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Firmenich, the Geneva-founded flavors and fragrances house, built its competitive edge on the tacit, highly specialized craft of its perfumers and flavorists – expertise sitting at the intersection of chemistry and artistry. By 2017 board-level anxiety about digital disruption, and credible signals that technology giants were eyeing the sector, forced the question of how a craft-based industry should respond to AI. Eric Nicolas, chief financial officer (CFO) and head of strategy, and Eric Saracchi, chief digital and information officer (CDIO) were charged with shaping that response. Rather than buy capability or partner externally, they chose to build in-house: d-lab, sited deliberately close to, while being organizationally distinct from EPFL's innovation park in Lausanne. The case follows d-lab from early experimentation to a string of commercial firsts: an AI-generated beef flavor launched in Asia in 2020, and an AI-created laundry fragrance in early 2021. Central to the lab's traction was a deliberate framing choice positioning AI as a creative co-pilot rather than a replacement and designed to win over skeptical, identity-invested experts whose value rested precisely on the knowledge AI now threatened to encode. By November 2021 d-lab had been named digital innovation of the year and had halved time-to-market while cutting formulation costs. The case closes on an unresolved strategic question facing Nicolas and Saracchi: how to move d-lab from proof of concept to durable advantage while deepening its integration with the wider organization, and extending its reach from formulation into molecular discovery. It offers a grounded vehicle for examining innovation-unit design, expert buy-in under AI disruption, and the governance of adjacent-but-separate digital capability.

What does a zero target measure? In 2016, Barry Callebaut launched Forever Chocolate with a pledge to eradicate child labor from its supply chain by 2025. For its 2021-22 financial year, the company reported over 25,000 cases of child labor identified and 2,844 remediated. In May 2023, it changed the target: By 2025, human rights due diligence would cover its entire cocoa supply chain and every identified case would be remediated. A Bittersweet Paradox: From Zero Child Labor to Human Rights Due Diligence uses this decision to examine how zero KPIs and impact metrics behave in practice. A zero KPI states an absolute ethical demand in a single number. That simplicity mobilizes action. It can also conceal the conditions that determine whether change lasts: persistent poverty in farming communities, limited access to education, and constraints that no single company can resolve alone. But Zero KPIs also set a measurement trap. Stronger monitoring uncovers more cases so improved visibility looks like deteriorating performance. A report of zero cases can say more about what an organization fails to see than about the children it has protected. The replacement metrics raise their own questions. Is abandoning zero child labor a retreat or an evolution in the sustainability strategy compliant with the new regulatory environment? Students work with the company's reported figures through the eyes of a sustainability manager, an investor, a child rights organization and a farmer cooperative, each reading the same evidence differently. The questions apply more broadly: to net zero emissions, zero workplace harm and zero discrimination. What exactly does 'zero' cover? Do incentives reward discovering problems? Who verifies that remediation lasts? Do indicators reveal progress or reward an attractive appearance of success?

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Generative AI has made building software feel almost free. A product manager describes what she wants, an AI model writes the code, and a working tool appears in an afternoon, impressing everyone who sees it. As a result, companies and teams that ...

Andrew Sharman explains why constant availability damages attention, judgment, and sustainable performance – and what leaders can do differently.