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The learning outcomes of this paper are as follows: to define the scope of digital customer experience, why it is important and how it can be used to create a competitive advantage, to evaluate the various challenges for traditional retail businesses that undertake a digital transformation strategy, to critically assess a chosen digital transformation strategy, to identify the key features of a successful digital transformation strategy and to develop a crisis communication strategy.

The Cape Union Mart Group is a typical apparel retail company faced with the challenge of improving the digital customer experience and accelerating digital transformation in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Due to the pandemic, the demand for e-commerce increased dramatically. However, strict lockdown regulations forbade the delivery of clothing. When the lockdown was lifted, there was an order backlog of four weeks. To add to this challenge, the Group was in the midst of a technology update. They moved their entire information technology (IT) backbone to three clouds and, just a week before the lockdown, launched five new websites for its five different retail chains. The ultimate goal with the technology update was to give the company a competitive advantage by improving the customer experience. However, having to do this at an accelerated pace due to the pandemic posed a number of challenges. The case provides a vivid description of how the crisis unfolded and how Grant De Waal-Dubla, the executive of e-commerce and IT at the Group and his team responded to the challenges, together with the marketing team. Based on the success of e-commerce during the lockdown, the owners of the business then tasked Grant with new, aggressive growth targets. Whilst dealing with the aftermath of the lockdown, Grant’s main challenge is to develop a strategy to reach those targets.

The primary target audience for this case are postgraduate students enrolled on programmes such as Master of Business Administration or specialist masters in a business field such as marketing or strategy and also for Executive Education courses.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

John Williams, senior director of marketing for Microsoft's .NET, was trying to build the .NET brand, a comprehensive family of next-generation connectivity software products. Highlights the challenges of branding and positioning a complex technology offering. The first challenge facing Microsoft was to develop a common definition of .NET, which had been in flux over the prior two years. The second challenge was to choose between an umbrella branding strategy, a sub-branding strategy, and an ingredient branding strategy. The third challenge was to create a value proposition that would appeal to three very different target audiences: business decision makers, IT professionals, and developers.

To analyze the branding and positioning of a complex new technology offering: by defining a new product offering for public understanding and comprehension; evaluating brand strategies for optimal effect, considering possible hurdles to implementation of each strategy; and developing a value proposition attractive to differing audiences.

The learning outcomes are to understand the definition of public value and the strategic drivers behind public value creation, understand the nature of social innovation in the public sector, identify the critical opportunities and challenges involved in sustaining innovation in the public sector and identify the role that non-profit organizations can play in supporting and sustaining social innovation.

This case puts participants in the shoes of a global health innovator’s leadership team as the organization approaches a funding crisis. The organization, VillageReach, is on a quest to expand across the public health system of Mozambique and experiences a funding dilemma. The case reveals the challenges of working with governments to achieve large-scale, systemic change. It explores the conundrum of using international donor funding to embed new practices in government service delivery. Ultimately, it asks participants to choose between the pursuit of new, small-scale innovative projects and the large-scale rollout of a national programme.

This teaching case is written for courses focused on social entrepreneurship, social innovation and social change. It can also be used in courses focused on non-profit management and public sector innovation. Specifically, the teaching case is suitable for two audiences: social enterprise and non-profit managers focused on strategy, development and operations (the case focuses on an enterprise that relies primarily on donor funding) and health-care managers and administrators. Generally, the case is suitable for undergraduates in their final year of study as well as graduate-level business and public administration courses, including MBA, MPH, MPA, EMBA and Executive Education courses.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

This case was designed to facilitate discussion of how a cyberattack was remediated by a major public university. Students are challenged to think through how to best manage the remediation project, including the application of best practices such as risk management, stakeholder management, communication plans, outsourcing/procurement management, and cyberattack remediation. The Phoenix Project was a success from multiple perspectives, and as such provides a useful example of how to manage an unplanned, mission-critical project well.

After discussing this case, students will be able to understand the challenges faced by social entrepreneurs in starting a health-tech start-up in Africa; create and evaluate lean business models of health-tech companies as a social enterprise; evaluate how health-tech start-ups were developing innovative business models and supply chain networks to make prescription drugs accessible and available in Africa; understand how inorganic growth strategies can help health-tech start-ups scale up; and evaluate what promises investors were seeing while investing in social enterprises in the health-care sector in Africa and what social wealth they were creating.

In August 2022, Gregory Rockson (Rockson), social entrepreneur and founder of for-profit health technology (health-tech) social enterprise in Ghana, mPharma, stated that he had plans to replicate the company’s business model, which provided people access to drugs and at affordable prices, to other African nations, beyond the company’s existing footprint. However, analysts pointed out that the fragmented drug supply chain and poor regulation in the health-care market across Africa could act as a challenge for mPharma to replicate its business model successfully across the African continent. People in Africa were forced to pay higher prices to buy life-saving drugs due to the continent’s fragmented drug supply chain. To add to their woes, pharmacies struggled to keep life-saving and life-sustaining medicines in stock. Often, patients traveled miles to a pharmacy only to find out that the drugs they needed were not in stock. In addition to this, the markets were flooded with counterfeit drugs. And the Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the situation. mPharma managed the prescription drug inventory for pharmacies and drug suppliers using its proprietary vendor management information system. By using the technology infrastructure it had built, the company connected patients, pharmacies and hospitals through a cloud-based software. The system enabled doctors to track in real-time which drugs were available and at which location, thus giving patients reliable access to medicines. Patients registering with mPharma with their prescriptions and medical history received an alert on their mobile phones notifying them where the drugs they needed were available. mPharma bought drugs from major drug manufacturers such as Novartis International AG, Pfizer Inc. (Pfizer) and Bayer AG, on behalf of the pharmacies. This enabled the pharmacies to save on the up-front costs of stocking the drugs, reduced supply constraints and ensured availability of drugs to consumers in these underserved markets. The company had a consignment model wherein member pharmacies had to pay only for what they sold. Most pharmacies forecast the number of drugs they needed and purchased them from mPharma at pre-agreed rates. The company took the inventory liability to prevent pharmacies from going out of stock. As mPharma used its purchasing power to buy drugs in large quantities from drug manufacturers and suppliers, it was able to help patients realize cost savings of 30% to 60% in the purchase of medicines. mPharma was focusing on achieving its ambitious goal of dominating the health-care market in Africa in future. However, analysts felt that the company would face challenges related to poor regulation in the health-care market, high prices of drugs and the fragmented pharmacy retail market in the continent.

This case is intended for use in MBA/MS level programs as part of a course on Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainability, Business Model Innovation, Disruptive Business Models, and Supply Chain Management in the Drug Industry.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

Marketing Management, Business Strategy and Promotion & Advertising.

Associated degree, undergraduate and graduate students as well as executives from profit-making organizations.

Groupon is the world's largest daily-deal Web site and a pioneer in the group-buying industry. The major feature of the company's business model is that merchants use Groupon as a platform to offer coupons with a discounted price, and the coupon buyers can then redeem these coupons. Groupon has done business in over 50 countries and, by 2012, had over 39.5 million subscribers received its daily news. It had a 59.1 per cent share of the daily-deals market in 2013. Groupon is a publicly listed company on the NASDAQ in the USA, trading under the ticker symbol of “GPRN”.

The students' business knowledge and skills will be sharpened by working through this case, and students will be challenged to identify solutions to the marketing concerns: specifically, how the driving approach of its daily-deal business model enabled the company to adopt a growth strategy that will confront the difficulties of the emergent “golden age” of the daily-deal industry in the twenty-first century. In addition, it will also be of help to the students to take the active roles of thinker, analyst, evaluator, decision-maker and implementer to evaluate the continuing changes in a competitive environment and consider how Groupon can seize available opportunities to predict future performance by comparing data from 2008 and 2012.

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

This case describes the evolution of an entrepreneur's venture-capital fund-raising from seed-stage financing through later-round efforts. The case focuses on where the “action” is in venture finance: the exploitation of social capital by an entrepreneur and investors. Much of the teaching materials on venture finance focus on the economics of financing; while these materials provide useful information about the mechanics of valuation and how to structure venture-capital agreements, they miss the social side of venture-capital investing. The case illustrates the theoretical concept that social capital (i.e., a person's relationship to other people in society) influences venture finance. The case can be used in a class on entrepreneurship or venture finance.

This case discusses Qihoo 360's free business model, how it used this free model to overpower competitors, and how the model evolved over time. Qihoo 360 is a company that took just six years to become a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (with a market value of over US$ 2 billion). At Qihoo 360's Initial Public Offering (IPO) at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Qihoo's founder Zhou Hongyi reflected on how Qihoo's free business model had brought its current success and speculates on its future challenges.

The authors used both secondary data and field interviews when preparing this case. After reading through various company reports, competitor information, and financial filings, the authors interviewed five top manager team (TMT) members of Qihoo 360, three TMT members of its competitors, and two partners of venture capital investors who have invested in these companies in Beijing or Shenzhen during the last three years. The authors collected 347 media reports related to these companies in Chinese covering seven years of history. This long span of data collection improves the interpretation of the company and helps construct the storyline of the case.

This case is suitable for an MBA course or an advanced undergraduate course in strategic management or a technology-oriented entrepreneurship course, focussing on the topic of the free business model, business model innovation, disruptive innovation, and evolution of the business model during the entrepreneurial process.

The learning outcomes are to get an understanding of the greeting cards (GCs) industry – appreciate the evolution of the industry and the changes that have been impacting the industry; analyze the external environment situation and assess the current strategy of Archies; analyze the existing strategy of Archies and apply the knowledge of strategic frameworks to the current business context of Archies; and create a new strategy for the company to overcome its current challenges.

The case highlights the situation faced by Archies Limited, a company, which pioneered the growth of the social expression industry in India and developed the market for GCs, a quintessentially Western concept in the Indian market. While it experienced phenomenal growth for two and a half decades, in the past 10 years, things have become more difficult for the company. Based on secondary data, this case presents various facts related to the case and seeks answers related to possible strategies that the firm may explore in the future.

Undergraduate and postgraduate management course in the area of strategic management. The level of difficulty can be from medium to high depending on the learning level.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

Information Technology Security.

The case adds value for management students at all levels, as well as for practitioners. Work experience is not a requirement, as the case will expose some of the fundamental concepts pertaining to the scenario described. Assignment questions are designed from the perspective of teaching this case to a business student audience. The case could certainly be adjusted to fit the needs of students in more technical disciplines.

Set in October 2008, the case begins with the dilemmas facing Mr Ramanuj as he and his team from E-Infra Solutions prepared to address the damages caused by a major virus attach at OrangeInc headquarter at Bangalore, India. The virus attack destroyed all the important organizational documents residing on the computer systems and brought its business to a standstill. The catastrophe indicated the need for a comprehensive information technology (IT) security solution which was earlier overlooked by OrangeInc's management.

To teach the basic concepts of information security, in particular malware, and its impact on the business. To introduce the concepts and the importance of security awareness program. To teach the importance of IT infrastructure technology, process and procedures.

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