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This case was developed from secondary sources. The secondary sources included company websites, social media and news reports. This case has been classroom tested in multiple executive master of business administration (MBA) courses on business model innovation and entrepreneurship.

The case traces the entrepreneurial journey of Dozee, a remote patient monitoring system in India. Dozee was manufactured by Turtle Shell Technologies Private Limited, cofounded by Mudit and Gaurav. The primary customers of Dozee’s offering were households with elderly citizens and health-conscious individuals who sought preventive health care. The cofounders identified the unmet need for a convenient and user-friendly contactless health tracker. Dozee team built a thin sensor-embedded sheet and module that can be placed beneath the mattress to track sleep patterns and health vitals. They also provided data analysis and data interpretation services. After four years of conceptualization, Dozee launched its product and service in 2019. Although the initial response was lukewarm, the onset of the COVID-19 crisis led to significant changes in the health-care industry. Demand for virtual assistance and contactless monitoring devices became increasingly important elements of COVID-19 treatment. Unlike other sensor-based fitness trackers, the sheet could be easily placed under the patient’s bed to capture health vitals. Choosing to pivot from a home-based individual customer segment to a medical-grade device provider for hospitals could significantly increase the scale and scope of the offering for Dozee, but it would also place Dozee in direct competition with other health monitoring devices from different business categories.

This case is appropriate for MBA and executive-level courses related to entrepreneurship and business model innovation. The case explores issues such as digital disruption and how start-ups can design a go-to-market strategy. The case works well in the classroom, even if people are unfamiliar with the health-care industry. Participants can certainly relate to the concept of adopting artificial intelligence–enabled devices for monitoring their health. The instructor should be able to quickly engage participants in a lively discussion about Dozee’s vision and the opportunities and challenges in adopting digital solutions in health care.

This case presents some of the entrepreneurial challenges faced by a female leader in the technology sector who conceived a new product based on her passion to help others especially those most disadvantaged.

Upon completion of this case study, students should be able to prepare supply chain and distribution analysis that considers ethics and sustainability, integrate philanthropic efforts as part of an organizational strategy and recognize strategies to promote equity within and beyond an organization.

Connie Stacey (she/her) is an entrepreneur and president of Growing Greener Innovations, an award-winning battery energy storage company based in Alberta, Canada, with a mission to end energy poverty globally. With the emergence of COVID-19 as a global pandemic in 2020, Stacey turned her attention to an innovation called Project Rescue, a ventilator that uses non-identifying patient vitals to track data. It serves as a pandemic early warning system, addressing two key challenges: pandemic data are prone to error, and real-time information is non-existent after the pandemic has spread. This new product was conceived based on her passion to help others, especially those most disadvantaged. This multi-faceted case focuses on the many challenges that Stacey and her team needed to address. The dilemma in this case centres on establishing supply chains amid a pandemic, as well as prioritizing the corporate social responsibility elements of philanthropy and equity within her organization (and beyond).

This case is appropriate for third- or fourth-year undergraduate or graduate-level students.

In addition to “call out boxes” throughout the case and teaching note, additional readings/links/videos are outlined below. (These supplementary materials, “Teaching Tips”, are included in the teaching notes as well.)

CCS 11: Strategy.

Pharmaceutical marketing, brand protection.

It could be used with the pharmaceutical marketing students and MBA students for analysing counterfeit medicines' menace in developing countries and positioning of a disruptive technology. The case could be used for marketing consultants, Brand managers and executive development programmes to explore issues such as protecting brands through technology, pharmaceutical packaging marketing, competitiveness of counterfeit drugs, global harmonisation.

Against the backdrop of rising menace of counterfeit drugs in developing countries, the case talks in particular about an innovative pharmaceutical packaging company. The company has developed a unique security technology called non-ClonableID™ which can enable products to be authenticated throughout the supply chain, thus protecting brands and preventing misuse. Despite a promising technology, it poses challenges regarding its adoption and commercial success.

Counterfeiting as an inevitable result of Globalization has become a global nuisance and has to be dealt at global level. Brand protection could be one of the lowest cost tools for pharmaceutical companies to restore public confidence in their products and themselves. While all methods for anti-counterfeiting are known to have short lives the menace still must be dealt with. For this, companies need to deploy anti-counterfeiting strategies that set up various layers of security.

Teaching note.

GE Healthcare was on a continuous lookout for investing into new and innovative super value products for the Bottom of the Pyramid markets in India. After launching its first successful super value ECG machine Mac 400, GE had recently launched its twenty-fifth super value product a PET CT machine. Serving the BOP markets has its own unique challenges that may be different for each product that is placed in the market. However, GE has so far successfully sailed through all the challenges and developed a steep learning curve about BOP markets. However, it is now facing the challenge of ensuring sustainability of product pipeline. The company is also keen to exploit the opportunities for reverse innovation that super value products have provided. The company also wants to assess the disruptive impact of these products in domestic medical device markets as well as markets outside India.

The (A) case describes the evolution between 1999 and 2005 of an unusual innovation team within the office of the chief information officer at oil and gas giant BP. This team helped business units conceive, develop, and implement novel, value-added applications for emerging information technologies. The team leader, vice president and chief technology officer Phiroz Darukhanavala (“Daru”), eschewed a large group and venture budget in favor of a small, lean team intimately engaged with BP's business units. The case describes several mechanisms created by the CTO office during its early evolution: “Blue Chalk” events that expanded executives' appreciation of emerging technology capabilities, a network of relationships through which emerging technologies were scouted and vetted, a structured technology transfer process, and annual “game-changer” projects.

The (B) case describes how the CTO office team members in 2011 again solicited advice from their ecosystem of thought leaders and held workshops to significantly enhance their impact. As a result, they began developing solutions for broader, more fundamental business problems that came to be known as Grand Challenges: extremely difficult business problems whose solutions could potentially create hundreds of millions—or billions—of dollars in business value.

After reading and analyzing the case, students will be able to:

• Understand the management challenges associated with realizing the business value of new technologies

• Explore how innovation management evolves as an innovation team learns from its successes and failures and, more importantly, builds a reputation within and outside the company

• Examine a prototypical “advocate” model of corporate entrepreneurial practice

• Explore a leading example of a successful internal innovation program

Understand the management challenges associated with realizing the business value of new technologies

Explore how innovation management evolves as an innovation team learns from its successes and failures and, more importantly, builds a reputation within and outside the company

Examine a prototypical “advocate” model of corporate entrepreneurial practice

Explore a leading example of a successful internal innovation program

Strategy, strategic management, market and product analysis.

The case is intended for a business strategy course in management. The target participants are MBA students specializing in strategy area as well as middle level and senior level managers from the industry, who come for an executive programme in management science.

Year 2009, Mr Pawan Kumar (General Manager, Halonix Limited) was facing a decision-making situation in the organization. Being one of the most experienced and oldest employees of Halonix (incorporated as Phoenix Lamps Ltd in 1991), he had witnessed the tremendous growth of the company since its inception in 1991. The company was having a global brand image in automotive halogen lamps and became a dominant player in compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) market in India by 2007. With the increasing competition and change in market dynamics, the company needed to decide upon the future product portfolio mix and strategy to be adopted to gain the maximum benefit and win over the competition in both the product segments. The automotive halogen product segment was generating higher margins but having relatively slow growth. The CFL product segment was a growing market but was generating low margins due to increasing competition from entry of large number of players.

The theoretical concepts, which will be explored in this case, involve the following: the importance of industry structure analysis in understanding the basis of competition. The importance of value-chain analysis in strategic planning. The importance of Boston Consulting Group growth-share matrix in evaluating the product portfolio mix having different growth drivers and target segments?

Teaching notes.

The case helps to introduce some of the elements of strategic management process, which are vital for competitive advantage, particularly for the public utility services such as MSWM. It intends to achieve the following objectives: analyse the external environment for MSWM industry in India; analyse the internal organizational environment for a firm’s strategic competitiveness; introduce the concept of value and value chain understand the role of Stakeholder groups; understand the concept of public–private partnerships (PPP); and understand the role of technology in sustaining a competitive advantages.

This case focuses on entrepreneurial venture of Gaurav Sharma and his team who intend to transform the landscape of Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM) industry in the country. THANKYOU (letsthankyou.com) is a Jaipur, India-based enterprise offering waste management solutions across different verticals. It was founded in 2016, following an opportunity in the waste management industry unleashed by the Government of India’s (GOI) new MSWM 2016 rules making it mandatory for the waste generators to manage (segregate, process, transport and disposal) their own waste. After initial examination of MSWM service scenario in the country, Gaurav and his two team members realize that a lack of integration among the multiple entities of waste management value chain is the root cause of the current poor state of affairs. So, they come up with an online marketplace, which offers a one-stop solution for the waste management of general households, residential settings and corporate. With initial projects implemented in the decentralized mode offering unit-level services such as door-to-door waste collection, on-demand waste pick-up and waste audits for corporate, the company has eventually got an opportunity of working on a centralized MSWM project for a leading hotel. Indeed, the company has the first mover advantage of entering the government controlled MSWM industry. However, to move forward, the THANKYOU team must address some fundamental issues in the industry: How to integrate the informal and formal sectors involved in waste management to achieve economies of scale? How to make land-filling the least preferred option of waste management? How to use technology to enhance the efficiency of MSWM value chain?

The case can add value to a course on strategic management at the post-graduate level. It highlights the role of external and internal environment analyses in the formulation of business strategy, ultimately leading to a firm’s strategic competitiveness. In a strategic management course, the case can be used to discuss introductory topics such as the analysis of internal and external environment; value creation by leveraging internal resources and capabilities; analysis of a firm’s dependence on its stakeholder groups; ascertainment of the profitability driver for a firm’s business model; and the concept of PPP.

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

CSS 11: Strategy

Students will be able to analyse competitive situations of the focal firm in the platform market, factors that make the focal firm become dominant in the sharing economy through the technology platform and the focal firm’s motives and growth strategies through mergers and acquisitions and overseas expansion, as well as give recommendations on the focal firm’s strategies to move forward to achieve and maintain its competitive position in the platform market.

On 4^th April, 2018, Meituan-Dianping (Meituan), a Chinese group-buying website for consumer products and retail services acquired Mobike, a Chinese dockless bike-sharing platform for US$2.7bn. Mobike had raised several rounds of funding for its large investments and operations in this highly competitive and cash-intensive industry. However, it was still struggling to survive and make a profit in the Chinese and overseas markets. It was believed that the merger between the companies was the only viable alternative. Had Meituan’s Chief Executive Officer made the right decision in acquiring Mobike? After Mobike became an integral part of Meituan, what should be done to turn this technology platform to be profitable in the Chinese and overseas market?

The case is intended for senior undergraduate or graduate-level courses in business schools.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

This case discusses the best-selling security system for preventing shoplifting and the dilemma its startup manufacturer faced when it learned there was a very remote possibility that the system might interfere with heart pacemakers. The theme of the case is that when health is involved, a company must carefully consider any level of preventable risk a product poses, even if that level of risk is extremely low.

Pebble Technology Corporation (Pebble) was an early entrant into the smartwatch industry. Pebble’s Founder, Eric Migicovsky, began thinking about creating a smartwatch in 2008 while still an undergraduate engineering student. After selling about 1,500 prototype watches, he was accepted into Silicon Valley’s prestigious Y Combinator business start-up program. Finding it difficult to attract investors, Migicovsky launched a crowdfunding campaign that raised a record-breaking $10.27m on Kickstarter. The case concludes shortly after Apple’s unveiling of its soon-to-be-released Apple Watch. The case provides an opportunity to evaluate Pebble’s various strategic options at the time of Apple’s announcement.

The authors observed over 30 h of video and audio recordings of speeches, interviews and other events involving Pebble’s founder, other Pebble executives, investors and competitors. These recordings are all publicly available. Whenever possible, the authors also reviewed the Twitter feeds, Facebook sites and personal websites of Pebble’s top executives over time. Similarly, the authors followed Pebble’s official website, corporate blog and Kickstarter campaign websites. The authors also drew from numerous media reports. Due to the public nature of the data, no company release is provided nor has any information been disguised in any way.

The case is designed for both undergraduate and graduate students for courses in strategic management.