Resolute Marine Energy (RME) founder and CEO Bill Staby and COO Olivier Ceberio believed their company’s wave energy desalination system could provide safe and affordable drinking water to water-stressed communities. They set their sights on launching RME’s Wave2O system in Ugu, South Africa, popula...

Over the seven years since its founding in 2010, Spartan Race grew to be the world’s most popular obstacle course race provider. Spartan’s CEO and founder was contemplating an initial public offering but was unsure how the new global revenue recognition standard that the company was in the process o...

The 2007-09 Great Recession took a huge bite out of the U.S. restaurant industry as consumers ate out less often. Even during the subsequent economic recovery, ongoing financial concerns continued to depress the appetite for eating out. The casual dining sector, situated in the middle ground between...

In mid-2018, the U.S. auto industry was in the early stages of what many believed would be a significant evolution in how people thought about and used cars. The future would be dominated by electric and autonomous vehicles. Car ownership in which people paid for a hard asset with all its bells and ...

Set in 2009, and based on interviews with and publications by MIT Sloan Professors Simon Johnson and Andrew Lo, this note describes the “why” and “how” behind the global financial crisis that hit in 2008 as well as the short-term and long-range solutions being publicly advocated by Johnson and Lo.

In late 2003, salt producer Compass Minerals celebrated its first day trading as a public company on the NASDAQ. Knowing that it would continue to wrestle with how to price its product and respond to competitive and environmental challenges as a publicly traded company, Compass Minerals would now ha...

In 2008, Hannah Jones, Nike’s new VP of Corporate Responsibility, wanted the company to be a leader in creating sustainable footwear, and subsequently developed a strategy for working with the product units to do so. Questions remained about whether Nike was on the right track and if the company was...

Throughout 2017 and into 2018, Tesla was burning through cash as the company sought to ramp up production of its Model 3 all-electric vehicle (EV). Investors were questioning whether Tesla would need to raise additional capital. While the company had been successful in the past at issuing both equit...

In January 2015, after several stints at the U.S. Department of State and a New York communications consultancy, Medora Brown packed her bags and moved to Kenya to pursue a passion for social enterprise. She had been accepted as a communications fellow at Sanergy, a company providing modern sanitati...

Corning’s Growth and Strategy Council—a centralized team that included the CEO, COO, and CTO who were heavily involved in managing the company’s innovation strategy—had enabled the company to continually re-create itself with new technologies and products. Set in 2008, the case highlights the inner ...