Leading a Surgical Revolution

Arnaud Vaissié of International SOS shares how the firm’s resilience and innovation have driven its 40-year success amid crises, from financial sho...

There is much that organizations can learn from artists and designers, from turning ideas into innovation to creative problem-solving and better de...

The case focuses on Contabilizei, a Brazilian startup providing online accounting services for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The case study delves into the challenges faced by the company’s founder and CEO, Vitor Torres, as he navigated Brazil’s complex social and economic landscape. Issues such as Brazil’s byzantine tax system, disparate educational quality and accessibility, and the high cost of doing business in the country are explored. Despite these barriers, Contabilizei demonstrated impressive growth, transforming digital innovation into standardized services. However, the rise of competitors and persistent profitability concerns prompt Torres to thoroughly explore future strategies to maintain market leadership and improve financial performance. The case provides an in-depth analysis of Brazil’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, examining its business, educational, legal and infrastructural realities and their implications for startups as well as the difficult step for startups to become established companies.

Unyarat Pornprakit (Unya) is the youthful chief executive officer of Jubilee Enterprise PLC, a diamond jewelry retailer. Since Unya became CEO in 2...

Family businesses are integral to the entrepreneurial ecosystems in which they operate. In order to explore how the legacy of individual entreprene...

Data cooperatives, entities that allow individuals to pool together their personal data to gain collective bargaining power and enable them to mon...

Fatbergs and grease waste from industrial kitchens are hardly the most enticing topics for a business school case study. Yet ZhanaSolutions, the st...

Craft firms characterized by a humanistic approach to work face a tension between adhering to pure craft principles and embracing industrialization...

This case follows the steps taken by Kaichi Yokoyama, Moon Creative Lab’s CEO, to establish the entity as a pioneering venture studio and entrepreneurial talent development entity within the Mitsui Group. As a corporate venture, the story began in 2018 when Kaichi embarked on a mission to reshape Mitsui's deeply entrenched traditions and pursue a new era of innovation and creativity, a need highlighted by the appointment of a task force entrusted with the role of charting the company’s strategic direction until 2030. Kaichi believed Mitsui needed to evolve from merely “connecting” to “creating” to remain relevant in an ever-evolving world and to avoid being disrupted from the outside, but rather the inside. His vision extended far beyond short-term profits; it was about investing in Mitsui’s most valuable asset: its people. Kaichi aimed to nurture curiosity, broaden employees’ perspectives and create a culture of innovation. Moon was the vehicle to bring the vision to life, a corporate venture studio that would revolutionize Mitsu’s conventional operations and mindsets by celebrating curiosity and innovation in a venture studio set up in Silicon Valley. Despite strong resistance from Mitsui’s middle management, Moon pressed on with its mission. By 2023, it had to take stock of progress and define the objectives for the next five years, as well as the KPIs that would ensure its continued relevance within the Mitsui Group in an era of increasing uncertainty.

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