September 2024

Strategic Positioning: Competitive Advantage and Value Creation (A) Overview – Background Note

By Bukky Oyedeji

A firm achieves a competitive advantage when it earns higher economic profits than its competitors in the same industry. This advantage is primarily achieved by creating and delivering more economic value than competitors. Competitive advantage is essential for long-term success and profitability as...

September 2024

Five Forces Framework (B): Key Concepts – Background Note

By Bukky Oyedeji

Five Forces Framework: Key concepts...

September 2024

Five Forces Framework (A) – Background Note

The Five Forces framework, elaborated in a March/April 1979 article in Harvard Business Review by Michael Porter, is widely used to analyse the competitive environment in an industry. It provides insights into the potential profitability of incumbent firms operating within an industry....

April 2024

The Transformation of Digital China: Harnessing the Potential of Data, Cloud and AI

By Julian Birkinshaw, Dickie Liang-Hong Ke

The case, set in 2024, describes the transformation of Digital China, a large IT services company in China that had grown proactively and ambitiously into new digital services, including artificial intelligence (AI). The case briefly describes the company’s background so we can see how it has evol...

April 2024

Up in the air: Dubai’s air-taxi service

By Aharon Cohen Mohliver, Nick Mickshik

The case describes the air-taxi industry at the end of 2023 as many companies vied to join the “eVTOL revolution”: in January 2022 the Vertical Flight Society listed 600 designs from nearly 350 companies and innovators worldwide, although only about two dozen of the 600 concepts had made it to t...

April 2024

From hype to disillusionment: Metaverse’s rise, apparent fall and green shoots

By Michael Jacobides, Katie Round, Francois Candelon

This case study critically examines the evolution of the metaverse, interrogating its ascendancy, its perceived decline and the nascent indicators of its resurgence. Beginning with the concept’s origins in science fiction, it tracks the metaverse’s evolution through advancements in gaming and th...

April 2024

From adversity to leadership: Tanla Platforms’ journey to becoming India’s SaaS titan

By Florin Vasvari

The outlook for Tanla Platforms was notably positive. It was January 2024 and the Hyderabad-based SaaS firm had reported a 20.3% year-on-year rise in net profit for the October-December quarter of 2023 over the same quarter of the previous fiscal year. Additionally, Tanla had recently announced its ...

February 2024

Digital Dubai: Making Dubai the Digital Capital of the World

By Julian Birkinshaw, Neil King

When the Dubai Government announced in 2021 that it had processed its last-ever paper transaction, becoming the first government in the world to go paperless, it completed a 20-year journey of digital transformation that changed people’s lives across the emirate fundamentally. Since launching i...

December 2023

citizenM: Radical innovation in the hotel industry (Chinese language)

By Freek Vermeulen

In 2008, a group of five entrepreneurs and executives teamed up to launch an innovative hotel chain into what seemed like a highly competitive industry. Rattan Chadha, the founder of fashion company MEXX and Michael Levie, a hotel industry veteran, teamed up with Hans Meyer, a hotel development spec...

September 2023

Desso (B): Going Forward (Portuguese language)

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...