Apollo Hospitals--First-World Health Care at Emerging-Market Prices

Felix  Oberholzer-Gee; Tarun   Khanna; Carin-Isabel  Knoop

Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2005 (Revised June 2007)

Apollo Hospitals--First-World Health Care at Emerging-Market Prices

by Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Tarun Khanna and Carin-Isabel Knoop

Abstract

The Apollo Hospitals Group, one of Asia's premier health care organizations, had come to rival the best health care organizations on the globe. Apollo offered advanced medical procedures, such as cardiac surgery using the beating heart technique, at very high levels of quality but at a fraction of the cost of hospitals in the West. Apollo's managers must decide how best to capitalize on the group's remarkable medical capabilities. One option was to bet on global medical tourism by trying to attract patients from Asia and worldwide needing advanced medical procedures. Thailand had set the example for medical tourism and attracted more than one million patients a year, most of them undergoing plastic surgery. Another option Apollo considered was to build and manage hospitals abroad.

Keywords: Vertical Integration; Decision Choices and Conditions; Health Care and Treatment; Global Strategy; Developing Countries and Economies; Health Industry; Thailand; United States; India;

Format: Print

20 pages

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Citation:

Oberholzer-Gee, Felix, Tarun Khanna, and Carin-Isabel Knoop. "Apollo Hospitals--First-World Health Care at Emerging-Market Prices." Harvard Business School Case 706-440, October 2005. (Revised June 2007.)

Alibaba's Rural Taobao initiative had been launched in 2014 as a public service initiative to increase e-commerce adoption in China’s remote rural areas. In the first two iterations of the initiative, dubbed “1.0” and “2.0,” Alibaba had partnered with local businesses and young returnees to operate village stations. Village stations served as logistical and educational hubs to help villagers make online purchases. Despite significant growth in sales through village stations, the business model was operating at a loss, and competitors JD and Pinduoduo were growing quickly, threatening to challenge Alibaba by claiming the rural e-commerce markets. Bill Wang, the head of the initiative, was tasked with designing and implementing the next model for Alibaba’s future expansion into rural areas. The decision centers around whether Alibaba should copy the successes of competitors JD and Pinduoduo, escalate commitment to its original value proposition (hands-on service to villagers), or embrace an entirely new model. The case highlights the competing pressures of financial performance, CSR and corporate mission, government relations, and long-term competitive positioning that are common to major strategic decisions.

In October 2018, Chef Carme Ruscalleda, the most-starred woman chef in the world at the time, closed the doors of her Restaurant Sant Pau (Sant Pau), as she had on almost every night for the past 30 years—this time for the last time. Ruscalleda had opened the restaurant in 1988 with her husband and partner. Sant Pau had a rating of three Michelin stars, the highest rating available to a restaurant through the well-known MICHELIN Guide to fine dining. Her other two restaurants—Sant Pau Tokyo, a sister restaurant in Japan, and Moments, in Barcelona’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel—had two Michelin stars each. Many people—from the village and around the world—were sad to see the iconic restaurant close after so many decades. The case describes her approach to cooking, managing teams, dealing with stress, running a family business and constantly reinventing herself.

Case | HBS Case Collection | September 2019

Earth Bank of Codes: Making Nature's Biological Assets Visible and Valuable for the Benefit of All

Tarun Khanna, Raffaella Sadun and Susie Ma

In 2019, entrepreneur Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio was developing a project he hoped could generate and share wealth from the natural resources of the Amazon without destroying those resources. His idea, called Earth Bank of Codes (EBC), would create a library of the genomic codes of all known species that could be tapped for discovery and innovation, from new medical interventions to more efficient manufacturing processes. He proposed to use blockchain technology to make the data both accessible and trackable so that its use could be monitored. Castilla-Rubio envisioned a time when a company in the U.S. could access a biological asset from the Peruvian Amazon, develop and commercialize a product based on the asset, and have a fraction of the resulting sales land directly in the bank account of various beneficiaries, including the Peruvian government and indigenous communities. Now he was facing major decisions about how to structure EBC to achieve his goals. Should he start at the top and build partnerships with national governments and inter-governmental organizations as the cornerstone of EBC? Or would it be better to forge ahead with a few stakeholders in an entrepreneurial project?

Keywords: Decision Making; Development Economics; Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention; Intellectual Property; Emerging Markets; Market Design; Marketplace Matching; Science; Genetics; Natural Environment; Environmental Sustainability; Weather and Climate Change; Social Enterprise; Strategy; Strategic Planning; Technology; Ownership; Social Psychology; Trust; Society; Biotechnology Industry; South America; Amazon Basin;

Citation:

Khanna, Tarun, Raffaella Sadun, and Susie Ma. "Earth Bank of Codes: Making Nature's Biological Assets Visible and Valuable for the Benefit of All." Harvard Business School Case 720-356, September 2019. View Details

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Apollo Hospitals--First-World Health Care at Emerging-Market Prices

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