Latest cases
February 2021
Finance for Entrepreneurial Companies: Financing Instruments – Technical Note
By John Mullins, Robert M Johnson, Steve Pesenti
Despite today’s growing attention to bootstrapping and the use of customer funding in the financing of new ventures, many new ventures, be they a startup or a plan to grow an existing business, will require some initial injection of capital to finance the fixed assets, working capital, and operati...
January 2021
Pharma UK: The Transdermal Technology – Compact Case
By Julian Birkinshaw
Pharma UK was the UK subsidiary of Pharma, a major international pharmaceuticals company with expertise in oncology, hormone replacement drugs and fertility. Pharma UK was responsible for selling drugs in the local marketplace. However, it also had 50 people in R&D, doing local development work ...
January 2021
Building an Agile Organisation at ING Bank Netherlands – Compact Case
By Julian Birkinshaw, Ken Mark
ING Group was established through a merger of three Dutch financial services firms in 1991. It expanded internationally into Europe and the Americas, and created a no-frills savings account business called ING Direct in the late 1990s. In 2007 it merged its two main subsidiary banks, Postbank with ...
January 2021
Costa Coffee: Project Marlow – Compact Case
By Julian Birkinshaw, Ken Mark
For Jim Slater, head of Costa Express in 2014, the biggest new growth opportunity was to roll out the company’s third-generation vending machine, called Marlow. The product had been developed in record time, but Slater faced several strategic and operational challenges in launching it....
November 2020
Twisterden Pricing a go-to-market strategy – Compact Case
By Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg
English wine has come a long way. In Britain, sweet and poorer quality wines dominated the palates of the 1970s, when domestic producers were almost nowhere to be seen. Today, the range of wine available to British households is global and local wineries have grown to take market share with increasi...