chotuKool: 'Little Cool,' Big Opportunity

Rory  McDonald; Derek  van Bever; Efosa  Ojomo

Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2016 (Revised September 2016)

chotuKool: 'Little Cool,' Big Opportunity

by Rory McDonald, Derek van Bever and Efosa Ojomo

Abstract

In 2013, a team led by Gopalan Sunderraman, vice president of corporate development at Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd.—one of the companies owned by Godrej Group, a large Indian conglomerate—was preparing to launch an innovative low-cost refrigerator. Developed expressly for the approximately 80% of Indians who lacked access to refrigeration (a market Godrej had never before targeted), the chotuKool represented a technological marvel—a small, inexpensive thermoelectric appliance powered by a rechargeable battery. The case traces chotuKool’s development and evolution from an initial product concept inspired by theories of innovation and the strategic vision of Jamshyd Godrej (managing director and chairman at Godrej & Boyce Mfg.) to a promising new line of business that emerged from a process of learning and discovery through market feedback. As the company geared up for the broader rollout of chotuKool, Sunderraman and his team faced some tough questions. What was the proper target and scope for the launch? Which strategy gave them the best chance of success? Could chotuKool really redefine the company and bring refrigeration to hundreds of millions of Indians?

Keywords: Disruptive Innovation; Consumer Products Industry;

Language: English

Format: Print

18 pages

Educators Purchase

Citation:

McDonald, Rory, Derek van Bever, and Efosa Ojomo. "chotuKool: 'Little Cool,' Big Opportunity." Harvard Business School Case 616-020, June 2016. (Revised September 2016.)

Unlike traditional market segmentations that are based on a correlation of product sales or service with the attributes of the purchaser (such as age, gender, income level, and education level), jobs-based segmentation seeks to understand the causal roots of purchase—when a buyer needs to "hire" a product or service to get a "job" done. This note details the thought process and the methodology behind a jobs-based segmentation and provides numerous examples. It highlights three levels in the architecture of a job: 1) What is the fundamental job or problem the customer is facing? This includes political, functional, emotional, and social dimensions; 2) What are the experiences in purchase and use that, if all provided, would sum up to nailing the job perfectly? (The "hiring criteria"); and 3) What do we need to integrate, and how must we knit those things together, so that we can provide these experiences?

Article | Administrative Science Quarterly | June 2020

Parallel Play: Startups, Nascent Markets, and the Effective Design of a Business Model

Rory McDonald and Kathleen Eisenhardt

Prior research advances several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in the same nascent market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how entrepreneurs effectively design business models: parallel play. Similar to parallel play by preschoolers, entrepreneurs engaged in parallel play interweave action, cognition, and timing to accelerate learning about a novel world. Specifically, they (1) borrow from peers and focus on established substitutes, (2) test assumptions, then commit to a broad business-model template, and (3) pause before elaborating the activity system. The insights from our framework contribute to research on optimal distinctiveness, and to the learning and evolutionary-adjustment literature on search. More broadly, we blend organization theory with a fresh theoretical lens—business-model processes—to highlight how organizations actually work and create value.

Keywords: search; legitimacy; organizational innovation; organizational learning; mechanisms and processes; institutional entrepreneurship; qualitative methods; business model design; Business Model; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Emerging Markets; Adaptation; Competition; Strategy;