entrepreneurial experiences, Motlekar developed a personal and professional interest in parenting magazines. As a Black South African women, married to an Indian man, in an increasingly multi-racial and multi-cultural society, Motlekar recognized a gap for a parenting magazine that would appeal to a wider and more racially and culturally inclusive target market. After extensive research and development, she launched the Mamas & Papas magazine in early 2009. The case charts Motlekar's journey as an entrepreneur, as well as her efforts between 2006 and 2009 to bring the magazine to life. The case explores the quantitative and qualitative research approaches employed by Motlekar, as well as her marketing and branding initiatives towards building a Mamas & Papas brand beyond just the physical magazine. With the magazine having been on the shelves for 12 months, Motlekar and her board faced a number of decisions. These included options to increase advertising revenues and circulation, as well as choosing how to extend the Mamas & Papas brand into related categories.

This case focuses on organizational transformation in an accounting firm in South Africa. The case describes how the impact of both globalization and the transformation that the country had undergone since the advent of democracy in 1994 steered StratAFin Inc. towards a process of building a new identity. The case describes how senior management realized the need for transformation based on the many new challenges that were being faced in the changing environment. Change was experienced at many levels within the organization: from the construction of a new building as a symbol of the change to corporatizing and growing the firm, changing the management structure, investing heavily in technology and human capital development, focusing on continuous improvement and driving major diversity transformation. The case offers insights into the many change drivers that had to be considered in the process, how the organization had to manage any resistance to change and the resultant need for flexibility during the process, and the importance of measurement of the many dimensions within a transformation process. The case concludes with the challenge of how the firm's leadership could ensure that the continuing transformation maintained its momentum.

North American and European branded hotel chains in their quest to maximize shareholder wealth have recently shed ownership of assets and freed up capital to focus on their core businesses with the help of strenuous contracts. The ensuing pursuit of further business development has expedited the internationalization process and a new business model of franchising the brand/value proposition in international locations has evolved. Globally accepted brands hold the promise of global quality. It is widely believed that Western brands deliver more value than brands from emerging nations, such that they can charge global prices to global customers. Service delivery failure is encountered frequently in the accommodation and food services industry. Such failures can act as an important performance measurement criteria. Managers are taught how to recover from service delivery failure and address loyalty issues of existing customers. They fear losing them as the cost of acquiring new customers may exceed the cost of keeping existing customers. The case illustrates how a globally branded North American hotel chain disregarded the basic tenets of maintaining the global brand promise, ignored generally accepted North American customer service standards, failed to instigate delivery failure recovery and leveraged firm specific capabilities to maximize shareholder wealth. The reaction of the local counterpart, the reaction to countermand the imbalance in the ensuing business relationship and adaptation of the value proposition are told from the perspective of a vacationing couple that experienced the diluted brand firsthand.

Clarks at a Crossroads (A) describes how this venerable British shoe company falls behind its competition and into financial trouble. The case ends with a pivotal vote by shareholders on whether to sell this family company.