On February 16, 2021, Slave Free Chocolate removed Tony’s Chocolonely (Tony’s), a chocolate company based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from its “Ethical Chocolate Companies” list due to Tony’s association with Barry Callebaut, a cocoa processor associated with child slavery in West Africa. Tony’s, a B Corp-certified company whose founding mission was to eradicate child slavery from the cocoa supply chain, had to address its public removal from the .....more

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

In June 2018, the executive vice-president of Networks and Information Technology of KPN BV (KPN), Bouke Hoving, was evaluating the digital transformation of KPN, the leading telecommunications company in the Netherlands. Hoving had been an initiator of a turnaround that had started at KPN in 2014, after a financially and operationally hectic year. The entry into the market of over-the-top digital services, which used the Internet to bypass platforms .....more

Eneco Group, the second largest utility company in the Netherlands, launched a smart thermostat, Toon, that served as a platform for energy management services. Toon quickly became the gold standard for smart homes in the Netherlands. In January 2017, top management needed to discuss the strategic priorities to keep Toon’s lead and hold off the competition.

In late 2016, an analyst at Oliver Wyman (OW), was contemplating the high stakes of her new project. European riverboat company Temarca Group (Temarca) had just approached Duke Royalty (Duke) seeking €9.0 million to expand its riverboat fleet at the time. The analyst had to consider the first potential investment for the newly-formed partnership. If a financing decision was made, Temarca would be one of the first investments in Duke’s portfolio. The .....more

ING Groep NV, a successful Dutch-based bank with operations in over 40 countries, had a very successful year in 2016. The bank had achieved strong growth in customer numbers, savings, and lending. However, digitization was disrupting the banking industry. ING Groep NV had successfully taken multiple initiatives to tackle the fundamental changes driven by the digital disruption, but its future, like that of all the other major traditional banks, remained .....more

In 2007, when Tata Steel (Tata) bought the Anglo-Dutch steel maker, Corus Group plc (Corus), it was a moment of great promise for India’s growing steel industry. At almost 10 times the size of Tata, Corus was a company of enormous scale. The importance of that scale was reflected in Tata’s need to raise the price of its original offer by a premium of 34 per cent. Tata’s aim was to become a formidable force in the world steel industry. It stood to .....more

In January 2016, the program director of Royal FloraHolland and a supply chain consultant met to develop a supply chain strategy that would allow Royal FloraHolland to adapt to the changing competitive environment that jeopardized its business model. Royal FloraHolland was the largest floriculture auction organization in the world, selling more than 30 million flowers and plants daily. Located in the Netherlands, Royal FloraHolland was a co-operative .....more

DSM, a global life sciences, business-to-business company, is in the midst of a massive multi-year corporate rebranding exercise to incorporate the concept of creating sustainable shared value. With few precedents in this industry, the company must develop its own processes and implementation. Students are challenged to define the next steps in the rebranding, including the promotion of DSM’s sustainability positioning as its key differentiator.

Philips’ new venture integration (NVI) department is aware of the fact that many acquisitions turn into “deals from hell” instead of “deals from heaven.” Its post-merger integration specialists have learned that cost synergies are far easier to realize than sales (or growth) synergies. Stimulated by the urge to grow, the NVI department has developed a new methodology called the “sales integration approach” to realize sales (or growth) synergies. It .....more