Search results

Entrepreneurship.

MBA level – entrepreneurship courses, MA level – women empowerment issues, MBA – thriving in unstructured environments.

Saundarya Rajesh, was the founder-president of AVTAR Career Creators (ACC) a talent consulting firm that offered solutions in training, hiring, selection process outsourcing and human resource information studies to over 400 clients. The case describes the progressive journey of Saundarya as an entrepreneur in discovering and exploiting opportunities as they arise at different points of her career. Saundarya did pioneering work for creating flexi-career opportunities that included tools for Flexidizing® and Unbundling® of jobs. She has won many accolades for her work that included Tie Stree Shakti Awards 2011 for excellence in entrepreneurship, Cavinkare's Chinnikrishnan Innovation Award for Outstanding Entrepreneurship 2011 and India Today's Business Wizards of Tamil Nadu, 2011. Saundarya was happy with the fact that there were 23,000 women currently on the AVTAR I-WIN network and there were 13-15 lakh more women whose talent could be harnessed. She dreamt of ensuring that 1.2 million Indian women, who had dropped out of the workforce in the past 10-15 years, could be brought back to contribute productively. While there appeared to be an acceptance of the flexible working concept among the potential employees and employers, several questions about the future potential of such a work-force needed to be answered.

To understand the factors that constitute entrepreneur's alertness such as personality traits, social networks and prior knowledge. To understand the importance of entrepreneur's alertness for identifying business opportunities. To understand types of entrepreneurial opportunities. To understand the opportunity identification triad: recognition, development and evaluation. To understand how to develop a business model in under-defined contexts.

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

Participants will learn to analyze the basis of consumer segmentation in management education. It will specifically highlight the importance of positioning in influencing the marketing strategy of a firm and discuss the importance of a differentiated-low cost strategy to gain competitive advantage. The case will familiarize students with the business environment of rural India, and the applicability of the 4A’s and the 5D’s framework. Finally, the case will help participants understand the difference between a rural market and a Bottom-of-Pyramid (BoP) market.

A rural MBA institute for BoP students is grappling with the problem of low admissions, leading to an existential crisis. Two divergent options are presented to the protagonist. The first is to close down the B-school and use the infrastructure and facilities for a well-funded government skill development program which is vocational and intended for creating blue-collar workers. The second is to find ways to bolster the B-school to ensure that it gets adequate student enrollment, thereby leading to profitability.

This case is suitable for an undergraduate or MBA course in marketing management, rural marketing in India, South-Asian marketing or strategic marketing.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or e-mail support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. There is an accompanying spreadsheet with the case for studying the market. It contains relevant market data that would support analysis of the case. Comments are added for easy understanding. Instructors can access the separate spreadsheet that works out the break-even calculations for the fee structure of the institute. Instructions on calculations as well as comments are added for easy understanding.

CSS 8: Marketing.

In early 2017, after launching its successful “Greenhouse-in-a-Box” pilot project in India with fifteen smallholder farmers, Kheyti, a non-profit agricultural technology (AgTech) social enterprise, was struggling with several decisions in developing and growing its business. Kheyti was launched in 2015 to help smallholder farmers battle poverty and income variability by providing affordable technologies bundled with services. Over eighteen months, the team had developed a low-cost and modular greenhouse product to which it added financing, inputs, training, and market linkages to create a comprehensive “full-stack” solution for small farmers. The pilot project was a success in many ways, but Saumya, Kheyti's co-founder and head of product, was concerned that it revealed shortcomings that could severely affect the viability and scalability of Kheyti's solution.

Saumya had some important decisions to make. Should Kheyti redesign the product from scratch, or find other ways to reduce the cost for early adopters? Should it rely on upfront revenues from sales of the greenhouse, or consider developing an innovative financing or contract farming model? Kheyti's dwindling cash reserves meant that these decisions were urgent and critical. The path chosen now would determine whether the startup would move beyond the pilot stage and achieve its vision of serving 1 million farmers by 2025.

This case on “Corporate governance: a farce at Volkswagen (VW)” is set in September of 2015. The precipitating events, which started with the Emissions scandal and tampering of the technology, unfold a history of threatening organizational culture, deliberate cheating, and failure of good governance. The case presents that though the outgoing CEO took the responsibility for the event but said that he was shocked by the event and stunned that the misconduct of such a scale could occur in the VW Group. Given the roles and responsibilities of board of management and the supervisory board, how could the scandal of such magnitude go unnoticed? Were robust corporate governance practices being not followed at VW?

The case is based on the material available in the public domain, records, press reports, published books, interviews published by key board members of Volkswagen and the company website.

This case can be used for undergraduate senior classes or graduate and executive education level courses in corporate governance and ethical practices. This case will sync best with the topics around Board Composition and size, Board Independence, fiduciary duties of supervisory board, board duality and leadership and its impact on organizational culture.

The case describes how a leader simultaneously addresses various aspects of business and people management to achieve a turnaround. The actions taken by the leader to get rid of the non-functional practices, nurture the existing practices, and create new strategies and processes to accomplish business growth are described. The leader reshapes the organisational culture in partnership with the human resource department. The case can be used to show the different leadership styles (transactional and transformational) and tactics for managing change-partnering with HR to revamp people practices, cherry-pick and develop the right talent, etc.

The subject area is international business and global operations.

The study includes BSc, MSc and MBA students and management trainees who are interested in learning how an industry can be assessed to make a decision on market entry/expansion. Even senior management teams could be targeted in executive education programs, as this case provides a detailed procedure and methodology that is also used by companies (multinational corporations and small- and medium-sized enterprises) to develop strategies on corporate and functional levels.

A group of five senior executive teams of different Swiss luxury and lifestyle companies wanted to enter the Middle East market. To figure out the optimal market entry and operating strategies, the senior executive team approached the Head of the Swiss Business Hub Middle East of Switzerland Global Enterprise, Thomas Meier, in December 2012. Although being marked with great potential and an over-proportional growth, the Middle Eastern luxury market contained impediments that international firms had to take into consideration. Therefore, Thomas had to analyze the future outlook for this segment of the Middle East retail sector to develop potential strategies for the five different Swiss luxury and lifestyle companies to potentially operate successfully in the Middle East luxury and lifestyle market.

The study identifies barriers and operations challenges especially for Swiss and other foreign luxury and lifestyle retailers in the Middle East, understands the future (2017) institutional environment of the luxury and lifestyle retail sector in the Middle East and applies the institutions-resources matrix in the context of a Swiss company to evaluate the uncertainties prevailing in the Middle East luxury and lifestyle retail sector. It helps in turning insights about future developments in an industry (segment) into consequences for the corporate and functional strategies of a company.

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

CSS 5: International Business.

Young professors Baxter, Jim, and Robert are eager to start a new graduate certificate in educational leadership with a focus on technology. The department supports their initiative. The department is even supportive of offering this certificate fully online. Support waned when, in an effort to boost student enrollment, it is suggested that additional graduate courses and programs within the department also move fully online. In department meetings, faculty members argue about the rigor of online courses and if it is possible to convert existing courses and programs to an online delivery format. Tammy and Larry are veteran faculty members who do not want to teach online and have made it clear to the rest of the faculty they are not eager to change. When there are not enough students to offer their programs in the traditional format, all faculty members are forced to begin teach online.

This is a disguised field-researched case.

This case may be used in a variety of graduate business or education courses, such as introduction to business, business ethics, educational leadership, technology leadership, or higher education.

Students should have some understanding of systems change, ethical decision making, and human resources development.

The ATF case is a succinct opportunity to explore the many special features of leadership succession for a family business. In 2009 the company was passing the baton to the oldest of three sons in the second-generation family business.

ATF produced metal and plastic fasteners for, primarily, the automotive industry. ATF had grown into a company with more than $50 million in annual revenues. The company had grown in large part through alliances with other family businesses around the world. First-generation patriarch Don Surber had led the company since he acquired it in 1982. Don was known for his charismatic leadership style and his focus on driving value through a network approach.

The case traces the career paths of all three sons and looks at the succession through the eyes of the oldest son, Jason Surber. The elements, constituents, and challenges of succession are evident. The fundamental insight is that business leadership succession is far more than just passing the business leadership baton. It also requires attention to the family, the board, the whole system of external stakeholders, and the future of ownership.

The epilogue in this note covers the period from 2009 to 2012 by describing what Jason did to earn credibility, to incorporate his brothers, and to define his personal leadership philosophy and style. The epilogue thus provides students with an opportunity to consider and define their own personal philosophy of management leadership and their own style. They will see the art of melding styles from the past with their own for the future.

After completion of this case study, students should be able to reflect on the concept of creating shared value and then determine whether Shesha Geza can be referred to as a shared value company and, if so, what level of shared value it demonstrates. They will be able to subjectively and objectively understand the possible meaning of when a social enterprise embarks on a strategy to scale the organisation; clarity of construct will enable managers to better plan and successfully implement scalability goals. They will also be able to recognise, once scalability goals are better understood and planned, that there are a multitude of intra-organisational levers and drivers that may contribute to the organisation’s ability to scale its operations, which are related to specific internal organisational capabilities of social enterprise companies. In addition, there are situational factors that may affect the business either positively or negatively in relation to the scalability success of which a social entrepreneur should be aware.

In April 2021, Dean Boniface and his brother, Roger, had just signed off a new informational video for their Shesha Geza innovation, a low-cost hand-washing station designed for use at commuter hubs and high-traffic areas across the African continent. The unit used diluted chlorine instead of alcohol-based sanitisers to ensure a more expedient and sustainable solution, one better suited to Africa’s logistical challenges. Boniface, the co-founder of Vue Architects, had conceptualised the idea of the hand-washing hub during South African Government’s enforced COVID-19 lockdown from 27 March 2020 to 1 May 2020. Shesha Geza’s speed to market was a key contributor to its successful response in solving a critical social need. Throughout 2020, Boniface and his team built successful partnerships and secured an impressive order pipeline within a short span. Export opportunities across Africa, installations and maintenance of a sizable number of units across South Africa and the development of a behavioural change programme aimed at hygiene in schools kept the momentum going in the business. However, a year into the business and the future sustainability of a crisis–response enterprise and the ability of a shared value enterprise to scale were playing on Boniface’s mind. He was worried about the future of the small resource-constrained business. Holding onto the mental map of everything the team had learned over the past year, Boniface was confident about one thing: “All the programmes we build around Shesha Geza are value-adds to our current business. Hand hygiene will not diminish after COVID-19; it will continue to be an important social issue across the African continent.”

This case is intended for discussion in post-graduate-level courses such as an MBA and in postgraduate courses focused on business model innovation or on creating shared value. This case is suitable for use in the environment of business courses in relation to environmental situational factors that may affect the ability to scale social enterprises or strategic implementation courses, considering the still pervasive challenge of scaling increasingly important social impact enterprises.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

The media consultant for the Reagan-Bush '84 campaign identifies his goal as stopping and reversing a strong decline in support for President Reagan. The case describes the results of some of the motivational research used, and introduces a framework for evaluating advertising strategies. The case also introduces the MECCAS framework for evaluating advertising copy and discusses theory-driven communication strategies.