Case studies

Implementing a sustainability strategy requires firms to consider economic, strategic, environmental, and community perspectives. Suitable for MBA, undergraduate, and executive learners, this sustainability case covers innovation, intrapreneurship, and strategy. A technical note entitled, “Corporate Greenhouse Accounting: Carbon Footprint Analysis” (UVA-ENT-0113) is an effective complement. Frito-Lay’s Arizona facility pilots a program to take its snack chip manufacturing off the grid. Decision makers discuss operating, financial, marketing, and corporate strategy as the facility calculates its carbon footprint, converts to non-fossil-fuel energy sources, and stops relying on the scarce local water supply.

Suitable for MBA and executive learners, this case series presents a narrative that prompts students to discuss entrepreneurial thinking. An entrepreneur who loves his native Swedish Lapland uses his natural gift for effectuation to ask What? What next? And What now? As his ventures evolve, students will wonder how they would master similar challenges to their own entrepreneurial plans and expectations. The case can be taught in either one or two sessions of a 90-minute MBA course or a four-hour executive education class.

Microsoft employs 90,000 people and its products affect millions of users around the world every day. Developing the next version of Windows or Office is easy for Microsoft, but the company has struggled when it comes to more radical innovation. Intense competition from Google, Apple, and others threatens a business model that has delivered tremendous success over 25 years. This case highlights the strategic challenges facing Microsoft and provides insights into the organizational, leadership, and operational issues that must be addressed in order to define a successful innovation strategy at one of the world's most well-known companies.

This case is an updated version of “Netflix Inc.: DVD Wars” (UVA-M-0763), and was written as a replacement for it.

A financial analyst is asked to appraise the value of Netflix’s stock at a time of unprecedented turmoil for the company. This case introduces customer lifetime value (CLV) as a useful metric for subscription-based businesses.

This case examines the queueing issues caused by the growth in popularity of one of the most visited Hindu temples in the world. On January 2, 2015, Ramesh and Vasantha Gupta visit Tirumala Venkateswara Temple, just a day after some 210,000 people crowded the 2,000-year-old site. The case describes the many enhancements that the temple administrator, Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), has implemented since its management of the temple complex began in 1932. The soaring popularity of the temple, however, has led to safety and comfort concerns for pilgrims. While challenging students to consider additional improvements that might benefit pilgrim throughput rate and time in the temple system, the case highlights the tension TTD must manage between maximizing efficiency and maintaining religious traditions. Additionally, the case demonstrates the importance of perceived waiting times in the management of queues.

In an effort to save his business, Paul Marciano, the owner of Italian family restaurant Maria’s Ristorante, runs a number of experiments focused on improving the customer experience around his target customer segment. These experiments lead to a better understanding about his business and cause him to make specific changes to his business model that ultimately improve things across the board. The experiments are based on research from the academic literature on the use of behavioral variables to manage customer perceptions.

Pancho’s Burritos is a high-end fast-food restaurant located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Due to a recent surge in customers, the lines at the restaurant during peak hours are becoming very long and causing excessive customer waiting. To improve current customer wait times and plan for future growth requirements, Francisco “Pancho” Escoba, the proprietor, wants to get a better understanding of the current operational capacity. The key decision Escoba must make is how to redesign his burrito-making process to increase the capacity and reduce customer wait time.

Suitable for an undergraduate or MBA course, the case can be used in an introductory operations course to teach capacity analysis and queuing. The case provides a relatable and understandable setting for students without an operations background to gain a better grasp of basic course concepts and illustrates how interactions between capacity and queuing affect one another. As an exam or review case it works well because it contains standard process calculations that all students should know how to perform.

The strategic and tactical problems of managing the operations function in a service environment can be examined through the context of the Walt Disney Company (DIS) opening Shanghai Disneyland. The company and its investors were excited about the Shanghai opening for a good reason: demographics. The resort would be located in the Pudong district of Shanghai, easily the wealthiest of all of China’s districts. A massive 330 million people lived with a three-hour driving radius of the resort site, compared with 19.6 million who lived within the same radius at DIS’s most profitable park, Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Still, risks remained. Construction complications had delayed the opening almost a year longer than expected and cost overruns and alterations had increased the final price tag of the project. The Chinese economy had also hit a rough patch following the Chinese stock market slump in the summer of 2015. With the world watching, could the classic Disney theme park experience be delivered with the right cultural balance to appeal to its largely Chinese customers? Could DIS get it right?

This case could be used in entrepreneurship, strategy, and small-business courses. It presents classic issues regarding successful start-ups such as how to choose from a multitude of growth opportunities; how to pace growth so as not to dilute quality control and financial risk tolerance; and how to choose a strategic focus.

This case describes the evolution of an entrepreneur's venture-capital fund-raising from seed-stage financing through later-round efforts. The case focuses on where the “action” is in venture finance: the exploitation of social capital by an entrepreneur and investors. Much of the teaching materials on venture finance focus on the economics of financing; while these materials provide useful information about the mechanics of valuation and how to structure venture-capital agreements, they miss the social side of venture-capital investing. The case illustrates the theoretical concept that social capital (i.e., a person's relationship to other people in society) influences venture finance. The case can be used in a class on entrepreneurship or venture finance.