Browse abstracts and ordering information for case studies written and published by faculty at Stanford GSB.
For publicly available cases in this collection, Harvard Business Impact and Ivey Publishing distribute in North America, and The Case Centre and IESE Publishing in Europe.
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Royal Bank of Canada: Using People Strategy and Analytics To Drive Employee Performance (B)
This is the follow up case to “Royal Bank of Canada: Using People Strategy and Analytics to Drive Employee Performance (A).” This (B) case presents the results of the company’s two major people analytics projects, which are described in the (A) case. The…
nuTonomy: The Global Race to Get a Robotaxi to Your Door
nuTonomy was an innovative company spun out of MIT that sought to develop Automated Mobility on Demand (AMoD) services: fleets of highly automated on-demand vehicles or “robotaxis.” The two founders had developed software and algorithms for autonomous…
Stanford Medicine: Health IT Purchasing Decisions in a Complex Medical Organization
Deep Technology Applications in Developing Economies: Three Vignettes
As developing economies grow and become more connected, new and exciting entrepreneurial opportunities arise across markets and industries. Smartphones, the best sensors on earth have already been deployed and new technologies, such as Machine Learning…
Rachio: Marketing a Disruptive Sprinkler Technology
General Electric in 2017: Naming and Claiming the Industrial Internet
From 2010 to 2017, General Electric pivoted from an industrial behemoth to a data-driven tech company by incorporating big data analytics across all of their subsidiaries. As the world’s first “digital industrial” company, it named and the Industrial…
NetApp 2017
Corporate Venture Capital Primer
The corporate venture capital (CVC) primer follows the journey of Claudia Fan Munce, the head of CVC for a major software and hardware conglomerate, as she and her team source and diligence partnership opportunities with startups in the healthcare…
Birch Benders
The Birch Benders case follows the story of Matt LaCasse and Lizzie Ackerman as they embark on a journey to make the world’s best pancake mix. Through their trials and tribulations, the readers learn of the nuances involved in crafting an immaculate…
Restructuring a Utility: RWE's Carve-out of Innogy
In 2016, the German utility RWE undertook a carve-out in which substantial parts of the company’s assets and liabilities were offered to the general public as part of an IPO. The case describes the developments in the German energy landscape that led RWE…
Clover (A)
Clover Network’s founders didn’t see the curveball coming at the end of 2012. The two-year-old start-up had just nine employees. It had dumped its first business idea, pivoted from its second, and was working hard on a new product: a tablet-based cash…
AstraZeneca: Scaling Simplification
How can a huge global company simplify its operations? AstraZeneca, a 60,000-employee pharmaceutical giant, faced a “patent cliff” starting around 2012, and saw revenue and income fall sharply for several years running. CEO Pascal Soriot outlined several…
AB InBev: Brewing an Innovation Strategy
AB InBev, the world’s largest beer company, faced serious challenges in 2017. First, large food and beverage companies were under-pressure due to shifting consumer preferences towards healthier products and increasing price pressure from retailers. The…
Daimler: Reinventing Mobility
In 2017, significant changes were sweeping the global automotive industry: the rapid growth of electric vehicles, the race to develop commercially reliable autonomous cars and the ride-sharing phenomenon. Those trends were magnified by technological…
Charles Schwab Corp. in 2017
By almost any measure, Charles Schwab Corp. appeared to be killing it in 2017. The wealth management, banking, custody and brokerage firm’s stock was trading near its all-time high. It was posting unprecedented levels of new client accounts, net new…
The Thiel Foundation: Contrarian Philanthropy
Before becoming an entrepreneur and investor, Peter Thiel pursued a more conventional, white-collar path. He moved between jobs as a judicial clerk, a lawyer, and a Wall Street trader. In 1998, Peter Thiel cofounded PayPal with Max Levchin. In 2002…
Pandora
The offices of Pandora Media were thick with excitement and anxiety in March 2017. The company had just launched its new streaming music subscription service, Pandora Premium. The product was a major departure for Pandora, which since 2005 had built its…
General Electric in 2017: Naming and Claiming the Industrial Internet
From 2010 to 2017, General Electric pivoted from an industrial behemoth to a data-driven tech company by incorporating big data analytics across all of their subsidiaries. As the world’s first “digital industrial” company, it named and the Industrial…
Royal Bank of Canada: Using People Strategy and Analytics To Drive Employee Performance (A)
This case discusses how the leaders of the Royal Bank of Canada infused the 80,000-employee company with a new emphasis on People Analytics. This supported the bank’s business strategies for its wide range of business units. The bank’s new People…
Paradise Bakery & Cafe: The Challenge of Success
Paradise Bakery and Café: The Challenges of Success traces the journey of entrepreneur Daniel Patterson from the founding of his bakery in Southern California, through the challenges of growth, to an eventual sale, and a post-acquisition crisis. The case…
Automakers in the Sharing Economy: An Examination of the Burgeoning Mobility Industry and Automakers’ Strategies
This paper compares different types of shared mobility solutions, in particular carsharing and ride hailing, the two most prevalent forms today. It describes the major trends prompting OEMs to engage in the mobility industry, such as urbanization…
TTTech in 2017: When Market and Technology Trends Align with Company Capabilities
“TTTech in 2017: When Market and Technology Trends Align with Company Capabilities” examines the Austrian technology company TTTech. A global leader in robust networked safety controls, TTTech developed hardware and software solutions that improved the…
PayPal in 2017: Continuing to Reshape the Payments Landscape
Between 2013 and 2017 PayPal had grown from $8 billion to almost $11 billion in revenues and had a market cap of over $70 billion. In addition, the product and cultural transformations of the organization made the firm feel like an entirely new company…
Medium in 2017: Developing a New Model for Media
The Medium Corporation seeks to change how people author, consume and engage with content on the Internet. Founded by Ev Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter, the company developed a digital publishing platform and set of social network tools that…
Podcases: Case Studies, Reimagined