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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For roughly a decade, the team at Emphasys Medical had been working to design, develop, and then gain regulatory approval in the U.S. to market an innovative new device therapy to treat emphysema. However, after investing millions of dollars to test the…
Community service had a long history of success at NIKE. Often, employees did not even see their work as “volunteering”—they felt like they were doing what they loved and making a difference to the people around them. Despite this enthusiasm, corporate…
An initial public offering (IPO) is the first sale of stock or shares by a company to the public. IPOs are often issued by smaller, younger companies seeking capital to expand, although they can also be done by large privately owned companies looking to…
JetBlue Airways grew rapidly from its founding in 2000, focusing on providing low-cost service to previously underserved cities, while giving passengers a high-quality experience, (“bringing humanity back to air travel”). An ice storm at JFK airport on…
By 2008, Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba.com Inc., was in a position to consider how to fortify Taobao’s dominant position in China’s online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) market. Ma and his company had come a long way since May 2003, when they first launched the…
The case highlights the evolution of a wide-area-network (WAN) optimization company from its founding day to its potential IPO. It explores the various challenges faced by management along the way, both in terms of determining what characteristics are…
Kevin Donnelly, a junior partner at up and coming venture firm New Wave Ventures, has invested in NOW!, a start-up consumer internet company. Kevin and Mark Rosen, NOW!’s founder, agree to hire a new CEO, Todd Brown, to lead and develop a compelling…
Vocera Communications (B) is a company update as of 2007, after a new CEO/Chairman was hired. The company had evolved over the years into a healthcare technology company, and several other significant changes had taken place, specifically regarding…
This case presents two vignettes from the perspective of Laura White, a newly-promoted manager of the Cook Islands operations for a large Australian bank. In Vignette A, White learns of the existence of an Offshore Banking Unit (OBU) – the source of…
In 2002, Baker Hughes was accused of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). This case describes the actions taken by the company in response to those accusations. These include hiring a third-party law firm to undertake an independent…
Netflix was among a small group of Silicon Valley companies to emerge from the technology bubble of the late 1990s a clear winner in terms of growth, market share, and profitability. That Netflix was able not only to prevail over this competition but also…
These vignettes follow Mary Simmons as she progresses through her career in marketing at Proctor & Gamble and then later when she started her own consumer product company. In both vignettes, Mary is faced with an ethical dilemma regarding the marketing of…
In Part A, Valley Systems, a computer hardware company which manufactures high performance internetworking systems, was six months post-IPO and struggling to make their quarterly earnings. Matt Tucker, the company’s CEO, was very concerned about the…
