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This case is set in early 2011, after a period of incredible customer and revenue growth for Groupon. Reviewing Groupon's rise, the case explores whether Groupon promotions are really good for local merchants, whether it can continue to thrive amidst increasingly intense competition, and the key reasons for the company's remarkable early success.

The case deals with an IT company born in Argentina in 2003 to provide software services to established companies in the developed world. After reaching sales of $57 million in 2010, the company ponders its next steps to achieve $500 million in revenues by 2015.

In late 2010, Jean-Paul Clozel, CEO of the Swiss biotech pharmaceuticals firm Actelion, looks back on a successful decade. The small venture that he had started with a few of his scientist colleagues in the late 1990s to discover novel medicine in a research-driven organisation had grown into one of Europe's largest biotech firms by revenues. Their success was mainly founded on their orphan indication drug Tracleer, which Actelion sold and marketed worldwide. However, Tracleer's looming patent expiry in a few years and recent late-stage pipeline setbacks had put the company under pressure from investors. While Clozel was confident in their ability to deliver future drugs that could secure further growing revenue streams, he wondered how to maintain their entrepreneurial culture that he saw as a prerequisite for this--particularly their lean hierarchy and researchers' freedom to follow innovation where it led them--in a company of more than 2,400 people which continued to grow.

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Next Street Financial, LLC was a modern merchant bank that provided high quality advisory services and capital to small- and mid-sized inner city businesses. Next Street was a for-profit business that aimed to increase the growth, profitability and success of its client companies, thereby enhancing economic development, wealth and job creation in the inner city. The advisory component of its mission seemed well underway but raising a fund to directly finance client companies had proved challenging. As Next Street considered expanding its capacity to help clients achieve their growth potential, the firm was deciding between raising a fund or focusing its resources on expanding its abilities to more effectively help its clients obtain financing from other institutions.

Harmonic is a small, privately held manufacturer of hearing aids. Harriet Burns and Marc Davis, two employees at Harmonic, have an opportunity to purchase the company from the founder. As well-informed insiders who understand the industry, Burns and Davis believe the benefits of ownership far outweigh the risks. While the decision to purchase Harmonic is easy for them, arranging financing proves more difficult. The company is preparing to launch a new hearing aid product and Burns and Davis want the financing package to include the additional capital required to complete both the development and the launch. Two financing alternatives are presented: one is virtually all debt-financed, the other all equity. The financing structure Burns and Davis select will have a significant impact on the products and future prospects of the company. Students must analyze the two financing alternatives, determine the advantages and disadvantages, and recommend the best option.

After creating a market for his "new to the world" product and a significant partnership with the German-based SAP AG (SAP), Sridhar Tayur had an opportunity to take the partnership with SAP to another level by establishing a reseller arrangement, available to only a dozen or so of SAP's elite partners out of more than 600-widely considered in the enterprise software industry as a dream come true for technology entrepreneurs. Suitable for use in MBA, EMBA, and GEMBA programs, this case offers the opportunity to focus decision making on several key marketing and sales issues. Should Tayur sign a deal with SAP, thereby handing significant control of the messaging and positioning of SmartOps to a global giant? How reliant on SAP did he really want to get? Would signing the deal make losing control of his company more likely and alienate prospects who were not fans of SAP? What would not doing the deal mean for the relationship with SAP? Would SAP go down the reseller route with a competitor? What exactly was a good reseller contract, and was it possible for a company as small as SmartOps to make the agreement a win-win?

Sasken, a communication software company based in India, provides research and development support to leading wireless device vendors from its offshore centres in India in an intellectual property-oriented product and services space. Sasken has faced a number of challenges in building an advanced multimedia player for high-end mobile handsets for the Japanese market. The Japanese market is one of the most advanced in the mobile services it offers, and is well ahead of the rest of the world in terms of handset functions and features. Located in an offshore centre far away from the target market, in a country where the mobile industry is still evolving, the Sasken project team faced a number of challenges in building a technology-intensive product according to its client's specific requirements. With high client expectations and norms regarding quality, completeness of the product and timeliness of delivery, the Sasken project manager had to successfully manage evolving technical requirements for the product from the company's offshore centre in Bangalore. Sasken's project team also had to cope with unavailability of tools and platforms, with communication and co-ordination challenges, and with cultural differences that were typical of offshore product development. This case illustrates how having clarity on product features, following a suitable process orientation, adhering to quality and timeline expectations, effectively dealing with a distributed team setup, and managing cross-cultural issues are important pre-requisites for success in offshore software development.

This case focuses on Solutions Care Association (SCA) - a nonprofit health care organization established in 2000, which quickly became a leader in environmental stewardship and social responsibility. With headquarters in Glenbrook, Nevada, the company had a strong mission and socially responsible culture, which helped attract talent and launch social and environmental initiatives. Despite its numerous achievements and awards, however, there was limited awareness internally and externally about these initiatives and their impact on business and society. In addition, the company did not have a comprehensive way to track and report these achievements. As an emerging leader of the integrated health care plan in the United States, Solutions Care Association had both the responsibility and the opportunity to be a model of what American health care should look like. With growing concerns and scrutiny of the health care industry, there was no better time for Solutions Care Association to continue to strengthen its leadership position in addressing key social and environmental problems, such as providing affordable health care, reducing climate change impacts, phasing out toxic chemicals and creating a safe, culturally sensitive and supportive environment for employees, patients and suppliers.<br><br>The overall goal of the case is to use the provided information from a comprehensive company assessment to identify a few key areas where Solutions Care Association can focus and demonstrate industry leadership while also supporting the bottom line. A set of key questions is included to guide students' discussion around critical issues for building an integrated CSR strategy for Solutions Care Association, considering its culture, structure and present level of corporate citizenship management.

3M Canada (3M) has been a corporate sponsor of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation (CBCF, or the Foundation) since 2005. In support of the CBCF, 3M has produced and sold "pink products" (products that bear the pink ribbon, such as Post-it-Notes and flag pens, Nexcare bandages, and Scotch-Brite sponges), with a contribution of each sale benefiting the CBCF. This case examines the corporate sponsorship relationship, specifically how 3M's brand manager for Post-it brand office products can further activate the relationship with CBCF. The brand manager's marketing campaign for 2009 was successful; however, she now needs to determine the best approach for her 2010 campaign.

Google search had helped Demand Media grow to be a $1.9 billion online publisher. Then, social media and smartphone apps began to change the way people navigated the Internet. How should Demand Media respond? The business ran on a radically new model in which a stable of 10,000 freelance contributors supplied content, the Internet's search engines brought it 75 million readers each month, and advertising generated revenue. It took the guesswork out of content production, with algorithms that indicated which topics were being searched and created content accordingly. Demand treated its 5,000 online articles published per day as an investment, not a cost, a reversal of the traditional media model. In addition to being able to infer consumers' interests with its algorithm, the company had a formula for estimating the lifetime value of each piece of content. As the business models of print and broadcast media declined, Demand had figured out how to leverage digital and social media tools to bring down the costs of creating content and to find an audience. In spring 2011, executives at the five-year-old company were pleased with the company's billion dollar IPO, the biggest Internet IPO since Google's, but changes in consumer behavior on the Internet were obliging a review of the model.

In April 2010, the eruption of a volcano wreaked havoc in the airline industry and placed Aer Arann on the brink of liquidation. For founder, sole owner and chairman Padraig O'Ceidigh, the airline has been a personal as well as business passion. The case provides a number of options for addressing the crisis. It also places the story in the context of Padraig's life journey and search for multi-dimensional success.

In the biotech world, the 18-year-old Munich-based company MorphoSys was a rarity: it was profitable. The company achieved this profitability not by developing and selling its own drugs, but by licensing access to its proprietary library of human antibodies. Recently, the company decided to deviate from this model, and attempt to develop its own proprietary products. The case allows analysis of "license vs. vertically integrate" business model decisions, and can be used to teach principles of business model design and the functioning of markets for know-how.

The wind turbine manufacturer Vestas launched the industry's first highly localized and customized new product launch campaigns which used also new tools such as web 2.0 platforms. Used to operate in a market where demand exceeded supply, Vestas had lost contact with its customer base and had a limited marketing budget, mainly used to finance global media advertisement campaigns. The world economic downturn which followed the U.S. credit crunch crisis of 2008 and the increased competition in the wind turbine market had brought about a sudden drop in Vestas orders of new turbines. Vestas thus decided to focus more on marketing and developed a new department, Global Marketing and Customer Insights. Morten Albaek was hired to manage and develop the department and to transform Vestas into the undisputed most customer focused company in the industry by 2012 and among the most customer centric B2B brand by 2015. He tested his new approach for the first time with the launch of their new V112 turbine for which he developed 72 customized campaigns targeting its main existing and potential customers and major stakeholders. Yet, had the campaign been effective in bringing Vestas closer to its customer base? Were they using the right tools?

Cindy Gallop launched IfWeRanTheWorld (IWRTW) in February 2010, as what the tech world called minimum viable product, in order to real-world test Gallop's "business of the future" concept while development was ongoing. IWRTW was conceived to bring together human good intentions with corporate good intentions, to activate both into shared action, against shared goals, to deliver shared and mutually accountable results. She wanted to make "doing good as sexy as hell" for both individuals and businesses, to make it quicker, easier, and simpler to turn intention into action, one "microaction" at a time. In January 2011, Gallop's key challenge was how to amplify the IWRTW experience in a way that would make it a more valuable-and immediately understandable-business proposition to a brand. The idea behind the venture was only as good as its business model and its execution.

Per the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), which President Obama signed in 2010, states would be required to create state-wide health insurance marketplaces - the Health Benefit Exchanges (HBEs) - in which individuals and small employers could choose from a set of easy-to-compare, tightly regulated health plans. This case explores how Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey would have to decide whether and how to compete in New Jersey's HBEs.

This case depicts how executives who are holding power in an organization can create chaos due to interpersonal conflict. Rao and Naik, two senior executives at TKC Consulting in India, scapegoated an innocent subordinate during the course of their rivalry. Their actions, not befitting the positions they held, created confusion and misunderstanding in the organization. The chairman of the company understood that their selfish, power-hungry actions could not be explicitly pointed out, as this would merely result in a cycle of blame. Yet he also knew that if the conflict was not addressed immediately, it would cause more discord within the organization.

The owner of Finchco plans to sell his company. The purpose of the case is to utilize several valuation methods and to suggest the possible deal structure. The case is made somewhat more complicated by the fact that Finchco has a real estate subsidiary, which must be valued and the company has a great opportunity to land a major new customer whose value must be included in the analysis.

An equity analyst uses a variety of methods to value Walmart shares, with a view to making a buy/sell or hold recommendation for the stock.

Jane Barrow, CEO of Caprica Energy, must recommend to the board which of three potential "unconventional" natural gas development sites in different parts of the United States the company should pursue. The case takes place in January 2011, when the "low-hanging fruit" of natural gas production in the United States had essentially been picked. All three of the potential sites (shale, coal bed methane, and tight sands) would require hydraulic fracturing, a process of removing gas that was formerly considered inaccessible by injecting water and chemicals into the ground. Because of emerging concerns about the potential harm "fracking" can do to drinking water, Barrow must not only analyze which site might be most profitable but also what the potential risks to the environment and area residents might be.