Innovation
January 2008
Silverglide Surgical Technologies (A)
By John Mullins
This is a two-case series. From a rocky perch above the city of Boulder, Colorado, Jon Thorne gazed across the city and onto the great plains that stretched eastward before him. 'There's nothing like a vigorous mountain bike ride into the hills,' Thorne thought, 'when crucial decisions have to be de...
August 2018
M-Pesa & Nick Hughes
By Lisa Duke, Rajesh Chandy
It was February 2009, and Nick Hughes, head of Global Payment Solutions at Vodafone, contemplated his notes as he waited to enter the company’s Executive Meeting at its headquarters in Newbury, amid the Berkshire countryside outside London. M-PESA (M for mobile, Pesa meaning ‘money’ in Swahili...
September 2016
ING Bank: Creating an Agile Organisation
By Julian Birkinshaw, Scott Duncan
Set in 2016, this case describes ING Bank’s implementation of a radical new way of working using agile principles. ING’s agile way of working has been written up in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review and McKinsey Quarterly. This case provides a detailed account of how the new struc...
August 2018
Bayer’s Innovation Agenda: Igniting Innovation in a 100,000-person company
By Julian Birkinshaw, Enrique De Diego, Henning Trill, Julia Hitzbleck
The case describes how Bayer, one of the oldest and largest life-science companies in the world, recognised that innovation driven solely by the traditional R&D process that characterised the sector would not be sufficient to remain competitive, given the major changes underway in pharma and cro...
September 2011
Desso (B): Going Forward
By Ioannis Ioannou, Amandine Ody-Brasier
This is part of a case series. This case describes the strategic transformation of DESSO, a Dutch manufacturer of carpet tiles and flooring solutions. The first part of the case describes the difficult situation in which the company found itself in the early 2000s, following a series of changes in o...
September 2011
Desso (A): Taking on the Sustainability Challenge
By Ioannis Ioannou, Amandine Ody-Brasier
This is part of a case series. This case describes the strategic transformation of DESSO, a Dutch manufacturer of carpet tiles and flooring solutions. The first part of the case describes the difficult situation in which the company found itself in the early 2000s, following a series of changes in o...
January 2012
Nespresso: What Else?
By Nader Tavassoli
In 2011 Nespresso, the premium single-serve coffee brand of the multinational Swiss company Nestle, found itself at a crossroads. Between 2006 and 2010 Nespresso had managed to nearly triple sales - from CHF1.16 billion to well over CHF3 billion. But despite its meteoric growth in recent years, comp...
December 2020
Amazon.com: Staying a step ahead (2021)
By Julian Birkinshaw, Lisa Duke
This case traces the rise and rise of Amazon.com, the second company after Apple to hit a trillion dollar market cap. The growth of Amazon is described, from its origins back in 1995 through to 2016. The case intentionally provides a lot of detail on specific new products and services created over t...