Production I.G: Challenging the Status Quo

Andrei  Hagiu; Tarun   Khanna; Felix  Oberholzer-Gee; Masako  Egawa; Chisato  Toyama

Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2006 (Revised March 2007)

Production I.G: Challenging the Status Quo

by Andrei Hagiu, Tarun Khanna, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Masako Egawa and Chisato Toyama

Abstract

In July 2006, Mitsuhisa Ishikawa wondered how he could further enhance the success and visibility of his animation production company headquartered in Tokyo, Production I.G. For the year ended May 2006, Production I.G. had sales of 5,439 million yen ($47.3 million), operating profit of 404 million yen ($3.5 million), and 184 employees. Its recent film Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2 competed at Cannes Film Festival in 2004, and the company had gone public in December 2005. These were no small accomplishments for a Japanese animation production company. Indeed, despite the global success of Japanese animation, the industry was fragmented with about 430 animation production companies and dominated by distributors--TV stations, movie distributors, DVD distributors and advertising agencies, which held the lion's share of content copyrights. Distributors controlled the funding and contracted the production out to animation production companies. As a result, most of the latter were small companies laboring in obscurity. As such, no Japanese animation production company came even close to the size of Walt Disney Co.: in 2005 Disney had revenues of $32 billion, whereas Toei Animation, the largest animation production company in Japan, had revenue of only 21 billion yen ($175 million). To Ishikawa's mind, one of the key decisions concerned the mix of the "contents garden" that his company should aspire to. Should he increase the share of animation productions based on manga (comics and print cartoons) relative to original-productions (i.e. animation stories created entirely by Production I.G.)?

Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Competitive Advantage; Markets; Animation Entertainment; Going Public; Growth and Development Strategy; Motion Pictures and Video Industry; Tokyo;

Format: Print

21 pages

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Citation:

Hagiu, Andrei, Tarun Khanna, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Masako Egawa, and Chisato Toyama. "Production I.G: Challenging the Status Quo." Harvard Business School Case 707-454, October 2006. (Revised March 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.

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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This paper examines the role that the two lead authors’ personal connections played in the research methodology and data collection for the Partition Stories Project—a mixed-methods approach to revisiting the much-studied historical trauma of the Partition of British India in 1947. The Project collected survivors’ oral histories, a data type that is a mainstay of qualitative research, and subjected their narrative data to statistical analysis to detect aggregated trends. In this paper, the authors discuss the process of straddling the dichotomies of insider/outsider and qualitative/quantitative, address the “myth of informed objectivity,” and consider the need for hybrid research structures with the intent to innovate in humanities projects such as this. In presenting key learnings from the project, this paper highlights the tensions that the authors faced between positivist and interpretivist methods of inquiry, looks at the difference between “insider” and “outsider” categories of positionality, and discusses in the quantification of qualitative oral history data. The paper concludes with an illustrative example from one of the lead authors’ past research experiences to suggest that the tensions of this project are general in occurrence and global in applicability, beyond the specifics of the Partition case study explored here.

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Production I.G: Challenging the Status Quo

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