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• Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | December 2019

  Under Armour

  Rory McDonald and Matt Higgins

  Citation:

  McDonald, Rory, and Matt Higgins. "Under Armour." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 620-070, December 2019.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | November 2019 (Revised December 2019)

  Marcus by Goldman Sachs

  Rory McDonald, Samir Junnarkar and David Lane

  Five years on from the 2008 financial crisis, Goldman Sachs remained wounded. Revenues at the global investment bank had stagnated below pre-crisis levels, and the firm had yet to rebound from a substantial decline in securities-trading revenues. Marcus by Goldman Sachs was one response—an effort that operated as a start-up but was sponsored by senior Goldman executives—to grow the firm’s revenues by entering consumer banking with digital-only offerings. The moved marked a dramatic cultural as well as product shift: the 150 year-old institution historically served only businesses and the wealthiest of individuals. In 2016, Marcus launched unsecured personal loans for the mass market; it rolled out high-yield deposits in 2017 and a credit card in partnership with Apple in 2019. By autumn of that year, Marcus had $5 billion in loans outstanding and $55 billion in deposits. It also faced a dilemma—ceaseless and rapid expansion had strained its people and infrastructure, yet Goldman expected Marcus to generate $1 billion in revenues in 2020. What now was the better bet, to pause to allow performance to catch up with growth, or to seize the additional opportunities that beckoned for Marcus to diversify into consumer finance products?

  Keywords: Corporate Entrepreneurship; Banks and Banking; Innovation Leadership; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Organizational Culture; Financial Services Industry; United Kingdom;

  Citation:

  McDonald, Rory, Samir Junnarkar, and David Lane. "Marcus by Goldman Sachs." Harvard Business School Case 620-005, November 2019. (Revised December 2019.)  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | November 2019 (Revised December 2019)

  Indigo Agriculture: Harnessing Nature

  Marco Iansiti, Michael W. Toffel and James Barnett

  Indigo Agriculture used a digital-enabled research and development (R&D) process to launch its initial product, microbial coatings for agricultural seeds, which increase crop yields while reducing the need for fertilizers. In doing so, the company developed direct relationships with farmers, in contrast to typical agricultural supply chains that use intermediaries. The company then launched a marketplace platform to link growers directly to crop buyers, again disintermediating the market. Indigo Agriculture is now considering launching an initiative to incentivize farmers to engage in regenerative agricultural practices by setting up a carbon market that could pay them for sequestering carbon into their soils. If scaled globally, the idea could sequester as much as one trillion tons (a teraton) of carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere into agricultural soils, but pursing the idea has many risks.

  Citation:

  Iansiti, Marco, Michael W. Toffel, and James Barnett. "Indigo Agriculture: Harnessing Nature." Harvard Business School Case 620-024, November 2019. (Revised December 2019.)  View Details

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