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This case describes the challenges faced by Amul in organising dairy farmers into a co-operative and creating continuous opportunities for value addition. Participants in the case discussion are required to review the developments in the organisation and recommend a strategy for the future.

Focuses on Apple Computer's launch of iTunes and iPod as a way to give Wintel users a relationship with Apple. Deals with issues of brand equity, corporate and brand goal setting, target selection, and matching product and service characteristics with goals and targets. Also allows for a discussion of channel partners, their interests, and their impact on the likely success or failure of a strategy.

Leadership.

The case is suitable for MBA, Executive level courses.

Yongye Group is a biotechnological enterprise in Inner Mongolia, China. In China, people lack trust in economic transactions due to the transitional state of the economy, especially regarding food safety. To respond to this situation, Wu Zishen, the chairman of the Board of Directors of Yongye Group, was determined to build trust among employees, distributors, farmers, and consumers towards the company. To this end, he started using a creative incentive system with employees and stakeholders: the pay-before-performance incentive system. According to this system, the reward is delivered in advance, contrary to be paid after the fulfillment of the task. This practice is meant to transform employees' work attitude from a passive “being told to work” to a more proactive “I want to work” mentality. When such an incentive system is practiced with customers and external distributors, it sends a message that the company is “treating customers as company employees”, which means that they are trusted as if they were part of the company itself. Wu Zishen also introduced a coherent series of leadership practices that generate a truly proactive culture in the organization.

From this case, students will learn how to create a proactive culture in business organizations and the effect of pay-before-performance on employees' work motivation.

Teaching notes and an exercise for class-based discussion are available.

This case study aims to provide students with: an understanding of the unique challenges companies in Africa face in attracting and retaining highly-skilled human resources. The ability to critically evaluate various talent recruitment, development and retention options available to companies in Africa.

This case study examines the talent management challenges faced by Chijioke Dozie, CEO of Nigeria-based financial services company One Finance (OneFi). Under the brand name Carbon, OneFi operated a digital financial services app that offered loans, bill payments, an investment platform and an electronic wallet. However, Nigeria did not have many professionals with experience in consumer lending and certain technical skills, particularly data scientists and software engineers, was hard to find. Data scientists, for instance, were not only in short supply in Nigeria but also they were in high demand globally. OneFi, therefore, competed against top employers throughout the world, but with a start-up budget. OneFi’s talent management dilemma is a common challenge faced by companies operating within under-developed African economies. The insights and learnings from this case are, therefore, also applicable to other businesses on the continent.

MBA Post Grad.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 1: Accounting and Finance.

This case features the challenges of a startup in the crowdfunding space in 2015 as its leadership assesses potential sources of growth for the company s future. Founded in Israel in 2012 by a renowned venture capitalist, OurCrowd was a venture capital crowdfunding platform that strove to connect high-growth startups raising capital with accredited private investors from around the world. Its value proposition was to democratize an inefficient market for private equity that had historically been dominated by a small number of highly connected venture capital firms (VCs). The case asks students to put themselves in the shoes of OurCrowd s head of investor community as he prepares for a meeting with the company s board of directors to discuss potential strategies for growth: Should the company partner with the incumbent VCs it initially sought to disrupt, emphasize marketing its Portfolio Reserve fund, strive to provide its investors and investees with higher value-added services, target a broader swath of investors by aggressively marketing the platform in international markets, or attempt to go up-market and pursue increasingly larger deals with later-stage companies? Through assessing these options and discussing this case, students will learn about incentive problems in two-sided markets as well as how different types of crowdfunding platforms create value for users.

Knowledge management strategy.

Small and medium organizations providing technology solutions.

This case presents the developments in BATOI, as it intends to proliferate its services and offerings. BATOI offers an enterprise-class cloud computing platform along with a set of software applications, a business social network and different online information and service portals catering to large audience at the global level. The organization focuses on customer satisfaction as an integral part of the value chain. The case presents the knowledge management (KM) initiatives that were introduced in BATOI as a part of the organization's strategy for growth and acquiring new customers. Based on the business goals of BATOI, the KM-related goals were identified as part of designing the KM strategy. Designing of the KM strategy further assisted BATOI to retain competent employees, and along the way, addressed the major concern of attrition that plagues many established organizations. To conclude, some of the future concerns of BATOI are indicated at the end of the case. The analysis of the case takes into account the KM challenges faced by BATOI and the necessary steps in successfully implementing a KM strategy in an organization.

The objective of this teaching case is as follows: to understand how KM is central to an organization's growth strategy; to appreciate the importance of KM in technology-intensive organizations; to understand the process of deriving the KM goals from the over arching business goals of an organization; and to comprehend the challenges associated with implementing KM strategy for the first time in an organization.

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