Retail Rocket: Personalizing the online shopping experience

Chris Tung is President of Strategic Development at Chinese e-commerce multinational Alibaba Group. He tells Amit Joshi how the company is integrat...

How can innovative solutions to address societal grand challenges be cultivated in a pragmatic and impactful way? In this article, we propose the “...

History, values and traditions provide family businesses with a competitive advantage, motivating and guiding their entrepreneurial activity. They ...

It is increasingly common to encounter individuals with “Fractional” in their job titles. On Linkedin alone, there are over 110,000 people who iden...

We argue that the divergent motivations underlying their creation and goals can contribute to the varying performance of academic spinoffs. Through...

Many companies overestimate customers’ appetite for sustainable products, flooding the market with offerings that don’t sell. The reality is, socia...

In 2022, Elon Musk, known for his innovative ideas and often compared to Steve Jobs, made a big move by buying Twitter for $44 billion. He then sta...

E-commerce as a share of retail continues to grow, accelerated by the pandemic. This is particularly true of the online grocery market. As one of t...

The case explores the efforts of Hamilton Mann, Group VP, Global Digital Marketing & Digital Transformation at Thales, to build a sales enablement platform as part of Thales’ larger digital transformation. “ContentFlix” aimed to be a one-stop sales enablement platform bringing together content for presentations and sales pitches and integrating solutions from across the business. Thales’ key account teams were used to operating in silos and via face-to-face interactions. Similarly, marketing and sales were distant and did not work together as effectively and seamlessly as they could. ContentFlix was intended to break down those silos and encourage collaboration between the company’s different businesses and marketing and sales teams. Mann’s team had launched ContentFlix quietly, tackling each implementation challenge as it came, and adoption had been steady. The Covid pandemic changed everything. Enforced lockdowns meant that remote cooperation between units became the only way to do business. The platform’s adoption accelerated beyond Mann’s expectations and continued to grow post-pandemic. The case explores how the team planned the platform, supported its rollout across Thales and continued to build it throughout the pandemic and beyond. The case explores in rich detail the obstacles and challenges as well as the successes Mann and his team face. The case closes with the rise of generative AI (GenAI). The team starts to consider where GenAI could enhance ContentFlix. What possibilities were there to take the platform to its next stage of development?

Terry Burns launched UniMag in 2007 and went on to develop its ecosystem of affiliated companies over several years. As most media were rapidly shifting online, UniMag established its brand as a high-profile magazine with a counter-intuitive focus on high-quality print and journalism. Since then, digitalization has increasingly shaped the media landscape, opening many opportunities for Burns. By 2023 digital activities most effectively drive the business of the many affiliated companies in UniMag’s ecosystem. In contrast, its print magazine sales have stalled, and costs keep growing. Burns and her team must make a strategic decision: What to do and what to stop? Where to perform and where to transform? In the context of a transforming media industry, the case illustrates how to set strategic direction in the face of disruptive forces in order to drive change and open opportunities.