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Greenko, a renewable power generating company investing in biomass, small and medium hydro power and wind power projects, had projected to achieve 1GW (Giga Watt = 1000 Mega Watt) of installed capacity by March 2015. The company had been financing its projects with debt from Indian banks and financial institutions on a project finance basis and it had to now decide whether to refinance the project finance debt with an international bond issue of USD 550 million. The case provides an opportunity to discuss the public policy and financing aspects of renewable energy in India.

Impact investing, Social enterprise.

MBA, EMBA, Executive Education.

Zoona mobile money: investing for impact details a slightly altered version of the real events that occurred in late 2011 with the series A round of investment in Zoona, a mobile money business in Zambia. The focus is on the decisions that have to be made by the management team of a socially innovative tech start-up (Zoona) providing mobile money and financial services to previously unbanked consumers in Zambia.

By the end of this case, the student should be able to: understand the basics of term sheets and be able to perform a high level analysis and comparison of two distinct term sheets; identify investor objectives, ultimately recognising the general differences between private equity and venture capital investors; identify and weigh the costs and benefits of term sheets, as well as identify negotiating points and necessary trade-offs in the investment process; and identify and understand the “soft” benefits of investors and weigh these in relation to a term sheet analysis.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 1: Accounting and Finance.

Alice Monroe, a 30-year-old married mother of two, was an admissions officer at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She was just completing her first year of service at Northwestern and qualified for the university's 403(b) retirement plan. It was early October 2017, and she had until the end of the month to decide if and to what extent she would participate in Northwestern's retirement plan–that is, how much of her salary should she put into the retirement plan, and into which mutual fund or funds should she allocate her savings?

The case includes background on defined contribution and benefit plans as well as mutual funds. It goes into detail about Northwestern's retirement plan, including data on the performance of 15 of the plan's core mutual funds. The case also provides each fund's strategy, Morningstar Rating and Morningstar Category, expense ratio, assets under management, turnover rate, and historical performance for the last 10 years.

Using modern portfolio theory (diversification and risk-return trade-off) and with an understanding of mutual fund fees and the tax advantages of retirement savings, students will decide how much Alice should invest and in which mutual funds.

The learning outcomes of this case study are to develop an understanding of informal business practices (IBP) from an economic and a behavioural perspective, identify the pros and cons of IBP and how they can hinder the realization of entrepreneurial aspirations, use the effectuation perspective to understand the entrepreneurial journey of the protagonist and apply the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis and effectuation theory to understand the need for transition from informal to formal business practices.

KSN Iyengar Catering Services (KSNICS) had gained popularity for cooking and serving traditional “Iyengar” cuisine during festivals, ceremonies and other auspicious occasions. With the passage of time, KSNICS slowly diversified into offering food carrier services, corporate catering and preparation of sweets/savouries during the Diwali festival. The enterprise managed to sustain itself without additional investments from external sources. KSNICS was managed in an informal manner by the protagonist, Krishna Kumar. After almost 30 years of KSNICS’s existence, in 2021, Kumar felt that they should diversify into the restaurant business by establishing an authentic “Iyengar” restaurant. In spite of the unpredictable market and the challenging times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he had somehow managed to sustain his catering business. However, given the informal methods through which he operated his catering services and in the post-COVID-19 pandemic scenario, would it be prudent on his part to establish a restaurant?

This case study is suitable for post-graduate- and executive-level instruction in courses such as managerial skills, entrepreneurship and human resource management. In managerial skills course, it can be used for applying SWOT analysis from a particular perspective for effective decision-making. In entrepreneurship-related courses, it can be used to introduce aspects such as entrepreneurship orientation, effectuation and decision-making. In organizational behaviour and HR-related courses, it can be used to highlight how employees can be trained and motivated and how businesses can be sustained within the scale, especially during challenging times. Irrespective of the course, the IBP discussion would remain a constant point of reference because that was the context under which the current business was operating.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

The case examines the development and launch of an exchange-traded fund (ETF) based on JUST Capital's socially responsible corporate ranking methodologies. The case provides a market overview of Environment, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) and socially responsible investing (SRI), what has driven growth in those areas worldwide, and several best-practice investment approaches. Following the overview, the case describes the founding and development of JUST Capital, explores JUST Capital's ranking methodologies, and presents the decision point faced by the CEO: requisite selection of one of three strategies in order for JUST Capital to generate “self-sustaining” revenue.

This case aims to help students achieve the following learning objectives: ■ to apply the Emergence of Social Enterprise in Europe (Emergence des Enterprises Sociales en Europe – EMES) Network definitional framework to the case, and in doing so, have a useful framework to define social enterprises in emerging markets; ■ to identify the factors that can play important role in making strategic decisions in social enterprises; ■ to evaluate the sustainability of a social enterprise; and ■ to address the unique funding and financial challenges faced by social enterprises.

This case study discusses the dilemmas related to business expansion faced by Waste4Change (W4C), a waste management organization based in Bekasi, Jakarta, Indonesia. W4C was founded in 2014 by a group of young men who shared the idealism of changing the world by doing the right things. This principally involved protecting the environment and educating communities while maintaining economic profitability. However, idealism can sometimes create dilemmas within decision-making as an organization attempts to prevent market logic from dictating its direction. This case examines two different types of decision: the problem of securing a waste management contract when a permit had not been granted by the local government; and the problem of selecting the appropriate funding sources to enable the organization to grow. The first decision occurred in the context of a dilemma in 2017 when W4C expanded their waste management services to several regions in Indonesia but without having succeeded in securing a permit from the local government to provide such services. Attempts to provide such services without a formal legal permit would have been considered a violation of the law, even though the clients needed them (be it residents or companies) and the nature of the service in question had a positive connotation (i.e. maintaining the cleanliness of the city through waste management).The second decision concerned W4C’s plan to go public around 10 years from now. The CEO, Mohamad Bijaksana Junerosano, also known as Sano, has been considering this option since 2020 in a bid to grow the social enterprise. W4C differed from other startups; however, in the sense that while many startups will approach a plan to go public as an exit strategy, Sano wanted to preserve the idealism that had been a cornerstone of the enterprise since its inception. In other words, for W4C, going public was not just a means to an end.

Undergraduate as well as graduate courses that focus on sustainability, accounting, financing and strategy.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 1: Accounting and Finance.

Operations management.

Management post graduate and corporate executives.

ProdVal Flow Controls Pvt Ltd was company in the SME sector in India. The company focused on quality products and timely delivery. The major challenge for ProdVal was increasing their production capacity. They had no control over their existing suppliers resulting in delay in raw materials delivery. Retention of vendors had an effect on inventory carrying cost. The company had limited production facilities and the workers were outsourced. The company operated with unskilled workers. The case presents the various issues faced by the company based on which strategies to practice and plan the company's future plans could be designed. This is a disguised case and all excerpts from interviews have been anonymized.

This case study will give an insight to students to understand how inventory management; impacts production. It even gives an idea about how ProdVal has used the strategy of outsourcing of technology and labour and maintained a good growth rate.

Production-related outsourcing.

Production management in small scale industry.

Organization structure of a manufacturing unit.

Concept of outsourcing HR and technology in an SME.

Teaching notes are available, please consult your librarian to access.

Spiegel Online (www.spiegel.de) is the leading news Web site in Germany. The site was first designed to accompany Der Spiegel, one of Europe's largest and Germany's most influential weekly magazine, which has a weekly circulation of around one million. The site's content is produced by a team of more than fifty journalists writing in several categories: politics, business, networld, panorama, arts and entertainment, science, university, school, sports, travel, weather, and automobiles. The original content is complemented by articles purchased from news agencies and selected articles from the print edition. Spiegel-Verlag is a major contributor to the Hamburg Media School, which offers professional master's degree programs in Media Management (MBA), film, and journalism. In their second year, MBA students typically engage in consulting projects with major media companies. In a recent assignment, Spiegel Online posed two questions to the MBA team: are there any chances for an economically successful entry into the market for interactive classifieds? And if so, what should the business model look like in detail? A student team analyzed markets for classified ads and found one market segment that appeared to be particularly promising: the market for art objects. During the development of a business plan for a new venture in this market it became apparent that there is much uncertainty about the key input parameters to the business plan. As a result, it is very difficult to assess the viability of the business idea. How can the team properly account for the uncertain input parameters? What is the impact of this uncertainty on the bottom line? Will a Web site for art objects earn or lose money? How can the team communicate this uncertainty to a group of high-level decision makers who want a simple “go or no-go” recommendation?

The objective is to make students aware of the applicability of Monte Carlo simulation to the analysis of complex business plans. Students should learn how to explicitly account for uncertain inputs in a business plan, how to assess the impact of uncertainty on the bottom line via Monte Carlo simulation, and how to communicate the results of their analysis to high-level decision makers.

Social enterprise.

This case study can be used on modules on social enterprise (SE) and international business for undergraduate and postgraduate studies.

Arusha Women Entrepreneur (AWE) is a SE established in 2008 in Tanzania that employs low-income women from peri-urban Arusha and provides technical and management skills training to smallholder farmers. AWE has created a value supply chain from the production and marketing of aflatoxin-free, natural peanut butter, having a strong vision of delivering social and development benefits for smallholder peanut farmers and unemployed women.

This case is the basis for class discussion rather than for illustrating either effective or ineffective handling of a business. From this case, students will learn about the emergence and development of SEs and the challenges they encounter to grow.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS: 3: Entrepreneurship.

As China has pressed ahead with rural revitalization in recent years, its rural financial sector has also developed rapidly and the financial environment has been greatly improved. But compared with urban areas, the rural financial sector makes rather limited contributions to rural economic development for a variety of reasons, including single types of service providers, narrow coverage, and lack of services and products. The underdevelopment of the rural financial system is closely related to the characteristics of its target customers and the economic system. The deficient rural financial credit system, the low level of IT application, the difficulty in data collection and integration, and the insufficient collateral of farmers pose high costs and huge risks for financial institutions when providing credit and other financial services.

In the present case, fintech and financial innovation complement each other: The application of fintech makes innovation possible, and the need for financial development fuels the development of fintech. Leveraging fintech and new business models, MYbank has overcome the main obstacles in the development of rural finance to provide convenient financial services for farmers and rural MSEs. Fintech is the abbreviation of “financial technology.” It can be understood as the combination of finance and technology for easier understanding, but it is more than that. Fintech refers to the innovation of traditional financial products and services with various technologies to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs. The emergence and development of fintech have led to the creation of new business models, applications, and processes, which have triggered major changes in financial markets, financial institutions, and the ways financial services are delivered, and are reshaping the financial landscapes of countries and even the world.

There are three major problems in the development of rural finance: difficult access to data, difficult risk management, and difficult market penetration. In order to gradually remove the obstacles and guarantee sustainable business development, MYbank has created three new business models with the power of fintech: digital inclusive finance at the county level, industrial finance, and platform finance. With these models, MYbank is searching for a “Chinese solution” to the worldwide problem of rural inclusive finance.