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There is little published information available in the area of youth programs and social entrepreneurship in underrepresented communities. However, there are many idealistic entrepreneurs in the community; the case describes the experience of one such individual. Case analysis and the Instructor’s Manual are based on standard theories and techniques in organizational environmental and strategy analysis, as well as information and approaches regarding nonprofit functioning.

This case was prepared from primary sources, based on interviews with the founder. The name of the organization was disguised but the location and the founder’s name were not.

Growing up in a rough neighborhood, Darnell found refuge in an after-school program, which he credited for several positive values. As an adult, he felt a strong desire to give back to the community he had grown up, and still lived in. Thus, was launched MoveAhead, a fitness-based after-school program similar to the one he had participated in. However, as was common for many social entrepreneurs, Darnell struggled to overcome severe lack of capital and to deal with operational issues. Now, MoveAhead had reached a critical and existentially important point, when a strategic decision had to be made.

This is a decision case. It discusses the difficulties faced by a social entrepreneur who had a strong drive and conviction but little capital. The case describes a strategic turning point for one such organization. It can be used in business and management courses at the undergraduate level. It would also be relevant to a course on (social) entrepreneurship. The level and analysis required of students and discussion questions used can be adjusted depending on whether the course is introductory or more advanced, such as strategy.

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.

Because U.S. legislators are often most attentive to the issues raised by people who create jobs in their states, Bob Epstein, a local business owner, has been asked by activists to help lobby for a bill that would mandate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in California. Before deciding whether he should work to establish the business community's backing for this bill, Epstein must weigh the pros and cons of supporting measures that might put his business (and standing in the community) at risk.

Use the 4 I's framework to evaluate the nonmarket environment, assess the political impact of the potential coalitions in favor of and opposed to the bill, identify the type of politics that characterizes the situation, and describe the strategies each side will likely use in contesting the bill.

Upon completion of the case study, the students will be able to find the challenges and underlying structures that cause the problem; the students will be able to identify the dynamic variables and develop the interconnection and interlinkages among the time-delayed variables to build the story of the business case; the students could develop the block diagram and could build the system dynamics model using the simulation software STELLA, and if they do not have the simulation software, even then they could have a mental model to understand the problem well; the system dynamics students can design the policies to make the system better behaved and recommend solutions; and the students could make mind maps and develop the mental model and could recommend solutions and way forward to overcome the challenges and solve the issues.

Tradeasia is a small-scale manufacturing firm that had started its business activities near Sundar Industrial Estate, Raiwind, in September 2007. The company’s prime focus was to buy the potato starch from chips manufacturing companies and, then, extract the potato starch from the waste potato using its own machinery and sell it as a sizing agent to textile mills. Quality characteristics in terms of better millage and enhanced gullibility made it compatible with Rafhan corn-based starch. The major challenge linked to potato starch was its degree of wetness; the potato starch either extracted from rotten potato or procured from the potato chips manufacturing companies had a high degree of wetness and moisture content. Wet potato starch sometimes had more than 60% moisture content, which was really a challenge. Owing to the high degree of wetness, the wet starch was prone to fungus growth, and within hours, the fungus created toxins if it was not dried immediately, and then after 24 h, toxins acquired a black colour, and they became hardened like pebbles. The starch then was unusable even for sizing purposes for textile products. Reduction in the degree of wetness was really a big challenge and demanded prompt action and high productivity of the operational staff to make that product dry for sale purposes. This was the biggest challenge that ended up in huge inventories of wet starch. Capacity constraints and operational inefficiency killed the company’s productivity and affected the company’s profit.

This case study is written and developed for MBA and MS-level supply chain students of the system dynamics course or those studying management of supply chain complexities. This case study discusses the operational challenges while running the business; huge inventories, capacity constraints and inefficiency in production operations were the challenges associated with almost all manufacturing industries. This case study discussed not only why such challenges are appearing in the business but also the solution that resided in the wisdom shared by the employees in the board meeting. An integrated system dynamics model could be used to design the policies to overcome such challenges. Even the block diagram of the model and causal loop diagram could help to conceptualize the problem and explore the way forward.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 7: Management science.

The authors used Sue’s (2010) microaggression process model and Freeman et al.’s (2010) stakeholder theory as a theoretical basis for this case.

Information for the case was gathered from publicly available sources. No formal data collection efforts were undertaken.

Guess Who’s Coming to Deliver is a case that examines an event that occurred at Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse in late July and early August of 2015. A customer who had purchased some products from Lowe’s requested that only White delivery people were dispatched to her home because she did not allow African–American people in her house. The case is factual and was written from information that was publicly available in the media. The case is designed to help instructors facilitate a meaningful classroom discussion about microaggressions from the different stakeholder perspectives.

The case is relevant for undergraduate and graduate organizational behavior and human resource management courses.

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.

Service innovation, ICT-enabled services, museum, cultural and creative industries.

Graduate-level courses of “Innovation Management,” “Service Innovation,” or “Cultural and Creative Industries”.

In 2006, the National Palace Museum (NPM) in Taipei, Taiwan, announced its new vision “Reviving the Charm of an Ancient Collection and Creating New values for Generations to Come”. In recent years, the NPM has been shifting its operational focus from being object-oriented to being public-centered, and the museum has held not only the physical forms of artifacts and documents but also their digital images and metadata. These changes would inject new life into historical artifacts. In addition, archives as its collections would be given a refreshingly new image to the public and become connected with people's daily lives. Among these endeavors for displaying historical artifacts online and prevailing Chinese culture in the modern age, the key issues are related to digital technology applications and service innovations. The service innovations would be further divided into information and communication technologies (ICT)-enabled ones and non-ICT-enabled ones. These shifts clearly claim that adopting digital technologies and innovative services can bring positive impacts to the museum. The NPM administrative team wants to keep infusing life into ancient artifacts and texts, sustaining curiosities of the public for Chinese culture and history, and invoking their interests to visit the NPM in person. However, to develop for the future while reviewing the past, the NPM administrative team has to meditate on the next steps in terms of implementation of service innovations.

Students will learn motivations of digital establishment and service innovations from the organization perspective and the necessities of technological implementation. Students will understand the difference in innovations between ICT-enabled services and non-ICT-enabled services. Students would be able to understand the process of developing a new service. Students will be aware of challenges the organization would face in developing a new service.

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

Organizational behavior, leadership, strategic management.

This case can be used at Master's level management students as well as for executive education programmes. The case can be used to teach courses like organizational behavior, leadership and strategic management.

Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation (MRVC) had been established with a purpose of catering the rail transportation requirement of Mumbai, the economic capital of India. After its establishment in the year 1999, commuters were hopeful but very less development and improvement was reported for six years. Mr P.C. Sehgal took over as Managing Director of MRVC in the year 2005. The primary task of Mr P.C. Sehgal was to implement the rail development plan proposed by Mumbai Urban Transport Project within the deadlines. Implementation of the given plan had various challenges and required high degree of coordination with different stakeholders (like Government of Maharashtra, Central Railway, Western Railway, etc.). It also required taking important decisions to move work fast and dealing with media and public pressure.

The case would instigate students to delve on the aspects of leadership and how the leader brings about change. The students would also get to know the challenges a leader face when he takes charge of an underperforming but critically important organization. Further the students are also exposed to the context of organizational management where the organization is trapped in a web of relations with conflicting stakeholders.

Teaching note.

Looks at the merger of two Chicago-based nonprofits that share similar missions and clientele, but have different strategies and capital structures. They also operate in the highly competitive job training/temporary work field, where organizational survival is at stake. Suburban Job Link is a fee-driven, largely commercial nonprofit, and STRIVE/CES is a philanthropic-based nonprofit dependent on grants and government for revenue. Explores alternatives to a merger and proceeds from merger discussions to post-merger outcomes.

To discuss strategic collaboration and alliances; how to get “more mission” through resource combinations; and how nonprofits compete in highly competitive industries.

The learning outcomes are as follows: educate the students about the challenges in the development sector in general and in work of organizations working for women empowerment in particular; understand the overall concept of women empowerment vis-à-vis social entrepreneurship; explain the importance of technology in entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship and development sector especially in marginalized communities in developing countries; and learn operational-level resource management in a resource-constrained setting of a non-profit sector.

Kaarvan Crafts Foundation (referred to as Kaarvan henceforth) worked for women empowerment in Pakistan with a focus on creating economic opportunities for rural women entrepreneurs. The case shares different initiatives by Kaarvan for creating opportunities for economic empowerment of rural women entrepreneurs. The main focus of the case is a program “Digitize to Equalize” in which Kaarvan offered digital literacy training to rural women entrepreneurs. The program involved developing an ecommerce platform where rural women entrepreneurs could sell their handicrafts and other products. A comprehensive training activity was designed as part of the program to facilitate trainees to sell their products on a purpose-built website. The training covered different activities ranging from using smartphones, basic product photography to order handling. Even in the initial phase, the challenges were somewhat unexpected for the team as they grappled with diversity of learning among the trainees. Few trainee women were able to learn the skills quickly and requested their trainers from Kaarvan to train them on widely popular skills of social media marketing. At the same time, other trainees were struggling with basic skills and needed more time to get basics right. Because the program had limited resources, Kaarvan’s management found themselves in a fix. The mission-oriented organization wanted to ensure the best possible opportunities for the trainees but the resources did not permit to create separate cohorts for different training areas.

In terms of complexity, this case study is suited for business students enrolled in senior undergraduate, graduate programs and executive MBA programs.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 7: Management Science.