More from these Authors

• Case | HBS Case Collection | November 2019 (Revised June 2020)

  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.

  Keywords: carbon sequestration;

  Citation:

  Iansiti, Marco, Michael W. Toffel, and James Barnett. "Indigo Agriculture: Harnessing Nature." Harvard Business School Case 620-024, November 2019. (Revised June 2020.)  View Details

  CiteView DetailsEducatorsPurchase

  Related

• Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2019 (Revised June 2020)

  Wendell Weeks at Corning Inc.: Extending a History of Life-Changing Innovations (A)

  Ryan Raffaelli, David G. Fubini and Aldo Sesia

  This case examines the leadership challenges associated with maintaining a culture of innovation in established organizations. It asks students to step into the shoes of a leader faced with making several tough decisions about when to invest (or to stop investing) in radical innovation projects. Corning CEO Wendell Weeks, who nearly bankrupted the company in the early 2000s when he overinvested in fiber optics, must initially decide if the company should enter a then-risky deal with Steve Jobs to produce the glass covers for the first generation iPhones. The case then asks students to analyze the Corning’s 157-year innovation agenda that started with the development of a bulb-shaped glass encasement for Thomas Edison's new incandescent lamp. In the years that followed, Corning made investments that led to products such as PYREX cookware, fiber-optic broadband cable, LCD television screens, Gorilla Glass, and a recent bet on pharmaceuticals. At the end of the case, Weeks must decide if Corning should continue to invest in a new pharmaceutical packaging product that held enormous promise, but had already cost the company $200 million in R&D and might divert resources and attention from other key business lines.

  Citation:

  Raffaelli, Ryan, David G. Fubini, and Aldo Sesia. "Wendell Weeks at Corning Inc.: Extending a History of Life-Changing Innovations (A)." Harvard Business School Case 419-003, April 2019. (Revised June 2020.)  View Details

  CiteView DetailsEducatorsPurchase

  Related

• Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2020

  RBC: Transforming Transformation (A)

  Ethan Bernstein, Francesca Gino and Aldo Sesia

  In 2017, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), a Canadian financial icon, mandated a swat team of “enablers of collaboration” (their job description) to support the personal and commercial bank in the enterprise-wide RBC Cultural Transformation initiative. Historically, personal and commercial banks (P&CB) maintained long relationships with their clients who tended to do most if not all of their banking with one bank. However, by 2017, industry-wide change was well underway as switching costs had become negligible if not non-existent. New entrants were disrupting the banking industry as digitization allowed upstarts to break through long-standing barriers to entry. RBC’s Cultural Transformation, intended to reposition the enterprise for the “new normal” in the financial industry, included the creation of this team of collaboration enablers (called Operations Transformation or OT) to drive efficiencies across operations within the current fulfillment operating model and importantly to envision and enable a new digital operating model where people only intervened in a transaction when there was an exception, i.e., a transaction that fell outside the technology’s capabilities. OT was tasked with enabling—through collaboration and without radical surgery—the day-to-day optimization of P&CB fulfillment activities and facilitating major change in the way work was done. At the time of the case, eighteen months in, the team was seeing mixed results, which deeply troubled its leadership. Questions abounded: Was it foolish to try to enable major change through collaboration without upending the traditional RBC organization with more radical approaches? Or was the OT group not structured correctly to enable it—and if not, what changes should be made? Was a different collaboration model needed? Internally, some questioned whether the group was optimally located within the organization (as part of the back office organization structure), since the back office was often viewed as more of a servant to the front office. Others wondered if OT’s internal structure was getting in the way of its purpose. The case examines three major transformation projects that OT is collaborating on with colleagues from Banking Operations and Risk Operations to understand what contributed to less than hoped for results. With this information OT leadership needs to think about changes, if any, moving forward from a structural, organizational, and capability perspective.

  Keywords: Service Delivery; Technology; Transformation; Change Management; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Decision Making; Human Resources; Management Systems; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Groups and Teams; Management Teams; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Canada;

  Citation:

  Bernstein, Ethan, Francesca Gino, and Aldo Sesia. "RBC: Transforming Transformation (A)." Harvard Business School Case 920-008, June 2020.  View Details

  CiteView DetailsEducators

  Related