Case studies

Risk identification and qualitative assessment are the learning outcomes.

The Bharat Bijlee Construction Limited (BBCL) was one of the largest construction companies operating in the power sector in India. After successfully completing a few projects in the Middle East, BBCL decided to expand its presence into African region. The BBCL was awarded a $85m contract for three sub-station projects to modernise Algeria’s power grid system by the “Shariket Karhaba Koudiet Eddraouch Spa”, a state-owned company in charge of power generation, transmission and distribution in Algeria.

The project, which is the first of BBCL in Saharan region in Algeria’s, presents many unique situations that company had never encountered before, including sand dunes, severe weather, remote locations, supply chain & logistics, strict contractual deadlines and a high level of construction risk. The project manager for BBCL was sceptic about how well his company would perform under the present project circumstances. How could he better align himself with the client, the various on-site local contractors and the numerous suppliers spread around the world?

The case emphasises the identification of various project risks that the project manager might encounter in the project. What do the PESTLE and ASCE frameworks for risk identification each represent, and how are they helpful for the project team in understanding various risks? How should the project’s qualitative risk assessment be conducted? And how can a heat map be a better tool for comprehending the criticality of each risk in the project?

Undergraduate and post graduate courses in project management, civil engineering and architecture domain.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 2: Built Environment.

This case study was developed using publicly available published sources like the company’s website, articles, blogs, videos, filings, etc. Multiple sources were used to put together the chronology, quotes and details. This case is not disguised. All the key figures in the case study are identified by their real names.

Black Girls Code (BGC) was founded by Kimberly Bryant (Bryant, she) as a nonprofit organization in 2011. BGC conducted workshops and programs to teach young girls of color technology, science, engineering and math and train them in Web design, developing apps and robotics. It aimed to address the lack of diversity in science and technology. The organization has received support from tech giants like Google, Facebook and IBM. In one decade, the organization trained more than 30,000 girls and aimed to teach one million girls by 2040.

In 2021, the BGC board ousted Bryant, citing allegations of workplace impropriety. She was put on paid administrative leave by the board. This ousting was done in the aftermath of complaints by several employees who raised concerns about Bryant’s conduct. The former and current employees said that high turnover in the organization was due to Bryant’s leadership, which was rooted in fear, and that she would publicly insult managers. The board formed a special committee to evaluate the concerns and sent Bryant on administrative leave.

Cristina Jones, who succeeded Bryant as CEO, brought about several changes in the organization and expanded the scope of science, technology, engineering and math to include arts. She expanded the courses to include design, gaming and others. She was looking forward to launching one million black girls in tech by 2040. But before she could go on, she needed to ensure that the ouster of the founder did not hinder the activities at BGC in any manner and also needed to address the concerns of employees, students and funders.

This case can be used to learn about nonprofits, the role of nonprofits in building an equitable society and nonprofit entrepreneurs. The objective is to understand how passionate entrepreneurs can create organizations that can make a high impact with limited resources but with ambition and vision for radical change.

This case also helps in learning the challenges encountered due to the rapid growth of startups and the role of the leader in handling such growth.

This case can be integrated into any of the existing courses or taken as a special case study to illustrate the gender and racial disparities that exist even in highly developed countries like the USA.

Public data such as news reports, interviews and memos were used to craft the case. In addition, the technical reports released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), along with secondary data in the form of expert accounts and congressional hearings were used to round out the synopsis of the case study.

This case explores the Boeing–McDonnell Douglas merger and its impact on Boeing’s corporate culture, ethics and strategic decision-making. After the merger, Boeing shifted from a culture focused on engineering excellence to one emphasizing cost-cutting and shareholder value. This cultural shift contributed to the development failures and ethical lapses that resulted in the 737 MAX crisis, which involved two fatal crashes. The case is designed for courses in Strategic Management or Organizational Behavior.

Strategic Management or Organizational Behavior

This case study involves interviews with radiologists of various hospitals and with company personnel. Both primary and secondary data sources have been used. The first-hand perspective from the radiologists highlighted the challenges they face concerning time and the patient load. The company personnel highlighted using machine learning for used cases to make the platform more robust and accurate. This case has been tested with MBA students.

An emerging health-care artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, DeepTek.AI, wants to expand its reach in the radiology market. The company intends to leverage technology to assist radiologists in diagnostics. India's health-care sector faces the challenge of needing more trained doctors and nurses to meet the ever-increasing needs of patients. This case study revolves around the radiologists' concerns about implementing the new technology and its ease of use. The features and benefits of integrating AI in diagnostics are the need of the hour, but the reliability of results needs to be ascertained for adopting it.

This case was written for marketing applications and practices, trends in marketing, marketing strategy and technology adoption in marketing courses at the post-graduate level. Consumer adoption of finance, hospitality, travel and health-care technology is vital for increasing the company's market share and growth prospects. The students will have an opportunity to understand the challenges and the opportunities.

This case study will help business management students learn the dynamics of distribution management in the rural context. After working through the case and assignment questions, the students will be able to:▪ Understand the transformation of rural retail from traditional models to organized modern retail;▪ Understand the opportunities and challenges of rural markets with specific reference to automobile products;▪ Identify and evaluate the various distribution channels available for rural markets; and▪ Devise a suitable rural-centric distribution model for automobile products following an appropriate logistics system.

Manan Motors, a dealership of Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India (HMSI) Private Limited in Hathras City of Uttar Pradesh province in India, has been operating successfully for the past two decades. Mr Manoj Bansal, the director at Manan Motors, was primarily targeting the urban markets with 60% dependency on the scooter portfolio of HMSI. But multiple pressures like stringent vehicle emission norms, price rise of two-wheelers and the impact of the pandemic took a toll upon the urban business of Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India Limited and subsequently upon Manan Motors. The sales for HMSI dipped from 15,121 million units in 2020–2021 to 13,466 million units in 2021–2022. Consequently, Bansal decided to alter the business strategy of Manan Motors and shift its focus from the urban to the rural territory of Hathras, where it could foresee demand for entry-level two-wheelers (engine capacity between 75 and 110 cc). Rural markets were developing, so Bansal realized that supplying a low-cost, low-end model to the rural Indian market was an opportunity for his dealership. Bansal’s decision to focus on the rural vertical of its two-wheeler business stirred several questions that floated in his mind. Should they manage distribution on their own, or through some channel members, or should they follow a rural-specific modern retail model?

The case study is designed for use by a postgraduate or executive-level audience for subjects such as sales and distribution management, distribution management and rural marketing. Students will understand the concept of distribution management and associated keywords specific to rural markets. The case study provides an opportunity to discuss and decide how a company can penetrate the rural market and also discusses the opportunities and challenges of rural distribution.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 9: Operations and logistics.

This case is based solely on secondary, publicly available information. Sources include the X social media platform, Anna Maria College’s (AMC) website and the Massachusetts-based Spectrum News.

AMC administrators knew student-athletes held a stake in the institution’s success. After all, over 40% of the College’s students played on its 13 Division-III (D-III) teams, which meant a significant portion of the private institution’s tuition and student fees were paid by student-athletes. But student-athletes were not AMC’s only stakeholders. In Spring 2024, this came to a head when the College found itself intervening as a faculty member and his student-athletes struggled to communicate with one another. AMC administrators were left wondering: How should they reconcile the competing needs of their diverse stakeholder groups?

This case and its accompanying teaching note are appropriate for lower-level undergraduate organizational communications classes that explore how stakeholder theory can drive messaging development. The case was tested in the classroom with upper-level undergraduate students in a strategic managerial communication course. It was embedded in a unit that focused on stakeholder management and communication, and it should be a prerequisite to a unit in which students build on the case’s content to develop full, multi-touch communication campaigns.

After studying and analyzing this case, students will be able to evaluate the strategic alternatives for growth for a small entrepreneurial business in an emerging market, analyze the trade-offs between maintaining continuity and change in the growth strategy adopted by an organization and synthesize an appropriate growth strategy for managing the trade-off between continuity and change in an organization.

It was late April 2022, and Mohammad Hamza – the founder and marketing head of Engineering & Environmental Solutions (E&E Solutions) – disconnected the call of his sales manager. His mind was fixated on how to craft the strategy for the next phase of the company’s growth. The deadline for their biggest tender was at the end of May 2022. Should he commit all the company’s reserves to this project or pursue global markets? Launched in 2015, E&E Solutions had come a long way from being a start-up with just one product to a full-blown manufacturer and environmental monitoring equipment service provider. Growing pollution and strictness in compliance propelled the demand for environmental monitoring equipment in India, poised to reach $342m by 2025. E&E Solutions leveraged its technological capabilities in Internet of Things and sensors producing low-cost monitoring equipment to gain an edge in an evolving market and bootstrapped its way to almost $5m annual turnover in 2021. However, the last review meeting brought many concerns for the next growth phase. E&E Solutions had so far focused on the domestic market, catering to the demands of private as well as government clients. A significant cause for concern had been the small order size of private players, averaging $2,000 and a lower net margin of 8%. Moreover, the company had been missing out on opportunities to bid for large government contracts owing to stringent bidding credentials required (such as turnover of at least 50%–80% of the project value and previous similar order experience with a range of at least 70% of the project value). Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic had stalled their efforts to tap a promising global environmental monitoring market (predicted to be $44bn by 2030). As Hamza and his team sat in their board room for a discussion, they had two alternatives. Either continue focusing on the domestic market, especially the big government contracts (more than $12m order size) or explore the markets in other emerging economies with demand for similar products (such as Middle East and North Africa region) more aggressively. Hamza was, however, wondering if they could do both, for he knew that to qualify for big government contracts, they needed to scale up. He was also getting restless after missing his target of reaching $20m in five years, especially since India’s ecosystem for start-ups and the small business sector had witnessed favorable policies and support from the government. He started pondering how to leverage his organization’s strengths and continuities to achieve the required pace and scale of change. His thoughts wandered around dividing the cash reserves of $500,000 to fuel growth without reducing the R&D budget. After all, R&D has been E&E Solutions’ forte since its inception and has been pivotal in creating its differentiation.

This case study can be used for core strategic management course at the undergraduate and graduate level of management programs. It can also be used in advanced strategy courses like strategic change, entrepreneurship and small business management offered in MBA programs.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy

This case was developed from published sources. Three types of data were used to develop this case. The accounting data were compiled by the case researcher from bank financial statements such as Form 10-K, Form 8-K and quarterly Financial Highlights issued by the bank. Market data were compiled from data providers such as FactSet, Yahoo! Finance, Pitchbook and the Federal Reserve System. Reports on market developments were gathered from major news outlets such as CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and S&P Global.

Interest rate risk played a big role in the banking crisis of 2023. For Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which specialized in providing banking services to venture-backed startups in the technology and life sciences sectors, its exposure to interest rate risk and the lack of hedging against interest rate risk had played a crucial role both directly and indirectly in the bank’s failure. This case study discussed the various channels that interest rate risk played in SVB’s failure as well as other risk factors that include an unusually high percentage of uninsured deposits and a high securities-to-asset ratio compared to its industry peers.

In the low interest rate years of 2020 and 2021, startups were able to fundraise a record amount of funding from venture capital (VC) investors. As many startups deposited their funds at SVB, they became an important and concentrated depositor base for the bank and held large deposit accounts that easily exceeded the $250,000 limit insurable by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. SVB benefited from the large deposit inflows in 2020 and 2021. The bank used some of the deposits to fund its loan portfolio, but most of the deposits were used to purchase debt securities such as US Treasuries and agency-used mortgage-backed securities. In fact, SVB’s investments in securities as a percentage of total assets were more than double its peers in the large banking organization (LBO) group, while the amount of loans funded as a percentage of total assets was almost half of its LBO peers.

As interest rates increased rapidly throughout 2022, bond prices fell. SVB experienced unrealized losses of $15.2bn in its held-to-maturity securities portfolio, which was almost equivalent to its equity of $16bn at the time. However, SVB implemented little or no hedging against the risk of rising interest rates. At the same time, fundraising activities slowed in the VC sector amid high interest rates and, thus, SVB’s startups clients had to draw on past deposits to continue to fund their operations. This resulted in SVB experiencing significant deposit outflows throughout 2022.

On March 8, 2023, SVB announced that it had sold all $21bn of its available-for-sale securities portfolio and suffered an $1.8bn in realized losses, which was greater than its entire last year’s net income. Markets jittered following the news. Over the next two days, depositors rushed to withdraw $142bn of deposits that represented 82% of its last year’s total deposits. Unable to withstand the crippling weight of deposit withdrawal, on March 10 the parent company of SVB filed for bankruptcy.

Given the multiplexity of the banking crisis of 2023, this case study specifically discussed the collapse of SVB, which was the second largest bank failure at the time of its collapse. This case would be valuable for finance and economics students to learn how various risk factors interact that precipitated SVB’s failure. While there were many risk factors at play, this case study homes in on how SVB’s exposure to interest rate risk and the lack of hedging contributed to its downfall. For purpose of pedagogy, this case also explains how a bank could use on-balance-sheet as well as off-balance-sheet methods to hedge interest rate risk. This case is appropriate for courses in Risk Management, Derivatives as well as Financial Markets and Institutions with a focus on interest rate risk and its corresponding hedging methods. A course in Money and Banking may also find this case relevant. Before starting, it is assumed that students have already taken foundational finance and macroeconomics courses, have a basic understanding of financial statement analysis and its interpretations, derivative instruments such as futures and swaps, as well as have prior experience with basic duration calculations.

This case aims to introduce students to the social sector financing (internal and external) landscape, and its nuances. It specifically provides material to enable critical evaluation and decision-making around financing a for-profit social enterprise and its associated challenges.

The case highlights the fundraising options available to a social enterprise in an emerging economy like India. EnglishHelper Technologies Private Ltd. (EH) commenced operations in 2011 as a subsidiary of its parent Boston-based company, to provide technology-based learning solutions primarily to the underserved segments of the country’s population. Sanjay Gupta, co-founder and CEO, EH Inc., wanted to explore funding options suitable for the company’s next growth stage. The existing funding sources of equity from its parent company, grants and revenues (mainly from product sales to government schools) had worked well for EH in the initial years of its growth. But its financial performance was being impacted, and, additionally, further scaling up would require sources that could give a much larger quantum of funds and add support to EH’s operations. EH would also need to revisit its revenue model to strengthen its financial sustainability, by drawing lessons from the other prevalent ones in the ed-tech sector and make it more effective. The case encourages students to assess the various funding alternatives, internal and external, for a social sector private company with a for-profit model like EH, to enable it to achieve its scaling-up plans while serving its social mission.

The case is relevant for both undergraduate and postgraduate students and can be used in business administration programs.

CSS 1: Accounting and finance.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

After completion of the case study, the students will be able to understand competitive business and corporate strategies; understand various standard models and frameworks related to business and corporate strategy development such as Porter’s five forces model, Ansoff matrix, three value disciplines frameworks, scenario planning matrix and value chain analysis; and practice competitive strategy formulation using the latest analyzing tools/frameworks/models.

Although the digital wallet industry in Nepal was in its initial stage, it was growing rapidly. A digital wallet brand – Khalti, launched in 2017, could secure the second position in the industry within two years of establishment. In recent times, the leading digital wallet brand was eSewa which was developed by Kathmandu-based company – F1Soft International in 2009. Khalti team was better for creativity, risk-bearing capability, intact bond among co-founders, innovative skills and aggressive growth. Mr Amit Agrawal, the chief executive officer of Sparrow Pay Pvt. Ltd, was preparing to formulate some strategies for his company’s product, Khalti, on March 24, 2020. The next day, he was going to present his ideas about the future directions of Khalti with the co-founders of Janaki Technology, the parent company of Sparrow Pay Ltd. Therefore, his major agenda was how to design effective strategies to make Khalti more competitive against eSewa and probably lead the industry. Based on such a scenario, this case study deals with various competitive business and corporate strategies such as marketing, product and cost differentiation that Khalti could formulate to maintain its position and further become a leading firm in the industry.

This case study is suitable for business training programs at the master’s level, including Master of Business Administration and executive education. It is also appropriate for undergraduate students, particularly those who want to understand more about competitive business, strategic management and corporate strategy in developing economies. It is especially useful for students who have taken courses in strategic management, corporate strategy, marketing management and business expansion management. This case study is suitable for provoking skills of students such as critical and creative thinking, risk analysis and business planning.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy