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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This case follows John Fernandez, CEO of Massachusetts Eye and Ear, as he evaluates whether or not his organization should join Partners HealthCare, the state’s largest healthcare provider. Starting in the mid-2000s, there was a growing trend towards…
Walker & Company follows Tristan Walker, the GSB alumnus and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, as he searches for an idea around which to start a business. After a period of sifting through ideas and performing diligence on opportunities ranging from hair…
It is a major global health challenge to get life-saving vaccines to children in hard-to-reach parts of Africa and Asia. These vaccines must stay cool during transport, yet it is not always possible to prevent heat exposure. Historically, health workers…
Centered on Practice Fusion, a free web-based electronic health record (EHR) company based in San Francisco, the Practice Fusion case examines the rapid growth of EHR systems in the United States from 2009 to 2014. The case discusses the challenges…
Entrepreneurs looking to launch start-ups in developing economies must confront numerous challenges that their peers in more developed countries may be less likely to encounter. Depending on the country in which they are operating, entrepreneurs in…
Alchemist Accelerator follows the story of Ravi Belani, founder and Managing Director of Alchemist Accelerator, as he leads one of the leading enterprise-focused accelerators in Silicon Valley. The case discusses the origins of the program, as well as the…
In 2016, Deutsche Telekom’s CEO Tim Höttges was steering the €69 billion telecom incumbent in new directions and seeking to disrupt the industry from within. The company’s tagline was “Life is For Sharing.” Its goal was to be Europe’s leading digital…
In 1998, Courtney Kingston persuaded her family to expand their ranch in Chile from dairy and cattle into wine. By March 2016, Kingston Family Vineyards had a strong international brand for its small-production wines and successfully sold the remaining…
As of 2016, Mathias Döpfner, chief executive officer (CEO) of Axel Springer SE, had successfully transitioned the German publishing house through a major digital transformation in the world of journalism. Given the massive disruption that had occurred…
In 2009, brothers Patrick and John Collison began working on a start-up called Stripe that made it simple for companies to send and receive money around the world. By the end of 2016, Stripe had expanded far beyond an online payment mechanism. Fueled by…
Near the end of 2008, Tyler Gage and Dan MacCombie enrolled in an entrepreneurship course at Brown University. During the class, they refined the business plan for Runa, a beverage company that would make drinks from guayusa, a little-known leaf that…
In late May 2009, New Vine Logistics (“New Vine”), a Napa-based wine shipping and fulfillment company, abruptly closed its doors, leaving hundreds of clients scrambling for information on their orders and inventory. Six days after New… |
The purpose of this case is to illustrate why Napa Valley wine producers find it both irresistible and challenging to enter the growing Chinese wine market. Over the course of the 2000s, China went from being the 51st largest wine importer in the world to…
Orb, a tiny Silicon Valley start-up, came up with a breakthrough technology. Before anyone else was doing it, Orb developed software that enabled every type of media on a PC (including music, photos, and videos) to be streamed remotely to any mobile…
Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone company founded in 2010, had quickly become an industry leader in the Chinese market. By 2016 it had started to expand internationally, and this case lays out the company’s globalization strategies and challenges moving…
The Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) was established in 2008 to improve the lives of individuals by strengthening our social, governmental, and economic systems. Cofounders Laura and John Arnold sought to deploy the majority of their wealth, time…
Established in 1999, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation aims to transform the lives of children living in urban poverty through better health, education, and family economic stability. Initially focusing on Central Texas, the foundation rapidly expanded…
This 2016 case describes how Bare Escentuals used innovative product design and marketing to transform itself from a local San Francisco retailer into one of the leading cosmetic companies in the United States. In 1995, the company launched bareMinerals…
Tristan Walker was a 32-year-old entrepreneur. A visionary thinker and GSB graduate, Walker had accomplished much in his short career, and had worked briefly at Twitter, Foursquare, and Andreessen Horowitz before founding his own company, Walker & Company…
Noam Angrist cofounded Young 1ove with the promise of connecting young Africans to proven life-saving information. By massively scaling sexual health information campaigns that were previously shown in randomized trials to have significant impact, he…
Psaltry International Limited was an agricultural processing company located in rural Nigeria. The company refined cassava into high-quality food-grade starch, which was used in many consumer products. As of 2016, Psaltry had 300 employees and operated…
In 2015, Federica Marchionni left her position as the president of the high fashion company Dolce & Gabbana USA to become the CEO of Lands’ End. She came with a mandate to drive the $1.4 billion iconic American clothing company into the next era. This…
The purpose of this case is to look at Autodesk’s cultural and technological challenges as the company faces a changing industry. With various innovations such as the cloud, the Internet of things, and various new manufacturing processes affecting every…
This case describes how eBay Inc. CEO John Donahoe, leading a multibillion-dollar global technology company in a highly competitive and changing environment, embraced design thinking as a key ingredient of culture change and a catalyst for growth and…
