Cases

Rafael Sebastián, CEO of Lékué, was holding an online meeting with a part of the company’s local management team and a part of its distribution team in Delaware (United States) and in its Suzhou factory (China). Lékué was dedicated to creating unique and effective solutions, gadgets and utensils that had already changed traditional cooking methods. The COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible for the company to attend the AMBIENTE consumer goods fair in Frankfurt (Germany) in February 2021 where it wanted to showcase its new products to its key international distributors. Since they couldn’t attend the fair, they had to decide if they should substitute their stand at AMBIENTE with a digital showroom.

This is a new version of the Casal del Infants case study used in the NGO management and leadership program module focused on change leadership. Casal del Infants, an NGO that works with at-risk youth, will celebrate its 45th anniversary in 2023. This is also the last year included in its 2020-2023 Strategic Plan (see Annex 3). This plan underscores the importance of neighborhoods as the drivers behind Casal and its work, creating a local educational community that is both welcoming and critical. Based on the institution’s mission and priorities, each office has its own set of dynamics depending on the specific reality of each municipality in which the NGO works. In fact, it has developed a unique social change theory for each area in keeping with Casal’s global social change theory.

Rosa Balaguer truly believed that the new strategic plan would have been nothing more than an idea, a nice idea, but only that, if the NGO had not invested heavily in empowering its local office directors over the last few years. Another decisive factor was the change in the NGO’s organizational structure and how it operated. Previously, the department directors were in charge of defining the guidelines for the NGO’s actions, while the local office directors were responsible for implementing them in each of their respective neighborhoods. Today, however, the directors of the territorial offices are in charge of defining what has to be done and how, while the department directors support them and their efforts. The NGO has been implementing this paradigm shift gradually, and an additional push is still needed for this new model to be fully in place. In fact, over the last few years, Rosa has met weekly with the team of department directors, a good indicator of the territorial teams’ importance for Casal’s leadership.

In addition to boosting Casal’s presence in those neighborhoods where it already works -a strategic objective which has achieved notable results over the last few years-, the 2020-2023 Strategic Plan (approved before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic) raised the possibility of the NGO expanding further into other territories. For this, the NGO needed to define how it would choose the territories in which it wanted to enter, incorporating active-listening tools and other mechanisms to get to know the different neighborhoods in depth. However, this expansion has not occurred to date. The aftermath of the pandemic and the current crisis stemming from the war in Ukraine have made it impossible to even think about this possible expansion. If carried out in the future, the first neighborhood into which it would expand would be in the city of Girona. Due to the latter’s socio-economic situation, the NGO’s actions would have a significant impact there and help it create synergies with its projects in the neighboring town of Salt where it already helps 500 people. Salt is the area in which, proportionally with respect to the NGO’s activities, Casal has to make the most effort and invest the freest resources in order to be operational.

On the other hand, the current social and economic crisis implies that Casal will have to increase its transformative impact in all the areas where it’s currently active, with greater emphasis on innovating its initiatives as well as furthering its impact on public administrations and the sum of the activities and projects it shares with other organizations. At the same time, all this implies that Casal will have to continue moving forward to become a more agile, decentralized and digitally relevant organization which knows how to make the most of the existing collective talent in its entire educational community (hired personnel, volunteers, users, families, allies, etc.).

This case is an adaptation of the PIDENSA case study focusing on CIOs and the realities they face. It has been designed to make it easier to understand the relationships that CIOs have with their management boards as well as, like in the original case study, their involvement in decision-making processes to restructure and improve governing bodies. The case explores issues related to management boards, their responsibilities, make-up and functioning. It provides a large volume of data and valuable insights to help readers when making decisions regarding how to improve corporate governance and its functioning.

In April 2022, Jeff Oldenburg, CEO of Echosec Systems, prepared for a meeting with the board of directors at which he needed to present a plan for future growth. The company's products pulled in and processed raw data from social media and unindexed (deep and dark web) sources to provide real-time threat intelligence to defense contractors, the intelligence community, and enterprise security teams. Oldenburg had begun to align the company around an ideal customer profile. He knew that Echosec Systems' next phase also relied on ongoing decisions about product development; in particular, whether to continue adding new sources of data or make inroads into delivering deeper insights from existing sources. Most importantly, the company needed a more disciplined approach to pricing.

Ferran Adrià was the head chef and cofounder of elBulli - which many critics considered the finest high-dining restaurant in the world. In 2009, at the top of his game, he shocked the world by announcing that he would be closing his restaurant. Adrià insisted, however, that elBulli would not disappear it would simply transform. This case follows Adrià's process of transformation between 2011 and 2022, as he converts a restaurant into a foundation, a museum, an artistic-corporate partnership, and a site of experimentation that defies categorisation. Along the way, Adrià offers lessons about innovation and creativity for students who wish to learn about how an institution can adapt and reinvent itself - even from a position of market dominance.

At the beginning of 2022, when the pandemic was finally coming to an end, the challenge for Familia Torres was defining a sustainability strategy for the future.  Although Familia Torres had been actively working since 2008 to mitigate and adapt to climate change through its Torres & Earth program, future scenarios presented serious challenges for the company. This meant that Familia Torres had to search for new terroirs at higher altitudes to find the right balance of heat during the day and cold at night in order to achieve a quality wine. They also strived to recover local ancestral strains resilient to these new climate scenarios. The threat of water scarcity loomed over the vineyards, as well as other ecological risks, such as the systematic loss of soil quantity and quality due to erosion, which reduced its productivity.

In this scenario, Miguel Torres Mackassek brought into discussion an emerging trend, called regenerative agriculture, that went beyond the concept of sustainability of "reducing harm", which already had been proved successful in several small-scale wine production companies. Regenerative agriculture proposed practices diametrically opposed to conventional agriculture, with the promise of regenerating soils, recovering biodiversity and the local water cycle, increasing the resilience and productivity of the land. By doing so, it also recovered the capacity of soil to absorb carbon, which would help mitigate climate change.

This "beyond sustainability" strategy was presented as a hopeful one, which focused on reversing climate change from the local sphere of action, and that was consistent with the family motto "the more we care for earth, the better our wine". However, this promising strategy implied many uncertainties. From a commercial perspective, it was not clear how it would affect production, how it would be articulated with the commercial strategy, or whether consumers would know how to appreciate the product. From an ecological perspective, it was unclear how much carbon would be absorbed, and for how long.

The Covid-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the company's results. Sales felt the effects of the fall in tourism and the closure of hotels and restaurants, given that the hotel, restaurant and catering sector accounted for 50% of the company's sales in Spain. Although the sales had increased to pre-pandemic figures by 2022 (around €255 million a year), the company believed that the consequences of this crisis would continue to be felt for at least another two years, and that the Ukrainian war would also bring consequences. On the other hand, major family businesses in the wine sector, also located in the Penedès region, had recently been acquired by international groups and investment funds.

In light of this situation, the Familia Torres management team asked themselves whether they should maintain the strategy of going "beyond sustainability" or they should consider strategies more consistent with the mainstream approach to climate resilient viticulture (such as the genetic improvement of grapes, or transferring vines to colder areas).  As the long-term approach typical of the wine industry calls for, the results of the strategy Familia Torres was to decide on would be seen in the following decades. Did they have enough economic strength to work on a long-term sustainability strategy? Or should they be less ambitious and delay their sustainability regenerative efforts? The family's fifth generation dreamt of the company remaining under the ownership of the Familia Torres. Just after celebrating 150 years of company history, this decision was their main challenge for the future.

This case tells the story of entrepreneur Pau Bach, who has tetraplegia, and Batec Mobility, a personal mobility device company that has an inclusive business model, in which social impact and economic profit are tightly integrated. It invites students to step into Bach's shoes in June of 2019, when he is considering an offer to purchase his company. Accepting the offer is one of three courses of action available to Bach; he could also try to leverage the offer to speed negotiations with a pair of Spanish impact investors or work to persuade his current investor to reinvest and sell for a higher price in the future. He must evaluate which course of action will best address his main goals: ensuring the continued growth of the business and its positive social impact, providing an acceptable exit to his investor, and meeting his personal and family needs. Leading up to this moment, the case reviews the company's stages of development, the funding it has received, and the process Bach has undertaken to sell the company. In this way, students explore the opportunities and challenges of developing, funding, and selling an inclusive business.

This case explores entrepreneur Ramon Molera's path to developing his business, Nnergix, a company specializing in energy-forecasting services. It explains what Molera did, how he made decisions to scale his business, how he made his company evolve from a service forecasting photovoltaic (PV) energy to a business that first included wind forecasts and later extended to hydro forecasts in order to serve system operators. Further evolutions saw Nnergix develop an extreme weather alert tool (Sentinel Weather) for PV and wind farm owners and a self-service PV generation management tool (Sentinel Solar).

Throughout the case, students will assume Molera's role as Nnergix's founder in order to learn how science and technology entrepreneurs make decisions when scaling up new ventures.

When developing a new business, entrepreneurs usually come across what look like new business opportunities, and they have to make difficult decisions. Should they work on these new opportunities or not? What should they take into consideration before going one way or another?
By exploring this case, students will learn:

• The importance of focusing on the business they are developing;
• How to be flexible enough to recognize and take advantage of whatever useful situations they come across;
• What to consider when analyzing new opportunities; and  
• How to make a start-up evolve into a scale-up.

This case was specifically written for use in entrepreneurship courses on technology or applied sciences for doctoral or master's students. The ideal time to use it is when students already have some knowledge of basic entrepreneurship and management tools, like opportunity analysis and business model design. The authors describe a teaching approach for that type of experienced student, although the case could also be beneficial to less experienced students if the instructor uses it to explain general concepts and tools.

This case explains how an entrepreneur, Raúl Aragonés, converted an innovative technology into AEInnova, a heat harvesting company. After explaining the incorporation of AEInnova and the change of CEO to David Comellas, the case explains the development of the heat harvesting technology. Initially, they worked on an application of their technology for cooling PV-panels to improve their performance. Then, they found an interesting application in industrial waste heat recovery, what later was named as the Waste Heat Recovery Unit (WHRU). Finally, by pure serendipity, they found another application for their technology: powering IoT sensor devices (Indu-Eye).

They knew that to succeed with their start-up, focusing was very important. Additionally, they did not have either the resources nor the time for developing and commercializing the three applications of their technology. Moreover, they had started to feel the pressure from investors that wanted to see some commercial results from their investments. So, they had to decide on which application to concentrate their efforts and take first to the market. Part A - Where to play, focuses on the decision to choose which application of the technology to commercialize first by analyzing the business opportunity and the associated risks.

In the end, they decided to focus on the business development of the Indu-Eye application, a wireless and batteryless IoT-device to monitor industrial processes. Additionally, they wanted to convert AEInnova into a scale-up that could become the reference company in the IoT industry. All these are treated in Part B - How to play.

This case study describes how the entrepreneur, Raúl Aragonés, turned innovative technology into AEInnova, a heat-recovery company. After explaining how AEInnova came to be and the change in CEO led by David Comellas, the case focuses on heat-recovery technology and its development. The company first worked on applying its technology to cool solar panels and improve their performance. Later on, they discovered it could be applied to recover residual industrial heat via a device which would later be referred to as a Waste Heat Recovery Unit (WHRU). Lastly, and by sheer chance, the company discovered another application for its technology: feeding data to Internet of Thing (IoT) sensors (“Indu-Eye”).

They knew that it was extremely important to remain focused for their startup to succeed. In addition, they didn’t have the resources or the time to develop, market and sell all three applications. Further still, they were already beginning to feel the pressure from their investors who wanted to see a return on their investments. Consequently, the company had to decide on which of the three applications it would concentrate its efforts and launch first. Part A of the case (“Where to Play?”) focuses on the decision regarding the technological application that the company would initially market, analyzing the corresponding business opportunities and associated risks.

Ultimately, the company decided to focus on commercializing the Indu-Eye application, a wireless and batteryless IoT device to monitor industrial processes. In addition, they wanted to turn AEInnova into a scaleup company capable of becoming a reference in the IoT industry. Part B of the case (“Where to Play?”) explores all of this.