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Necanko, Inc. is a large international food manufacturer. A buyer-scheduler for the company must forecast sales demand to determine production planning, inventory management, and distribution for the year. Sales were normally predictable and stable, but the company has just come back from a three-month layoff due to slow sales, and it is now experiencing a sales increase three times greater than usual. The buyer-scheduler is uncertain why the sales are spiking and must decide what action to take.

Founded in 1994 as a private think tank, Digital Economy focused on researching the effects of emerging technologies on competitive strategies and high-performance organizations. By the late 1990s, clients demanded consulting services to complement previously purchased research services. The company's business model and offerings flourished in the technology boom. Then, in the first quarter of 2001, the technology boom began to deflate. Digital Economy's decision makers were confident that the changes in the environment would be short lived and that the company's business model and offerings were infallible. Unfortunately, such an assessment and subsequent decisions led to substantial losses in the next two years. The parent firm pressured Digital Economy to realize a profit by the following fiscal year or be completely shut down or consolidated. Despite Digital Economy being in a state of crisis, the management team failed to see the need for change.

In November 1977, U.S. Air Force officials expressed mounting concern about the restrictions on their tactical capabilities that resulted from a string of problems with the new F100 engine in F-15 and F-16 fighter jets. The F100 engine, produced by Pratt and Whitney Aircraft, was a powerful new engine that played a critical role in the U.S. air-defense system. Development of the engine had started in the late 1960s, and its performance specifications pushed the envelope of the technological possibilities. Although setbacks had to be expected, there had long been a growing concern about the unreliability of the F100 engine in combat situations. The Air Force felt that Pratt had been largely unresponsive in prior discussions of these problems and was now reviewing its options.

On December 11, 2001, China became a member of the World Trade Organization. Many say the 1999 US-China bilateral trade agreement and the vote in Congress to permanently establish normal trade relations with China paved the way for China''s WTO accession. Even though China was not a WTO member, the United States had granted China Most Favored Nation trading status (MFN) since 1979. However, under US law, China''s trade status required an annual renewal that often became a focal point in Congress for protests over human rights issues, security concerns, and the growing US trade deficit with China. In order to support China''s WTO accession, the United States had to commit to non-discriminatory treatment by agreeing to make China''s MFN status permanent-known as PNTR or Permanent Normal Trade Status-thereby giving up the right to annual reviews. The vote in Congress generated a lobbying battle on Capitol Hill of historical proportions. Why did PNTR pass? What role should trade agreements play in promoting human rights, enhancing domestic reform, encouraging the rule of law, and promoting national security? How were the US-China bilateral agreement and the PNTR vote linked to other key negotiations? What is the role of trade in advancing America''s economic interests? (Revised August 2005) HKS Case Number 1771.0

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has a long, successful history at inventing solutions that help developing countries improve their agriculture. Their research centers are spread across the globe. For many years, they were funded by sponsors who took a long-term view--commensurate with the necessary horizon for R&D. Increasingly though, donors want faster, evidence-based payoffs to their donations. How should CGIAR adapt?

Loyalty Management UK (LMUK) manages British supermarket chain Sainsbury's frequent-shopper card program, called Nectar. LMUK uses Sainsbury's sponsorship as the magnet to attract other retailers into a profitable, multisponsor loyalty network. Examines the economics and consumer behavior of retail loyalty programs and allows comparison of the brand-building power of a single-sponsor program to the promotional power of a multisponsor program. Describes the launch of the program and its first 18 months of growth, at the end of which it is the largest loyalty program in Britain. Illustrates the use of the program to deliver customer-specific promotions to the 13.5 million-member database and how the program evaluates the success or failure of specific promotions.

The Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society's management team knew that they had conceived a very unique project, Elephant Walk Thru. The success of this innovative ecotourism project hinges on their ability to balance the needs of a diverse group of stakeholders as well as various economic and political-legal forces facing the organization. Their primary task in the ensuing months is to identify salient external opportunities and threats posed by stakeholder groups. Equally important is to evaluate the continually changing political-legal and economic environments prior to constructing the facilities.

Presents a brief historical overview of Enron's rise, its strategic successes and failures, the evolution of its business model, and the organizational processes relied upon by Enron's management to drive and monitor the business. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

It is 2004 and David Tennenhouse, the director of Intel Research, is reviewing the organization he has built since 2000. Intel Research was charged with exploring new and disruptive technologies that lay off the "silicon roadmap" that drove most of Intel's R&D efforts. This exploratory research was conducted using an approach that Tennenhouse oversaw during his years at the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Predicated on the funding of university grants, internal research efforts, joint labs run with universities, and selective corporate venture investments, the idea was to build a network to give advance warning of important new technologies. In 2004, Tennenhouse was reviewing its performance.

At year-end 2003, Freddie Mac's total mortgage portfolio reached a total principal of $1.4 trillion. The U.S. government did not explicitly back Freddie Mac, a stockholder-owned organization, but investors were said to perceive some degree of implicit government backing. After its success in the 1990s, Freddie Mac made maintaining steady earnings growth in the mid-teens an explicit goal through interest rate risk management. To smooth earnings in a changing interest rate environment, Freddie Mac prided itself on modeling, measuring, and managing credit and interest rate risk. Significant resources were devoted to developing sophisticated, quantitative risk modeling and solutions. Interest rate risk was reduced largely through the use of interest rate swaps and swaptions. The motivation to smooth earnings was inherent in Freddie Mac's culture and caused business problems: The operations (e.g., accounting, audit, etc.) of the organization were not well supported, executive compensation was tied to meeting earnings estimates, and employees involved in developing creative accounting solutions to manage earnings were thought of as "first-class citizens." On January 22, 2003, Freddie Mac announced it would restate earnings for 2002, 2001, and possibly 2000. The following June, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), Freddie Mac's regulator, began an examination of Freddie Mac's culture and the events leading up to the restatement. OFHEO determined that Freddie Mac had neglected operations risk management when managing interest rate risk and earnings, leaving room for accounting and disclosure issues. How should investors view the events leading up to the $5 billion restatement and Freddie Mac's management of interest rate risk and operations risk?

Todd Wilson, manager of partner development at Educational Technology Corp., needed to determine the targeting, positioning, and selling strategy for its innovative Interactive Mathematics software for the college market. This required determining what types of colleges to target and which stakeholders to focus on within institutions. His task was complicated by the unclear objectives of nonprofit institutions and the differing motivations of teachers, students, and college administrators in adopting software-based learning technology. Highlights the difficulties in innovation adoption within large nonprofit institutions and the challenges in marketing to institutions with complex decision-making processes, multiple influencers, and conflicting motivations.

Tracking technologies--in products and services like TiVo and electronic toll collection--make people's lives a lot more convenient. But the public is understandably concerned about the privacy issues such technologies raise. No one is more aware of those issues than Dante Sorella, CEO of Raydar Electronics, which develops and sells radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers. So Dante is troubled when executives from one of his client companies approach him about integrating RFID technology into retail operations. KK Inc., a manufacturer and retailer of teen clothing, wants to embed flat RFID tags into the bills of its caps and visors. The tags would be activated at the registers with customers' purchasing data. When a customer wearing a hat next visited a KK store, the tag would be scanned by readers mounted at the entrance, and a video screen would greet the shopper. Armed with data about the individual's preferences, store personnel could steer her toward her favorite styles or appropriate sale items. Dante appreciates the technology behind the idea--and, of course, its business potential for Raydar--yet he can't help thinking that this particular application smacks of Big Brother. How should Dante respond to KK's interest in tagging the caps and visors? Commenting on this fictional case study in R0412A and R0412Z are Glen Allmendinger, president of the technology consulting firm Harbor Research; Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to protect individuals' digital rights; Nick Dew, an assistant professor of management at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California; and R. Bhaskar, an associate of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.

Tracking technologies--in products and services like TiVo and electronic toll collection--make people's lives a lot more convenient. But the public is understandably concerned about the privacy issues such technologies raise. No one is more aware of those issues than Dante Sorella, CEO of Raydar Electronics, which develops and sells radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers. So Dante is troubled when executives from one of his client companies approach him about integrating RFID technology into retail operations. KK Inc., a manufacturer and retailer of teen clothing, wants to embed flat RFID tags into the bills of its caps and visors. The tags would be activated at the registers with customers' purchasing data. When a customer wearing a hat next visited a KK store, the tag would be scanned by readers mounted at the entrance, and a video screen would greet the shopper. Armed with data about the individual's preferences, store personnel could steer her toward her favorite styles or appropriate sale items. Dante appreciates the technology behind the idea--and, of course, its business potential for Raydar--yet he can't help thinking that this particular application smacks of Big Brother. How should Dante respond to KK's interest in tagging the caps and visors? Commenting on this fictional case study in R0412A and R0412Z are Glen Allmendinger, president of the technology consulting firm Harbor Research; Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to protect individuals' digital rights; Nick Dew, an assistant professor of management at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California; and R. Bhaskar, an associate of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.

Tracking technologies--in products and services like TiVo and electronic toll collection--make people's lives a lot more convenient. But the public is understandably concerned about the privacy issues such technologies raise. No one is more aware of those issues than Dante Sorella, CEO of Raydar Electronics, which develops and sells radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers. So Dante is troubled when executives from one of his client companies approach him about integrating RFID technology into retail operations. KK Inc., a manufacturer and retailer of teen clothing, wants to embed flat RFID tags into the bills of its caps and visors. The tags would be activated at the registers with customers' purchasing data. When a customer wearing a hat next visited a KK store, the tag would be scanned by readers mounted at the entrance, and a video screen would greet the shopper. Armed with data about the individual's preferences, store personnel could steer her toward her favorite styles or appropriate sale items. Dante appreciates the technology behind the idea--and, of course, its business potential for Raydar--yet he can't help thinking that this particular application smacks of Big Brother. How should Dante respond to KK's interest in tagging the caps and visors? Commenting on this fictional case study in R0412A and R0412Z are Glen Allmendinger, president of the technology consulting firm Harbor Research; Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to protect individuals' digital rights; Nick Dew, an assistant professor of management at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California; and R. Bhaskar, an associate of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.

As a multi-generational family business with a 100-year history in industrial engineering, the Nash Engineering Company had turned many challenges into opportunities. But in the late 1990s, the market for their products collapsed. The family and executive managers were faced with several options. Should they try to continue as a stand-alone organization? Should they pursue a strategic acquisition? Should the family sell Nash Engineering? There were many factors to consider, among them individual shareholders' need for dividends and liquidity, and the family's sense of pride in their heritage. What was the best solution for the business and the family?

Cumberland Entertainment, a niche music producer, was looking for capital to finance its planned expansion. CEO, Tom Smith, entered into negotiations with private equity firms, and struck an agreement that turned out to be incomplete. As a result, serious problems arose between financial investors and management. The case series describes how the parties dealt with these problems as their relationship evolved.

The primary purpose of this case is to describe the challenges facing Rasurel, the swimwear brand of Lejaby, a French lingerie company that has set itself the ambition of revitalizing the image of Rasurel in the minds of consumers. The case focuses on the issues facing the company as it considers the launch of the Rasurel Summer 2004 collection. The Lejaby management team has envisaged various options, favoring one where it would keep Rasurel in the company¿s portfolio and work on its repositioning. Bruno de Lalande, the newly appointed Marketing & Sales Director, has the task of leading the repositioning.

China is one of the oldest continuous civilizations in the world, with organized society existing for more than 10,000 years. Although the country has a complex and dynamic past, the scope and pace of change in China within the past 25 years have been unprecedented in the nation's long history. Since 1979, when China's reform era began, the country reduced the number of its citizens living in poverty by 200 million and achieved a sixfold increase in per capita income. China accounted for nearly 4% of the worldwide gross domestic product in 2004 and had become the sixth-largest economy and the leading recipient of foreign direct investment. While these results are impressive, this is only the beginning for China. As the most populous nation in the world, China needs to create 100 million new jobs by 2013 and quadruple its GDP by 2020 to achieve and sustain a reasonable standard of living for its people. To do so, the country must further open itself to foreign investment, trade, and the market-oriented ideas that will stimulate domestic productivity and build its competitiveness as a nation. As Michael Porter asserts, "National prosperity is created, not inherited. It does not grow out of a country's natural endowments, its labor pool, its interest rates, or its currency value. A nation's competitiveness depends on the capacity of its industry to innovate and upgrade." Over the last two and a half decades, China has proven its ability to capitalize on its innate advantages and make meaningful reforms. Whether the country can build on these successes to create a lasting competitive advantage under competition remains to be seen.

In April 2004, Google announced that it was launching its long-awaited IPO. Looks at the unconventional auction format of the IPO of the world's most popular search engine, the role of investment banks in the IPO process, and the implications for corporate governance and stock valuation of a dual-class share structure.

The CEO of Amtelecom Group Inc. (AGI) must make a recommendation to the board of directors regarding the best way to sell its Amtelecom Communications subsidiary. AGI owns and operates ICS Courier, a national fixed-route courier business, and Amtelecom Communications, a regional telecommunications, cable television, and Internet business. Amtelecom Communication's capital requirements are not being satisfied because cash is being diverted to ICS Courier to cover its losses. In addition, AGI's stock has been performing poorly. To alleviate these problems, the board has decided to sell off Amtelecom Communications. The three sales alternatives being considered are: selling to a strategic buyer, IPO via a common share offering, and IPO via an income trust offering.