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This case is based on primary and secondary data collection. ABCo’s Founder, Jocelyn Sheppard, sat down with the author for a 75-min recorded interview in July 2022, and she provided follow-up information via email. Interview data was supplemented with secondary data from publicly available sources to fill in portions on the founder, the company’s history and its location; and triangulate the collected interview data (Creswell and Poth, 2018). There are no conflicts of interest that the author needs to disclose related to the founder or company.

The case was piloted at one institution in the Fall 2022, Spring 2023 and Fall 2023 semesters, with 59 undergraduates in an in-person social entrepreneurship course and 165 undergraduates and 33 graduate students in an online asynchronous social entrepreneurship course. All students worked through the case in groups, and as a requirement of their corresponding assignment submission, they provided feedback that was de-identified. In total, 60 groups reported their feedback, which was considered during the subsequent drafts of the case and instructors’ manual IM.

According to the anonymized feedback, the protagonist, product line, desired social impact and experienced challenges of ABCo were all said to be interesting, approachable and relatable for students, and the case piqued the interest of students coming from different majors (e.g. business, environmental issues, human services and criminal justice). Students from rural areas, or those who have family in rural areas, felt the case was particularly interesting; a handful of the students in the asynchronous online class who were unfamiliar with such settings suggested providing students with some additional contextualization of rural environments, either through class discussion with other students who had experience in those environments or additional media or text-based supports. Further adjustments also included removing a reading and a corresponding question and revising elements within the Teaching Approaches section of the IM to support the additions they suggested within the feedback (i.e. spending time to define and walk through the provided model and highlight the differences of rural entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship in the rural as a class before engaging in the related write-ups for that question).

Jocelyn Sheppard, Founder of Appalachian Botanical Company (“ABCo”), had built her company not just on a vision of revitalizing reclaimed coal mine land through planting and producing products with lavender, but also to have a social impact on the rural town of Ashford and its greater region of Boone County in West Virginia, USA. While she understood that hiring workers in need of a second chance would present its challenges, she was shocked by the depth of social need her new employees presented, which contributed to many employees’ disruptive behaviors and turnover. To approach the problem at hand, Sheppard needed to reflect on the resources around her, namely, other entities and organizations who might be able to support her efforts to improve how ABCo delivers on its social mission and, thus, helps to improve the local community and its economy. The case draws upon literature and models within rural entrepreneurship and community development to have students advise Sheppard on what she should do next to improve the social outcomes for ABCo and its employees.

This case is geared for both upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in entrepreneurship, including in social, environmental and rural entrepreneurship courses and course modules. The case introduces students to a social enterprise struggling to get its footing in a rural context. The case would be suitable for both introductory and advanced courses, especially when placemaking/place-based entrepreneurship or ecosystem building are discussed.

The case was developed from secondary sources and interviews with a security analyst. The secondary sources include company annual reports, news reports, analyst reports, industry reports, company websites, stock exchange websites and databases such as Bloomberg and CMIE Prowess.

Increasing competition in product and capital markets has put tremendous pressure on managers to become more cost competitive. To address their firms' uncompetitive cost structures, managers may have to consider dramatic restructuring of their businesses. During 2014–2017, Tata Steel Ltd (TSL) UK considered a series of divestitures and a merger plan to nurse the company back to health. The case considers the economics of the restructuring plan. The case is designed to help students analyze a corporate downsizing program undertaken by a large Indian company in the UK and to highlight the dynamic role of the CFO and governance issues in family firms. It introduces students to issues surrounding a typical restructuring and provides students a platform to practice the estimation of value creation in a restructuring exercise. While some cases on corporate restructuring in the context of developed economies are available, there are very few cases written in an emerging market context. This case bridges that gap. TSL presents a unique opportunity to study corporate restructuring necessitated by a failed cross-border acquisition. It illustrates the potential for value loss in large, cross-border acquisitions. It shows how managerial hubris can prompt family firm owners to overbid in acquisitions and create legacy hot spots. In addition, the case can be used to discuss the causes of governance failures such as weak institutional monitoring and poor legal enforcement in emerging markets that could potentially harm minority shareholders.

The case was developed from secondary sources and interviews with a security analyst. The secondary sources include company annual reports, news reports, analyst reports, industry reports, company websites, stock exchange websites and databases such as Bloomberg and CMIE Prowess.

In 2017, it was a challenge to assess the future of global trade. It was an open question whether the US financial crisis and the recession that it triggered would mark a turning point for the liberal post–World War II world order. If one looked toward Europe, China, Latin America, and Japan, there was a flurry of activity. New trade agreements were being completed and pursued. In Washington, DC, on the other hand, President Donald Trump seemed set on ripping apart and/or renegotiating any trade deal the United States was ever part of.

This case explores Trump's opinions and emerging policy stance on trade, bilateralism, and the global economy, among others. It also gives an overview of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and asks whether the Trump presidency would constitute a major challenge to the WTO and what it stood for in 2017.

This case invites students to assess the impact that Brexit, the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, might have on a New York–based hedge fund's portfolio and, specifically, its UK assets. The case is designed to prompt students to make market assumptions and investment hypotheses based on a combination of numerical data and qualitative information. It requires no numerical computations; instead, it asks the student to interpret both markets' short-term reactions to the Brexit vote and strategy shifts from UK and European business leaders in order to evaluate longer-term implications for the economies of the United Kingdom, Europe, and the world.

In October 2016, Timothy Sloan, the newly appointed CEO of American banking giant Wells Fargo, faced a massive public-relations crisis. A few weeks earlier, a United States government agency had announced the results of its regulatory review of the bank and exposed a shocking practice common in the retail division, in which aggressive community bankers had created more than a million fraudulent accounts and credit card applications on behalf of unaware customers for the past several years. Over the next few weeks, the bank—and Sloan's predecessor, John Stumpf, in particular—suffered from harsh criticism from politicians, journalists, and former employees alike, ultimately forcing Stumpf's resignation. As Sloan sought to minimize the public-image backlash and restore general trust in Wells Fargo, he struggled to construct the best communication strategy for the bank's next chapter.

The learning outcomes of this study are to identify and discuss ways in which energy consumption in a residential educational institute can be reduced by improving demand-side energy management for sustainable development; summarise the challenges that an institute faces in transitioning to a more environmentally friendly mode of operations concerning energy management; illustrate the difference between operating expense and capital expenditure methods used for solar rooftop projects from the perspective of Goa Institute of Management (GIM); and analyse different project proposals for solar rooftop power generation energy using capital budgeting techniques.

Dr Ajit Parulekar, director at GIM, was evaluating the steps taken over the past few years for sustainable energy management to understand their impact and consider ways in which to take the environmental sustainability agenda forward. One of the projects that he was considering was the rooftop solar power plant. GIM had received proposals from several different vendors and evaluated three proposals out of these. He needed to decide on the capacity of the rooftop solar power generation and the type of contract that he should get into for the implementation of the project. This case study describes the differences and highlights the advantages and disadvantages of all the mentioned models with respect to GIM.

This case study is suitable for post-graduate level management students, as well as for undergraduate-level finance and management students.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS4: Environmental management.