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Goldman Sachs acquired Imprint Capital Advisors, a small firm that specialized in advising clients on environmental/social/governance (ESG) and impact investments. The founders sold Imprint with the belief that joining a global financial firm would help to scale impact investing, if not bring it into the mainstream. The case is set two years after the acquisition. It describes impact investing, the founding of Imprint, and its evolution from serving foundations and home offices to financial institutions, and its sale to and integration within Goldman Sachs. The founders consider the past two years and whether the acquisition has, in fact, help to scale ESG/impact investing.

In October 2015, ZappRx founder Zoe Barry is deciding between two business models for her health technology start-up. Her product, a software application which aims to expedite the prescription fulfillment process for patients with rare diseases, has attracted interest from specialty drug manufacturers who wish to build an exclusive platform for patients taking their medications. But Barry, against the advice of her management team, is considering an alternative business model, which would open the platform up to all manufacturers in a given disease area. Instead of financing product development through individual contracts, the comprehensive platform would be free to docs and pharma alike and financed via an aggressive fundraising strategy and through the sale of the prescription data collected on the app. Barry is willing to take the risk, but her management team is staunchly opposed. Which path should ZappRx take? The case is a window into the early go-to-market and business model decisions that an entrepreneur must make, in this case in the face of pushback from her own management team. The case also provides a detailed picture of the specialty pharmaceutical industry and challenges students to think about target customer identification and talent management in a start-up environment.

In 2018, Ludovic Le Moan and Christophe Fourtet, co-founders of the French tech startup Sigfox, reflected on the evolution of their venture and the way forward. Founded in 2009, Sigfox was a company that provided a global connectivity network for devices connected to the internet. As the startup was scaling rapidly, the founders made the strategic decision to target fewer industry verticals and to focus on asset tracking as the common denominator of the business. With a committed target of reaching 1 billion devices connected to the Sigfox network by 2022, they wondered which consequential changes needed to be made in order to achieve success in the nascent IoT market. Which initiatives would help them bring the company to the next stage?

Twenty-four-year old Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of India-based online, hotel branding network OYO Rooms, has tackled the issue of unreliability in India's highly-fragmented budget hotel industry. In 2018, OYO branded 8,500 properties across 200 cities and managed to capture almost 1.5% of India's budget hotel market. Ritesh believes that in the process, OYO has honed technological skills and infrastructural capabilities that can transform the company from being a technology player to a hotel developer. OYO now aspires to convert corporate spaces and homes into accommodation spaces, and to make its mark worldwide.

The brand management of places, such as countries, cities and regions, has received increasing attention in recent years. The associations, impressions and reputations that people have of a certain place can have a big impact in a number of areas - from tourism, to exports, to drawing talent, to securing foreign investment, to public diplomacy, and to political leadership. Consequently, a number of stakeholders may attempt to influence the perceptions that people have about a place in a way that is conducive to their goals. This background note lays the ground for instructors to expose students to the concept of a place brand, allow examining the ways in which it may be influenced, and examine the motivations of the various actors. The note provides ample examples of countries and cities that have actively tried to shape their brand identity and further exposes students to recent trends and vehicles (such as social media) relevant for the branding of places. The note raises a set of issues on this topic that can serve as the basis for a rich classroom discussion.

In March 2018, international shipping giant Maersk is getting ready to debut a trade digitization platform. Maersk hopes the platform will help streamline global trade since shipping goods internationally is an extraordinarily complicated and inefficient process. Maersk intends for stakeholders throughout the supply chain to utilize the platform, including its competitors. Blockchain, made famous through cryptocurrency, will power part of the project. Executives at Maersk believe that Blockchain technology can provide much needed transparency to the global supply chain. Maersk plans to launch the blockchain trade platform as an independent joint venture with IBM. The team at Maersk wonders if this joint venture is the right organization to operate the blockchain project. What challenges will the project face?

In September 2016, Marriott completed its $13.3 billion acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which added 11 brands to its already robust 19 hotel brand portfolio. Tina Edmundson, Marriott's global brand officer, was charged with making sense of the brand portfolio and designing a strategy that would clearly differentiate each brand from the others and a brand architecture system to communicate to consumers how to navigate among them. She would need to decide whether and how to prune brands from the portfolio, whether and how to combine brands through dual-branding and or sub-branding strategies, and whether, where, and how to use the Marriott parent brand to endorse the remaining brands.

Unlike financial success, there is no clear consensus regarding how best to define and measure social impact. This HBS note written for students of the HBS, MBA, class - Business at the Base of the Pyramid, offers readers pragmatic perspectives on how the framework of the Logic Model (Theory-of-Change) may be used by businesses, nonprofits, and impact investors to assess the social value they create for their customers/beneficiaries and society. The note concludes with a brief tour of a few impact evaluation methodologies and their applications in areas such as hunger, healthcare, education, and microfinance.

Ferrari is among the world's most powerful brands but how the company operates has remained mysterious. The case reveals the inner workings of the company - the Ferrari Way - from the way it designs, produces, and markets its cars, to how its leadership team is driving future growth. Central to Ferrari's strategy is its response to disruptive changes in the automotive industry and their impact on the company's products and brand.

Three brothers discuss the succession plans of their shares in the publicly listed family business.

On the afternoon of Monday October 13, 2008, Hank Paulson Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, walked into the large conference room across the hall from his office in the Treasury Department. Joining him were Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Timothy Geithner, Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporate Sheila Bair, and the Chief Executive Officers of nine of the largest banks in the United States. This distinguished group had been brought together by the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Financial panic was pushing the U.S. and European financial systems to the brink of failure. Paulson hoped his meeting with the bank CEOs would be a turning point. U.S. financial markets were closed for Columbus Day, and Paulson was planning to announce the latest government actions to stabilize the financial system before markets reopened on Tuesday.

Life insurance is an asset owned by the majority of American adults (61%). Note that this 61% penetration rate is essentially at parity with home ownership (64%), and higher than that of 401(k) retirement account ownership (53%). Life settlements, or life insurance settlements, allow individuals to sell their life insurance policy in a secondary market. A life insurance policy is a tradable asset, for many individuals possibly the most valuable one in their portfolio after real estate and perhaps a retirement account. The fact that the policy is tradable, however, is hardly known to the general public. When surrendering a policy to the insurance carrier, the policyholder often incurs a substantial discount on its economic value. At the same time, the insurer keeps the difference between the policy's economic value and its surrender value. By selling a policy in the secondary market, in contrast, it is common to achieve a price markedly above the surrender value. Hence, life settlements allow policyholders to capture a much larger, if not full, share of their contracts'economic value. In this Industry Note, we lay out the basic structure of the market, the important players, and the basic economics. We also go into the potential ways to maximize returns in this market for both investors and policy holders.

Comparison of the U.S. Government response, using the $700 billion TARP fund, to downturns in the banking and auto industries during the global financial crisis.

Tianqiao Chen, founder and CEO of Shanda Group, has set up his family office in the U.S. in 2016 after exiting from Shanda's Internet games business in China in 2014, again pioneering an unconventional approach to the management of a family office.

In February 2011, Adam Koppel, a Managing Director at Brookside Capital, the public equity arm of Bain Capital, must decide whether to increase or exit the firm's position in Celgene Corporation. News has emerged that raises potential safety concerns associated with Celgene's key drug, Revlimid. In response, Celgene's share price has traded down 20% in the last two months, and is now almost 10% below the level where Brookside made their initial investment.

The U.S. Intellectual Property (IP) Ecosystem is one of the most robust and dynamic in the world -- and has been for centuries. The bedrock of this system is the'patent,'a legal document that allows its holder exclusive commercialization rights of a part of the'idea space'granted through the patent. Strong legal protection of IP has made the U.S. a destination of great thinkers and innovators worldwide in order to enjoy this legal protection of their valuable insights. A new threat, however, looms. The same legal system that has protected IP has been used to create an organizational form known as a'Patent Troll.'Patent Trolls amass patents for the sake of opportunistically extracting rents from firms producing and commercializing products. In this Industry Note, we describe the origin, evolution, costs, benefits, and future outlook for Patent Trolling in the United States.

In 2015 Root Capital, a pioneer in the impact investing space, began to explore how to more systematically integrate impact and financial management. After much deliberation, Root Capital landed on ex-ante rating system for any potential investment which produced a proprietary expected impact. With this tool in place, Root Capital had an integrated picture of impact and financial performance for a loan, and across its portfolio. The next question Root capital faced was how to use this tool to optimize impact and financial performance going forward. This case was designed to be taught alongside Root Capital's Efficient Impact Frontier Simulation exercise.

In January 2018, Xerox, a well-known American digital document firm, convened its board of directors to decide whether to approve a merger with Japanese imaging company Fujifilm. Activist Xerox shareholders were suing to halt the transaction, and documents unearthed during the subsequent discovery process revealed that the deal was negotiated by a conflicted CEO. This case study draws from contemporaneous deal documents and unsealed court records to provide a behind-the-scenes look at the deal dynamics. The case raises important issues of deal process design, negotiations, corporate law, and corporate governance.

This case explores how neuroscientist Mariam Chammat helped set up the first behavioral insights team at the center of the French government, and encouraged French administrations to innovate and create policy initiatives based on psychological theories of influence and persuasion. Students are asked to assess 35 projects ripe for behavioral intervention and pick the winning proposals.

Beginning in 2014, JPMorgan Chase launched Invested in Detroit, a $100 million philanthropic investment in the city over five years. The bank worked with local economic development organizations, workforce development organizations, small businesses, philanthropies, and the city government to put in place a series of investments to help turn around the struggling city. In 2017, JPMorgan Chases'chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, is faced the with decision of whether or not to expand the program to other locations in the U.S.

Supplement to case 919002.

For over half a century, most of the world's economies have enjoyed steady growth and prosperity. While this economic growth has reduced the number of people living in poverty, it has come with an increase in economic inequality. The gap between the'haves'and the'have-nots'in developed countries has widened, with a small proportion of the population reaping an increasingly larger share of a country's economic rewards. This growing economic inequality has been particularly pronounced in the United States, but the phenomenon has also occurred in many nations. This note provides background on aspects of economic inequality. It begins by describing both income inequality and wealth inequality, providing an explanation of two widely used metrics and data that show increasing inequalities over time. It then moves to the factors that might contribute to this inequality, as well to propositions of economic and social consequences that might result from the widening gap. Finally, it addresses the issue of'equality of opportunity'or social mobility. This is an update to the Note on Economic Inequality (2015). It provides additional information on economic inequality, including union membership and inequality and political polarization.

In February 2018, the Remuneration Committee together with the full Board of Directors of the Scotland-based engineering company The Weir Group had to decide whether to seek a shareholder vote at the upcoming Annual General Meeting in April on a proposal to reform the company's executive remuneration system. The stakes were high: two years earlier shareholders had so roundly rejected a proposal to reform the company's executive pay arrangements that the result had hit the headlines. A new pioneering proposal had been put together-one that, if successful, would not only mark a dramatic change for the company but would also serve as a test case for executive pay reform in the whole United Kingdom. Should they go ahead? How a second failure to get shareholders'approval would be recorded in the chronicle of a company soon to celebrate its 150th anniversary?

In July 2017, CEO Kevin Tabb of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center announced his plan to consolidate 11 Massachusetts hospitals under a common management structure. These hospitals collectively generated $5 billion in patient revenue and 25% of privately-insured hospital stays in the state. The merger would create a credible competitor to Partners Healthcare, the state's dominant health care provider, but would potentially reduce competition and raise prices. State regulators were assessing the merger, and Tabb needed to argue its merits.

Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has built a phenomenally successful business at global scale to become the fifth most valuable public company in the world. The revelation of Cambridge Analytica events in March 2018, where 78 million users'information was leaked in a 2016 US election cycle, exposed a breach of trust/privacy amongst its user community. In the past, growth at any costs appeared to be the de facto strategy. Now many voices such as regulators, advertisers, ethicists, shareholders and users argued for a more responsible approach to addressing their concerns. Mark Zuckerberg (CEO/Chair/Founder) and Sheryl Sandberg (COO) mapped out their six-point plan to address this existential threat. Could they continue to grow and rectify the breach of trust/privacy? Did other stakeholders have some greater responsibility too? In addition to issues of privacy and trust, there is a growing chorus of concern about'content moderation'- not for the easy topics like spam or copyright material -but for the hard things around political points of view, hate speech, polarizing perspectives, etc. How will Facebook strike the balance between free speech and corrosive content across billions of users and dozens of languages? Are they the arbiters of truth/censorship in the digital world?

The case examines an industry in decline as the emergence of new technologies is changing consumer behaviors and threatening to make the business obsolete. In 2018, the Hollywood film industry is facing tough headwinds. Fewer and fewer Americans are going to movie theaters, opting instead to watch movies on demand in the comfort of their own homes or on portable devices. Adam Aron, the head of the world's largest movie theater chain, AMC Entertainment, is employing an aggressive strategy to bolster the moviegoing experience by adding new amenities including plush reclining seats, reserved seating, and upscale food and beverage options. He is also placing a special emphasis on expansion overseas where the market is growing. Will his actions allow the company to successfully compete in a mature industry under assault by new digital competitors? With the growing popularity of entertainment subscription services like Netflix and Spotify, should AMC adopt a similar business model?

On a sunny Monday morning, Rev. Morgan-Thomas walked into her newly acquired hat factory thinking,'What have I gotten myself into? Things are worse than I imagined. Can I ever turn this company around given all of the known and unknown problems? Can I make it profitable?'

This case examines the role of Cisco led by John Chambers in facilitating web filtering in China. It begins with tracing the origins of Cisco as a pioneer of networking equipment. John Chambers, who had worked as a sales manager at IBM and Wang Laboratories, joined Cisco in 1991 and became CEO in 1995. The company expanded rapidly thereafter, acquiring many firms and growing globally, including in China, where it virtually created the internet. The case explores how the firm facilitated surveillance and monitoring of the internet in the Golden Shield project launched in 2000, and in 2004 served as a key participant in the CN2 upgrade which greatly enhanced official capability to filter content online. The case ends in 2007 with Chambers announcing further capital expenditure in China, but facing growing criticism in the US Congress and elsewhere for its human rights record. At the same time Cisco faced a power domestic competitor, Huawei, which had grown rapidly investment in innovation even as Cisco had focused on share buy-backs after experiencing a sharp fall in its share price following the end of the dot.com bubble. The case provides a vehicle for exploring the ethical and human rights responsibilities of corporations in the technology sector, and the impact of the internet on democracy.