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Latest Case Studies
Case Study Digital Leadership Strategy
La Tour: Winning in the private hospital industry with value-based healthcare
This case describes the journey of a new CEO bringing an innovative vision and strategy to a for-profit hospital under new ownership. It shows the application of a value-based health outcome approach in this setting, focused on the strategic approach, marketing and branding customer-centricity, and leadership challenges. The case describes key d…
By Jim Pulcrano Natasha Lucenay Didier Boekraad Barry W. Miller and Arnold Vetterli
Case reference: IMD-7-2450 ©2023
Case Study General Management Global Business Strategy Digital
Novartis: The right prescription for a pharma company?
In June 2022, pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG announced it was cutting 8,000 jobs, i.e., 7% of its global workforce, as part of a restructuring plan that involved integrating its pharmaceuticals and oncology units into an Innovative Medicines business. By reorganizing as separate US and international commercial setups, making operational improv…
By Amit M. Joshi and Ivy Buche
Case reference: IMD-7-2404 ©2022
Novartis: The right prescription for a pharma company?
By Amit M. Joshi and Ivy Buche
Case reference: IMD-7-2404 ©2022
Summary
In June 2022, pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG announced it was cutting 8,000 jobs, i.e., 7% of its global workforce, as part of a restructuring plan that involved integrating its pharmaceuticals and oncology units into an Innovative Medicines business. By reorganizing as separate US and international commercial setups, making operational improvements and reducing duplications in the business, the company’s goal was to increase focus, strengthen competitiveness and drive synergies. According to market analysts, Novartis stock was undervalued. CEO Vasant Narasimhan was driving a strategy for Novartis to become a 100% medicines company powered by advanced therapy platforms and data science. He carried out bolt-on acquisitions, investing approximately $30 billion since 2018 in more than 10 deals. However, the company faced several challenges: integrating the acquired companies, stiff competition from peers, a looming patent cliff, setbacks in clinical trials of innovative drugs, scandals around kickbacks, data falsification and price collusion, and a recent overhaul of the top management team following the restructuring moves. While the makeover of Novartis was underway, the CEO had to chart the strategic roadmap to power the next phase of innovation, growth, productivity and value creation. What would the roadmap look like? What should the company prioritize for the short term and initiate for long-term success?
Reference IMD-7-2404
Copyright ©2022
Copyright owner IMD Copyright
Organization Novartis
Industry Health Care, Pharmaceuticals
Language English
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Case Study Business to Business China Digital Disruption General Management Strategy
Midea: The digital transformation of a home appliances giant
Over the past decade, Asian companies have been launching accelerated and wide-ranging digital transformation initiatives. This has enabled some of them to become leading national and even international players, as well as digital pioneers in their respective industries. This case examines the successful digital transformation undertaken by the…
By Mark J. Greeven Yunfei Feng and Wei Wei
Case reference: IMD-7-2425 ©2022
Midea: The digital transformation of a home appliances giant
By Mark J. Greeven Yunfei Feng and Wei Wei
Case reference: IMD-7-2425 ©2022
Summary
Over the past decade, Asian companies have been launching accelerated and wide-ranging digital transformation initiatives. This has enabled some of them to become leading national and even international players, as well as digital pioneers in their respective industries. This case examines the successful digital transformation undertaken by the Chinese company Midea, one of the world’s leading home appliance manufacturers. By digitally transforming the company, Midea improved its financial performance and reshaped its business on a wider scale. While many cases that address digital transformation focus on the early phases of the process, Midea’s case illustrates a successfully completed digital business transformation. This allows participants to have an overview of the entire digital transformation journey and see what the potential outcomes might be.
Reference IMD-7-2425
Copyright ©2022
Copyright owner IMD Copyright
Organization Midea
Industry Consumer Goods, Home Appliances
Language English
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Case Study Digital Disruption Sustainability Global Business Leadership Strategy
Future-proofing HEINEKEN: The EverGreen strategy
Dolf van den Brink, CEO of HEINEKEN, left the company’s global headquarters in Amsterdam for a company retreat. Over the next three days, the entire executive team would gather to discuss the company’s future. The preliminary results for 2022, presented during the recent two-day Capital Markets Event, were positive, and the company’s progress on…
By Niccolò Pisani and Inès Augier
Case reference: IMD-7-2423 ©2023
Case Study Digital Strategy
RIMAC: How a Peruvian insurance company is scaling AI
Fernando Rios, CEO of RIMAC Seguros y Reaseguros (RIMAC), a leading insurance company in Peru, had been driving an intensive digital transformation at the company since 2018. By modernizing its IT infrastructure and support applications across critical business units, Fernando sought to deliver a superior customer experience through faster respo…
By Amit M. Joshi and Ivy Buche
Case reference: IMD-7-2405 ©2022
Case Study Digital Global Business Operations Sustainability
Henkel: Driving sustainability through digital
Henkel, a 145-year-old family business, had unintentionally started its digital transformation journey in 2013. Only a few years later it had reached such a level of digital maturity that digital became a decisive element of the company’s strategic framework and one of the key drivers to achieve growth. In less than ten years, Henkel received in…
By Carlos Cordon and Edwin Wellian
Case reference: IMD-7-2420 ©2022
Henkel: Driving sustainability through digital
By Carlos Cordon and Edwin Wellian
Case reference: IMD-7-2420 ©2022
Summary
Henkel, a 145-year-old family business, had unintentionally started its digital transformation journey in 2013. Only a few years later it had reached such a level of digital maturity that digital became a decisive element of the company’s strategic framework and one of the key drivers to achieve growth. In less than ten years, Henkel received international recognition as a global leader in using Industry 4.0 technologies to transform factories, value chains and business models. The first part looks at how this journey started, what it had to do to reach this impressive level of digital competence and to make the journey self-sustaining. Can Henkel also build on the success of this digital transformation to make its products carbon-neutral during production and consumption? This is the question that will be explored during the second part. Henkel had made good progress to reduce its own operational CO2 emissions, but realized that this represented less than 5% of the total. Two-thirds occurred during consumption and one-third during the production of raw materials. Making a 50,000+ workforce and operations digitally savvy is one thing, but reducing carbon-emissions at stages of the process over which Henkel had no direct control is something else. The dilemma facing Henkel was where it should focus on to reduce its overall CO2 emissions. Should it continue to prioritize making its own production sites carbon-free, in the knowledge that this represents only a fraction of the total emissions, or should it prioritize making its products carbon-free in the other parts of the value chain where the impact on our planet is higher? Prioritizing the latter would make sense, but what could Henkel actually do to change the attitudes and behaviors of thousands of suppliers and hundreds of millions of consumers?
Reference IMD-7-2420
Copyright ©2022
Copyright owner IMD Copyright
Organization Henkel
Industry Consumer Goods;Manufacturing, Chemicals
Language English
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Case Study Operations Supply Chain Digital
Zalando: A digital foundation for fashion supply chain success
By 2021 Zalando had become Europe’s largest pure player in online fashion. But the road to success had not always been smooth. Back in 2014, six years after it was founded, the Germany-based company was at a crossroads. With an impending initial public offering (IPO) and investors looking for results, the company was nowhere near being profitabl…
By Richard Markoff David Schröder Arnd Huchzermeier and Ralf W. Seifert
Case reference: IMD-7-2401 ©2022
Case Study Digital Disruption Human Resources Sustainability
Automobili Lamborghini: Future-proofing an iconic luxury brand
Throughout its 60-year history, luxury carmaker Lamborghini had been consistently visionary, innovative and inspiring. Bold entrepreneurial moves – such as bringing the attributes of a racing car to mainstream, non-racing vehicles, or pioneering a luxury SUV – became an intrinsic part of the company’s DNA. Yet, entering the 2020s, the unfolding …
By Stéphane J. G. Girod and Martin Králik
Case reference: IMD-7-2409 ©2022
Automobili Lamborghini: Future-proofing an iconic luxury brand
By Stéphane J. G. Girod and Martin Králik
Case reference: IMD-7-2409 ©2022
Summary
Throughout its 60-year history, luxury carmaker Lamborghini had been consistently visionary, innovative and inspiring. Bold entrepreneurial moves – such as bringing the attributes of a racing car to mainstream, non-racing vehicles, or pioneering a luxury SUV – became an intrinsic part of the company’s DNA. Yet, entering the 2020s, the unfolding social, geopolitical, environmental and industrial transitions presented luxury players, including auto companies, with monumental challenges. Sustainability – and, in the car sector, electrification – came to define the new decade. In an effort to push for net-zero climate-change targets, between 2021 and 2022 EU legislators announced a virtual ban on the sale of traditional combustion engines past the year 2035. Future-proofing the organization for the challenges ahead required (i) reinventing the iconic brand so that it remained desirable in what will be a radically different automotive space, based on sustainability targets, new materials, and digital technologies; (ii) shifting the workforce composition and culture from one that was firmly rooted in engineering, precision, and a parochial, heads-down, male-dominated outlook to one that emphasized cross-functionality, diversity of backgrounds, curiosity, hyperawareness, and shared organizational and social values; and (iii) maintaining a position of thought, industry, technological and innovation leadership, alongside the timeless quality of the made-in-Italy label, at a time when customers as well as society at large are looking to global brands to come up with a renewed, compelling vision of purposeful luxury.
Reference IMD-7-2409
Copyright ©2022
Copyright owner IMD Copyright
Organization Automobili Lamborghini
Industry Consumer Goods, Luxury Goods and Jewelry;Automotive, Automobiles;Automotive
Language English
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Case Study Digital Disruption Operations
HEINEKEN: Building the connected brewery
HEINEKEN, one the world’s largest breweries, had led a long and successful effort to improve the efficiency of its brewery network. For the company COO, this was a source of pride, and also a challenge and an opportunity. Long curious about the potential for digitalizing the supply chain, perhaps this was the natural entry point for the company…
By Ralf W. Seifert and Richard Markoff
Case reference: IMD-7-2356 ©2022
Case Study Digital Disruption Entrepreneurship
Celonis: Building a lean digital ecosystem
To maintain its position as the category leader in process mining and execution management, Celonis needed to be able to facilitate – or even automate – corrective measures on these processes to edge closer to process mining nirvana, i.e. a fully automated, intelligent and real-time execution management system (EMS). But how to determine the rig…
2023 John Molson MBA International Case Writing Competition – 3rd Prize
By Carlos Cordon Benoit F. Leleux and Marc Chauvet
Case reference: IMD-7-2286 ©2022
Case Study Business to Business Digital Disruption Strategy General Management Marketing Entrepreneurship Customer Centricity
Sascar: The next five next years
When SASCAR was acquired by Michelin in 2014, it was barely staying afloat, selling telematic services on price. The case describes how the new CEO and CMO turned SASCAR around in five years. Without explicitly referring to it, they used customer-centric principles: they focused on customer benefits (value conception), achieved buy-in from custo…
By Frédéric Dalsace
Case reference: IMD-7-2143 ©2022
Sascar: The next five next years
By Frédéric Dalsace
Case reference: IMD-7-2143 ©2022
Summary
When SASCAR was acquired by Michelin in 2014, it was barely staying afloat, selling telematic services on price. The case describes how the new CEO and CMO turned SASCAR around in five years. Without explicitly referring to it, they used customer-centric principles: they focused on customer benefits (value conception), achieved buy-in from customers and third parties (value delivery) and got beyond the fixed-pie mindset (value capture). The results were startling: despite the growing competition, SASCAR evolved from a money losing, “me-too” local fleet management firm into a profitable leader in a growing market. The case goes on to discuss issues that the company will need to address, including performance-based business models, a branding strategy, international expansion and relations with Michelin.
Reference IMD-7-2143
Copyright ©2022
Copyright owner IMD Copyright
Organization Sascar
Industry Manufacturing, Technology;Logistics and Supply Chain, Transportation
Language English
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Case Study Strategy Competitiveness Disruption Digital
Trader Joe’s: At a crossroads?
When Covid-19 hit the US in 2020, the grocery retail industry underwent a greatly accelerated digital transformation as consumers’ habits changed drastically in a matter of weeks. As Americans sought to avoid their risk of exposure to the coronavirus, the adoption of online grocery shopping, click-and-collect and self-checkout skyrocketed. By 20…
By Niccolò Pisani Goutam Challagalla and Inès Augier
Case reference: IMD-7-2387 ©2022
Case Study Strategy Advertising Digital Disruption
Business on the move (B) (Video case)
Case B, a video case, reveals the identity of the company and its two protagonists. Via an interview technique, students learn about the starting situation and the reasoning behind the transformation. In three segments, Nadine Borter and Thomas Fresnard reveal how they transformed the organization – and the details are compelling The intricate d…
By Katharina Lange Nadine Borter and Thomas Frésard
Case reference: IMD-7-2369 ©2022
Business on the move (B) (Video case)
By Katharina Lange Nadine Borter and Thomas Frésard
Case reference: IMD-7-2369 ©2022
Summary
Case B, a video case, reveals the identity of the company and its two protagonists. Via an interview technique, students learn about the starting situation and the reasoning behind the transformation. In three segments, Nadine Borter and Thomas Fresnard reveal how they transformed the organization – and the details are compelling The intricate design of the mobile office, the choice of locations and the change in service portfolio are inspiring. The creativity the protagonists demonstrate in transforming their organization matches the (creative) industry they are in. This means this is also a case about values, authenticity and congruence of leadership and organizational purpose.
Reference IMD-7-2369
Copyright ©2022
Copyright owner IMD Copyright
Organization Contexta
Industry Business Management Services, Advertising and Public Relations;Media
Language English
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Case Study Strategy Advertising Digital Disruption
Business on the move (A)
Digitalization has dramatically changed the advertising industry. Short life cycle projects and melting profit margins were shaping the environment in which a Swiss marketing agency transformed itself radically and uniquely. This case explores how Contexta AG responds to market challenges with a change mindset, by initializing portfolio change …
By Katharina Lange and Valerie Keller-Birrer
Case reference: IMD-7-2368 ©2022
Business on the move (A)
By Katharina Lange and Valerie Keller-Birrer
Case reference: IMD-7-2368 ©2022
Summary
Digitalization has dramatically changed the advertising industry. Short life cycle projects and melting profit margins were shaping the environment in which a Swiss marketing agency transformed itself radically and uniquely. This case explores how Contexta AG responds to market challenges with a change mindset, by initializing portfolio change to match the company’s values and by creating a “nomadic office.” The critical questions start with the possible competitive advantage of nomadism, but then delve more profoundly into the crucible of leading a truly customer-centric organization. Reflections on the necessary leadership capabilities, such as empathy, humility, and courage, conclude the discussion. For didactic purposes, the case is split into case A, a short, anonymous introduction; and a video case B. Case A is a crisp pre-class read, with a brief characterization of the advertising market in Europe and an anonymous introduction to the two protagonists – Nadine and Thomas, owner and CEO of the advertising agency. The case digs into the challenges posed by digitalization and the disruption/disintermediation of value chains.The objective is to reflect on possible strategic responses and ignite the discussion on how to create a truly customer-centric organization.
Reference IMD-7-2368
Copyright ©2022
Copyright owner IMD Copyright
Organization Contexta
Industry Business Management Services, Advertising and Public Relations;Media
Language English
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Case Study Digital Disruption Entrepreneurship Strategy Start-up Advertising Social Media Sustainability
Largo.ai in Hollywood: Good enough?
The case tells the story of Sami Arpa a young entrepreneur with a passion for the movie industry. Sami Arpa and his start-up Largo leverage technology to improve the movie industry. Largo launched in 2018 with the platform for short films called Sofy.tv. In 2020 Largo launches its own SaaS B2B platform providing an AI algorithm for the film-maki…
By Jim Pulcrano Laure Frank Désirée Gilgen Konrad Meyer and Federico Paparella
Case reference: IMD-7-2388 ©2022