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An essential corporate decision-making tool, the Boston Consulting Group's growth-share matrix, is due for an upgrade. The purpose of this paper is to upgrade this growth matrix for use by corporate managers in the current platform age. Designed in the conglomerate age of the 1960s and 1970s to help corporate managers make disciplined and systematic portfolio investment decisions, the matrix is ill-adapted to the platform age in which we now live. The most valuable companies in the world are now platform companies, and many companies are transitioning to a more platform-based corporate portfolio. In this paper, the author explains how corporate managers can build and execute a sustainable platform portfolio.

The author started with a thorough study of the contextual assumptions and theoretical background of the original Boston Consulting Group growth-share matrix (which the author has been teaching for the past decade). He contrasted these with the assumptions and theoretical background developed in the platform strategy literature. To test and refine the framework, the author presented and discussed its applicability at companies such as GSK and with local consultants. He then used five consecutive cohorts of master students [280 students (70 groups)] to test this framework on a total of 20 companies (both “born platform” and “product to platform” companies).

The platform ecosystem age requires a corporate decision-making matrix that discriminates between businesses on the basis of platform market growth and platform commercialization capability, rather than product market growth and market share. As in the original matrix, these businesses correspond to three different investment horizons (Figure 1): the continuous renewal of blockbuster business, the integration of emerging killer businesses and the experimentation with joint innovation businesses. This paper helps corporate managers build and execute a sustainable platform portfolio by means of a sequence of six decision-making steps and a clear organizational template for successful execution.

The portfolio matrix, decision-making sequence and organizational execution advice presented in this paper are fit for both “born platform” companies such as Google (Alphabet) and “product to platform” hybrids such as Lego. The paper illustrates this with practical examples for both types of companies.

The innovation pyramid presented in this paper ranks innovation types in terms of their capacity to provide organizations with a long-term commercialization advantage.

It is based on ten years of studying different types of innovation and helping hundreds of groups of MBA and Master students apply these insights to hundreds of organizations in different industries.

The innovation pyramid provides organizational leaders with a powerful heuristic to organize their strategic innovation priorities, in terms of aligning and committing organizational innovation efforts.

To help organizational leaders, this paper illustrates each innovation type with clarifying examples of a variety of well-known firms.

The pyramid provides an antidote to the technological determinism and confusing use of innovation jargon, both of which over-promise disruptive and radical performance effects. Instead, it offers clarity and succinctness of purpose both in terms of aligning and committing to innovation efforts and priorities.

The case and discussion questions posed will allow the instructors the opportunity to introduce critical strategic concepts from strategic, nonprofit management and social enterprise literature. Specifically, (1) strategic transformation: countering drift and anticipating future trends and crises; (2) types of leadership: transactional versus transformational; (3) hybridity and mission drift; and (4) nonprofit funding models, the starvation cycle and the overhead myth.

Both primary and secondary sources have been used to prepare the case. The first two authors had the opportunity to interview Thomas Tighe, Direct Relief’s (DR) President and CEO in July of 2019. The interview lasted one hour and was transcribed by one of the authors and reviewed by the other two authors for accuracy. In addition, the authors conducted nonparticipant observations in DR’s headquarters in Santa Barbara (California). Given the longevity and media exposure of the organization, extensive internal and external archival data was also available for the analysis.

This real and undisguised case is based on DR, a +70-year-old humanitarian $1.2bn nonprofit organization headquartered in California (USA). From its headquarters in Santa Barbara, DR responds to emergencies and delivers medical support for vulnerable people affected by poverty, natural disasters and civil unrest in all 50 US states, six US territories including Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands, and in more than 90 countries.

The case presents Thomas Tighe, DR’s President and CEO, reflecting in late 2018 on the transformation and growth that the organization had experienced since he started his tenure in 2000. Specifically, he is considering the most effective way to allocate an unrestricted recent cash donation. Should DR spend that money on traditional fundraising, reducing its efficiency rate, or should DR take a long-term approach and use the funds to build long-term capabilities? In addition, the case outlines the history and evolution of DR over its more than 70 years of existence, the CEO’s background and motivations, as well as a detailed description of the organization’s revenue portfolio. Students will have an opportunity to learn about a unique nonprofit named among “the world’s most non-for-profit organizations” by Fast Company; DR was also included in the Charity Navigator’s list of the “10 Best Charities Everyone’s Heard of.” In addition, in January 2009, DR was designated as a Verified-Accredited Distributor by The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which placed it as the first nonprofit to receive this designation to deliver prescription medicines to all 50 US states. Throughout Tighe’s tenure, DR had been lauded for its fundraising efficiency. The unique distinction to DR’s efficiency is its tradition of adopting new technologies and modern business practices for humanitarian purposes.

Students will learn how DR, under the leadership of Thomas Tighe, reinvented and reinforced the organization’s traditions to retain high levels of efficiency in the face of an ever-larger organizational scale, public scrutiny and demand for humanitarian support across the world. Students will witness many strategic and operational tenets that they may be more familiar with from the for-profit world. The case also will help students to understand the concept of hybrid organizations and different nonprofit funding models.

The case has been written to be used in graduate Nonprofit Leadership Management and Social Entrepreneurship courses. Given the scope and implications, the case could also be used on an upper-level strategy course. To maximize students’ learning, the case should be introduced halfway into the course after students have a solid understanding of what nonprofits are and how they operate. If students are not familiar with some of the concepts introduced in the analysis, the proposed readings will prepare them for a more fruitful discussion.

This paper aims to provide advanced market managers in Europe, the USA or Japan with a long-term framework to prepare for and seize emerging market innovation opportunities.

This paper is based on eight years of studying emerging market innovation opportunities, how to prepare for them and how to seize them. This study mainly draws on experiential learning in the automotive sector, particularly in China.

The framework details the strategic co-evolution of advanced market firms, emerging market governments, customers and competitors through four stages of innovation. Emerging markets such as China and India at different stages, depending on the national context of development as well as the particular market context.

This research is primarily based on cases in the automotive sector. Challenging the ongoing assumption of superior advanced market innovation, this paper contributes to insights on the new innovation world order and how to invest in emerging market innovation opportunities.

The framework helps advanced market managers identify the strategic stage they are in, depending on the emerging market context. It provides them with long-term strategic insights, helping them anticipate moves and countermoves by emerging market governments and competitors, as well as anticipate the rapidly shifting needs of emerging market customers.

The four-stage framework brings together advanced market firms, emerging market governments, customers and competitors in a clear big picture. It conditions emerging market success in the even bigger picture of advanced market firms drawing on their learning in emerging markets in stages 3 and 4 to accelerate the renewal of their core business.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how executives can rapidly gain employee acceptance for strategic change through reciprocal sensegiving. The author draw on a processual case study of a transformational European merger to study this question, highlighting the properties of reciprocity in making sense of urgent strategic change, then developing them through the lens of a gift exchange.

The author draws on several qualitative methods to study sensegiving and sensemaking processes in Alpha and Beta from 2011 to 2014: insider-outsider team meetings at the beginning, mid-way and at the end of the merger integration process, ethnographic field notes during a four-month research internship, one focus group meeting with Alpha and Beta managers after the announcement of the redistribution of managerial positions, interviews with a carefully selected sample of top and middle managers, participant observation in key sensegiving meetings with top managers and “custodians,” triangulation with secondary data from the database Factiva, and finally follow-up insider corroboration of the findings by the research intern who took up a management position at Alpha in 2014.

Likening executive and employee sensegiving to a gift-giving and gift-returning exchange, the author elucidates how executives induce employees to quickly “give in” to strategic change imperatives. the author single out the key third party role of custodians of reciprocity in the mechanism, using the metaphor of the Trojan horse to illustrate its executive use and point to the underexplored darker side of prosocial sensegiving dynamics.

Further research should clarify the long-term advantages and disadvantages of the mechanism. The Trojan horse mechanism possibly sacrifices long-term reciprocity for short-term purposes. Following the example of executives in this case study, use of the Trojan horse mechanism should be followed by attention to socio-political balance concerns, including new procedures that clarify the link between value creation aims and employees’ collective contribution. Without such a cohesion-building exercise, employees’ feelings of procedural injustice may build up, resulting in negative reciprocity in subsequent change projects.

The work indicates that a leader’s visionary credentials are not the main source of her norm-shaping power in a project of urgent strategic change. Visionary credentials are welcomed by the dominant group of employees as long as they are framed as a symbolic management exercise that will not substantially impact socio-political balance. Substantively, employees make sense of the justice of urgent strategic change primarily through the lens of custodians and their “power from the past.”

All in all, executives should use the Trojan horse mechanism sparingly, in contexts of urgent strategic change and institutionalized employee behavior. Working with sources and voices of resistance from lower levels of management is more likely to yield symbiotic integration benefits.

Applied to the problem of rapid strategic change in a non-crisis context, the Trojan horse mechanism is a solution to the question: how can executives avoid lengthy socio-political confrontations and quickly induce employee ownership of painful strategic changes?

Purpose – The financial crisis has exposed a behavioral paradox: although asset managers are putting significant effort into meeting institutional pressures to demonstrate transparency and responsible behavior, their actual investment behaviors seem to remain inconsistent with responsible ownership. We seek to understand asset managers’ motivations to use externally defined environment, social, and governance (ESG) information to engage in sustainable investment.

Methodology/approach – We draw on insights from the sensemaking literature, as well as institutional, behavioral, and cognitive theories to shed new light on asset managers’ motivations to demonstrate conformance with ESG criteria.

Findings – The more asset managers demonstrate conformance, the less likely they are to make an effort to integrate sustainability and long-term, return-making concerns in their investment behaviors. As a result of the organization’s decoupling strategy, asset managers who are obliged to justify responsible behavior tend to have a limited sense of responsibility for encouraging long-term changes in corporate behavior.

Practical implications – We argue that calls for greater transparency in investment decisions under the guise of demonstrating conformance to ESG information requirements will not lead to more sustainable investment behavior.

Originality/value – This chapter challenges the assumption in the sustainable investment literature that the common use of ESG criteria enables investors to pressure and empower companies in the long term.