Advanced Leadership Pathways: Laurent Adamowicz and Bon'App

Teaching Note for Case 314-028. After a successful career as Chairman and CEO of Paris-based luxury food company, Fauchon, Laurent Adamowicz sought to provide a solution to a large scale complex problem. Ultimately, Adamowicz created a mobile application to provide consumers with more accessible and interpretable knowledge about the food they were eating to improve health outcomes. Adamowicz recognized that Harvard's Advanced LeadershipInitiative would provide him with resources, industry connections, and interdisciplinary collaboration to make a product that could address and/or prevent the type of continued excess caloric consumption that had contributed to the American obesity crisis. Collaboration with Harvard students and other fellows motivated Adamowicz to pursue the creation and development of a best-in-class smart phone application. Despite Adamowicz's focus on promoting healthful and informed eating habits, many choices still lay ahead of him in deciding how to develop a platform and database, the type of business model that would best support his goals, and the types of collaboration and marketing techniques that would get his idea off the ground. This case may be used for courses on entrepreneurship, social enterprise, leadership, and change management.