In mid-January 2022, the members of the executive committee of Pfizer Inc. (Pfizer), a global pharmaceutical enterprise headquartered in New York, were facing a strategic dilemma. Having just received the company’s full financial results for the year ending December 2021, they were preparing for an upcoming conference call with analysts where, in addition to making these results public, they had to also provide revenue guidance for the year ending .....more

Teaching note for product W39054.

Acorai AB, a Swedish medical start-up, had developed a heart monitor designed to meet the needs of cardiologists worldwide. The portable heart monitor had demonstrated in clinical trials its equivalence to the prevailing gold standard of invasive blood pressure management. The establishment of proof of parity was a big step forward for the company, though the clinical trials were preliminary and the product on hand was only a prototype. <br><br>The .....more

Teaching note for product W42614.

Spreadsheet to accompany product W42615.

The founder of Cheekbone Beauty, an Indigenous enterprise in the Niagara Region of Ontario, was driven by the goal of becoming “the first Indigenous woman to create a unicorn beauty brand from Canada.” In early 2021, she was seeking resolution to an ongoing entrepreneurial dilemma: How should she identify the fledgling company’s unique strengths and build them into sustainable competitive advantages?<br><br>The Ivey Business School gratefully .....more

Teaching note for product W25813.

In March 2020, the chief innovation and strategy officer (CISO) of Amsterdam-based Koninklijke Philips NV (Philips), a global leader in health technology, was surveying the distance that Philips had traversed in its transition from products to platforms. The CISO faced three managerial dilemmas: How could he transform the long-standing functional orientation at Philips into a multidisciplinary alignment? How could he ensure that Philips’s customer-facing .....more

Teaching note for product W25545.

In February 2020, the director of Global Creative Intelligence at McCormick & Company, Inc. (McCormick), was grappling with some challenges at his desk at the company’s headquarters in the United States. Having been mandated to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) in developing new products—in partnership with IBM—he had been interfacing with over 500 product developers at the company’s various locations worldwide. The director faced three managerial .....more