In 2014, ProGlove emerged the third-place winner in Intel''s "Make It Wearable Challenge". The ProGlove team of four who had met at the Technical University of Munich in Bavaria, Germany, had submitted the idea of a "smart glove," which was a barcode scanner, motion detector, and RFID reader connected to the back of an industrial-grade work glove for use in high volume manufacturing. The idea was based on observations of .....more

This Note introduces a module of cases used at Harvard Business School to teach fundamental concepts about navigating nascent industries and product categories. It elaborates a set of ''innovation tensions'' that managers must address in these domains. In connecting the cases to scholarly research on nascent industries (including research by the author), the module builds out a structured process for identifying the tensions and proposes .....more

In 2021, the car manufacturer National Electric Vehicle Sweden (NEVS) faced the challenge of securing funding from its investor to launch an innovative mobility solution based on fleets of shared autonomous driving (AD) cars. The system was complex as it required the development of several interconnected components: from AD cars to a system to coordinate the vehicles with the city''s digital and physical infrastructure. Furthermore, AD cars .....more

Supplement to case 619003.

The case illustrates the inventory management dilemma at The Star Clinic, a mobile medical clinic. The resident doctor at the clinic prefers commonly prescribed medicines, in particular Panadol, a brand of paracetamol (a pain relief drug), to be well stocked whereas the procurement manager seeks to minimise the holding cost of medicines. Wanting to set a very high patient service level, the doctor is demanding paracetamol to be readily available .....more

Charu Thomas, cofounder and CEO of Ox, a software platform provider that helped retailers improve online order fulfillment, was proud of how her business had grown and earned positive feedback from investors, beta customers, and the press. Now, in the summer of 2021, revenue was on track to meet projections, and she began a comprehensive analysis of her costs, especially cloud hosting and computing costs. Ox''s software was built and relied .....more

Spreadsheet supplement to case UV8469.

Toyota''s supply chain, long admired as an industry benchmark for efficiency and effectiveness, was unable to supply critical parts to replenish inventory in its plants pursuant to the global chip shortages that resulted from the general disruption created by the Covid-19 pandemic. During the first quarter of 2021, the delta variant of the virus was spreading across the globe. Southeast Asia, where Toyota sourced many auto components, was .....more

Beyond providing increased opportunities to underrepresented businesses for participating in the procurement process, supplier-diversity initiatives offer substantive financial benefits to the buyer organization. However, significant challenges may be associated with designing, implementing, and evaluating the socioeconomic impact of supplier-diversity initiatives. This technical note is designed to introduce the concept of supplier diversity in supply .....more

Godrej Appliances Division (GAD) of Godrej & Boyce manufacturing company limited - which had been around for more than 60 years and was the first company to manufacture refrigerators in India - began to face intense competition in the early to late 2000s due to the entry of multinational companies (MNCs), such as LG and Samsung, after liberalization of the Indian economy. GAD had been among the top-3 players in the industry until the entry of .....more