BakedBros, a renowned name in the cannabis-infused product industry, has established itself as a prominent player in the edibles market. Founded with a passion for creating high-quality cannabis products, the company has significantly impacted the industry by producing innovative, consistent, and safe edibles. However, like any business, it faces its unique set of challenges and opportunities:

BakedBros aims to overcome the hurdles associated with slowing sales during the summer months in Arizona. This season brings an "exodus" from the Southwest as snowbirds head back home and schools are out for the season. This trend significantly impacts the local market dynamics, and BakedBros is keen to explore new and unique marketing tactics to better equip them for the challenges this seasonal shift presents. To tackle this challenge effectively, acquire a deeper understanding of the seasonal Arizona market, specifically focusing on the cannabis industry. Uncover marketing strategies and business approaches that can not only weather the summer slump but also potentially thrive during this period. Help the company find a way to capitalize on this seasonal market shift and potentially set new industry standards for navigating such challenges. Explore the intricacies of BakedBros' business challenge and engage in an insightful and educational journey to craft innovative solutions that will not only help the company navigate the Arizona cannabis market but also provide valuable insights for the broader cannabis industry. It's a unique opportunity to apply strategic thinking, marketing expertise, and industry knowledge to solve a real-world business challenge in a dynamic and rapidly evolving sector.

Iconically seeks to define its product-market fit by identifying the ideal customer profile and validating its unique value proposition. This project will involve analyzing existing data, market research, and industry trends to develop insights without direct interaction with customers or company contacts.

While adidas was the founder of running shoes, their success at expanding beyond running shoes to keep up with Nike has created the perception of them as a "fashion brand". As a result  today's generation of runners are favoring specialty brands that cater to runners. This project will focus on analyzing market trends, understanding consumer behavior, and identifying strategies to win the loyalty of today's generation of runners against Nike and the top 3 US Running Brands (Brooks, New Balance, ASICS).

The Weather Channel (TWC) aims to explore new avenues for partnering with companies beyond traditional TV commercials. With a focus on leveraging their influence on weather, water, and climate conditions, TWC is looking to create new, non-traditional partnerships that drive revenue while expanding their digital marketing portfolio. The objective is to identify and propose innovative methods of incorporating product tie-ins, program sponsorships, and co-branding that align with TWC’s unique programming and audience.

Weather affects every business. WeatherTrends360's proprietary year-ahead forecasting model of seasonal sales and weather tells you what's coming, giving you time to plan inventory, advertising, allocation, and markdowns proactively. Trusted by the Fortune 100 and Main Street, it's the next generation of weather-based predictive analytics. Our passion is Better Business in any Weather. Our technology predicts year-ahead weekly temperatures, rainfall, and snowfall by a week out one year for every 1 mile on Earth. It also predicts any 3rd party metric where 3-5+ years of weekly data are available by location.

Weather Trends International, Inc. is looking for new verticals where the year-ahead predictive sales and weather analytics can help in humanitarian sectors, precisely how disease or hospital applications predict emergency room visits due to weather conditions associated with climate change; extremes in the rain, snow, heat, cold all create a big influx in a surprise emergency room visits and exacerbate diseases outbreaks such as Malaria.

Solé Bicycles has established a strong reputation for offering fashionable and affordable bicycles directly to consumers. As the company looks toward expansion, it plans to launch a line of E-Bikes in 2023. This new product line represents an exciting opportunity to enter a rapidly growing market with significant potential, as demand for e-bikes is on the rise due to urban commuting needs, delivery services, and leisure biking trends.

The challenge Solé faces is determining how best to position its new E-Bike line to target the right consumer segments, differentiate itself from competitors, and effectively communicate its value proposition. Success will depend on identifying the optimal customer base, determining the features and pricing that align with their needs, and designing strategic marketing campaigns that drive purchases and establish Solé as a key player in the e-bike market.

This project invites students to develop comprehensive, data-driven strategies for Solé’s E-Bike launch, focusing on customer segmentation, competitive benchmarking, product positioning, and go-to-market strategies.

True Religion, a powerhouse denim brand since the early 2000s, has undergone significant restructuring and recently emerged from bankruptcy. As part of its reinvention, the company is working to revitalize both its business and corporate culture. With improved financial performance and the ability to pay bonuses, True Religion has seen positive cultural shifts and is ready to build on this momentum by expanding its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

The company’s Human Resources (HR) team seeks assistance in developing a robust DEI strategy that not only strengthens internal culture but also engages employees in community outreach. Employees are eager to participate in initiatives such as a Culture Committee and Diversity Council, with a focus on serving underserved communities—particularly children. True Religion’s DEI vision emphasizes diversity across gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, ability, and age, aligning with the company’s mission to create meaningful social impact.

This project invites students to develop a comprehensive DEI strategy, focusing on leveraging employee engagement to support True Religion’s business and community objectives.

Gourmet Nuts, a leading provider of premium snacks, is focused on optimizing its marketing spend to achieve better returns on investment (ROI). As the company navigates different stages of growth, it seeks to develop a multi-year marketing plan that aligns with market trends, channel dynamics, and consumer preferences. With varied products across categories, channels, and geographies, Gourmet Nuts' challenge is to identify the most effective allocation of marketing resources and to optimize its spend in ways that support corporate social responsibility (CSR), growth, and long-term success.

Students participating in this project will assess the effectiveness of past marketing efforts, define key performance indicators (KPIs) for monitoring future campaigns, and recommend strategies that deliver sustainable growth.

This case places you at a strategic decision point in late 2004. Psomunix LLC is an emerging biopharmaceutical company created to advance an investigational immunotherapeutic treatment for psoriasis from an unusual scientific discovery toward U.S. commercialization. What begins as a compelling medical opportunity has evolved into a much larger entrepreneurial challenge involving intellectual property, clinical development, regulatory approval, capital formation, strategic partnerships, organizational capabilities, and the competing interests of founders and investors.

The opportunity originates with Dr. Flanagan, a Venezuelan immunologist and parasitologist whose work on a leishmaniasis vaccine produces an unexpected observation: some patients receiving the vaccine appear to experience substantial improvement in psoriasis symptoms. Over several years, Dr. Flanagan refines the treatment into an immunotherapeutic agent specifically intended for psoriasis and generates a substantial body of patient experience in Venezuela. One participant, Jack Goldberg, experiences a striking improvement himself and ultimately introduces the opportunity to his nephew, Mike German, and Mike's wife, Ann.

Ann and Mike bring something the scientist does not: extensive pharmaceutical, financial, international, manufacturing, and operational experience. They recognize that a promising medical discovery is not automatically a viable pharmaceutical product. Commercializing the therapy in the United States requires intellectual property protection, credible clinical evidence, regulatory engagement, compliant manufacturing, experienced personnel, financing, and ultimately access to the pharmaceutical industry's commercialization infrastructure.

Psomunix is therefore established in 2001 with approximately $50,000 in founder-provided seed capital. The team begins filing for U.S. patent protection, hires regulatory expertise, approaches the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and investigates whether established pharmaceutical companies might acquire or license the opportunity. Early conversations are sobering: large pharmaceutical companies consider the asset too early-stage and want U.S.-generated clinical data before assuming the development risk.

Rather than abandon the opportunity, the founders decide to build the capabilities required to advance it themselves.

That decision fundamentally changes the scale of the venture. Development work must move from Venezuela to the United States. Psomunix establishes operations in New Jersey, where the founders can access pharmaceutical companies, scientific talent, regulatory expertise, investment networks, legal specialists, and other components of the region's life-sciences ecosystem. Dr. Flanagan relocates to the United States, laboratory capabilities are established, toxicology work is outsourced, and the team begins generating evidence in a form that can support the U.S. regulatory process.

Capital quickly becomes one of the company's defining strategic constraints. Pharmaceutical development requires substantial investment well before a product generates commercial revenue. Psomunix' original planning estimates substantial clinical, regulatory, staffing, manufacturing, and operating requirements, with clinical development representing the largest component of anticipated future expenditures. The founders therefore need more than conventional small-business financing. They need risk capital from investors or strategic organizations willing to fund a long and uncertain development process.

Through their professional and personal networks, the founders gain access to private investors and pharmaceutical industry contacts. In 2002, Psomunix successfully raises approximately $8 million through private placements despite a difficult capital environment. An investment by a pharmaceutical company adds more than money: it provides technical services, development knowledge, industry credibility, and access to capabilities Psomunix could not easily build independently.

By 2003 and 2004, the venture has advanced materially. Its U.S. patent has been granted, an Investigational New Drug filing has enabled clinical development to proceed, Phase I work has been completed, personnel and laboratory capabilities have expanded, and the company is preparing for Phase II clinical trials involving approximately 130 participants and multiple physicians around the United States.

The opportunity is becoming more tangible, but the stakes are also becoming larger.

Psomunix operates in an increasingly competitive psoriasis market. Major pharmaceutical and biotechnology organizations are developing or commercializing biologic therapies, including products such as Enbrel, Remicade, Amevive, and Raptiva. Psomunix believes its therapy may possess meaningful potential advantages, including its intended psoriasis-specific use, reported efficacy in earlier experience, potentially favorable side-effect profile, and intramuscular administration. At the same time, competitors possess financial resources, regulatory experience, commercialization capabilities, manufacturing infrastructure, and established market access that a small venture cannot easily replicate.

The company must therefore decide how much of the development and commercialization journey it should attempt to control itself.

One path is to continue raising institutional risk capital, retain greater ownership of the asset, and push the therapy farther through clinical development before pursuing a licensing or acquisition transaction. Reaching later clinical milestones could substantially increase the asset's value, but it also exposes Psomunix to additional clinical risk, financing risk, dilution, management complexity, and the possibility that additional trials require more capital than expected.

A second path is to deepen a strategic relationship with an established pharmaceutical partner. Licensing or partnering earlier could provide capital, development expertise, regulatory capabilities, and eventual commercialization infrastructure while reducing Psomunix' financing burden. The trade-off is that the founders and early investors may surrender substantial economics, strategic control, and future upside before the therapy's value is fully demonstrated.

A third question exists at the founder level. Ann and Mike have helped transform a laboratory discovery into a functioning U.S. biopharmaceutical venture, but disagreements over financing strategy and corporate direction have strained relationships within the board and management team. They have stepped away from their executive and board roles, and an industry equity partner has offered to purchase their shares.

They must now consider two decisions simultaneously: What path gives Psomunix the strongest probability of successfully advancing the therapy, and what should Ann and Mike do with their ownership stake?

Your challenge is to advise both the company and its founders at this inflection point. Evaluate the commercial opportunity, competitive environment, regulatory and clinical pathway, financial requirements, strategic assets, financing alternatives, partnership options, and stakeholder interests. Determine how Psomunix should finance and structure its next stage of development, when and how it should engage larger pharmaceutical partners, and whether Ann and Mike should sell, retain, or restructure their ownership position.

The strongest recommendation will not simply identify the option with the greatest theoretical upside. It will reconcile scientific uncertainty, capital requirements, regulatory milestones, founder incentives, investor expectations, organizational capability, and the ultimate objective of bringing a potentially valuable therapy to patients.

 

In late 2026 John Ternus became the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Apple Inc., a company widely respected for its innovation pedigree. Steve Jobs set a high bar as CEO and became synonymous with a company known to “Think Different”, depicted in Apple’s viral video campaign in 1997. Apple, with Jobs as its leader, exemplified disruptive innovation[1]. As Ternus assumes this coveted leadership role at Apple, many are debating if and how he will maintain Apple’s entrepreneurial culture and leadership in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

The equity market in 2026 presents a financial paradox. Wall Street consensus projects that Apple’s annual revenue and earnings growth would decelerate into the single digits, trailing other technology companies [Please see the FT.com article by Robert Armstrong]. Many of Apple’s peers, including rival Microsoft, have used AI to grow its offerings, especially in cloud AI infrastructure and enterprise model deployments. Apple largely failed in its internal efforts to grow AI capabilities. 

Apple’s current valuation multiple has remained high in 2026. This is so despite its sluggish hardware refresh cycles and modest earnings projections. As noted by financial columnist Robert Armstrong in the Financial Times (September 16, 2026), Apple’s price-to-earnings multiple was higher than during the early high-growth era of the iPhone. Investors were not pricing Apple as a traditional hardware manufacturer or a hyper-growth software firm. Instead it seems that the market premium is being anchored in how Apple has created brand trust, platform stickiness, and an unmatched reputation for user data privacy. 

For decades, design thinking at Apple had been inextricably linked with privacy and hardware-software integration. The collaboration between Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, design and beauty of the company’s products were sacrosanct. It translated this appreciation for design excellence into the capability to produce simple, human-centric hardware aesthetics that were paired with seamless user experiences. Over time, that philosophy evolved into a core architecture of security: processing data on-device, minimizing data collection, and positioning privacy as a fundamental human right. This positioning created an emotional and institutional moat that differentiated Apple from advertising-driven business models. 

However, Ternus faced an unprecedented dilemma. The technological shift toward generative artificial intelligence and frontier large language models (LLMs) demanded multi-billion-dollar compute infrastructure that Apple had chosen not to build independently. To deliver competitive artificial intelligence features without falling behind, Apple chose to form deep strategic collaborations with frontier model rivals such as Google, OpenAI, and Meta. Ternus’s core challenge was clear: how could Apple scale frontier AI capabilities through third-party partners without eroding the very asset that justified its market premium: user trust? 

Apple's Ecosystem Moat:

To evaluate Apple’s strategic flexibility in 2026, management had to candidly assess how the company sustained its dominant ecosystem economics. While corporate narratives emphasized product design and user experience, Apple’s extraordinary profitability, specifically its high-margin Services segment, which surpassed $80 billion annually, relied heavily on strict platform monetization and exclusive distribution agreements.
 
Two major drivers underpinned this revenue engine. First, Apple enforces a monopoly on the App Store and the structure of commissions. It enforces absolute control over iOS app distribution and defends this legally. It maintains a 15% to 30% commission on digital goods and in-app purchases. Anti-steering provisions prevent developers from directing users to external payment systems and this secures pure-margin revenue for the company. Second, the company has an agreement with Google on how users search. Under an exclusive revenue-sharing deal, Google paid Apple an estimated $18 billion to $20 billion annually simply to remain the default search engine on Safari across iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices. This arrangement accounted for roughly 15% to 20% of Apple's total operating profits with virtually zero marginal cost.
 
These strategic moats have come under attack by regulators in the United States and in Europe. So, by 2026, regulatory and legal pressures fundamentally dismantled these two parts of Apple’s appropriability regime, a term coined by David Teece to show how innovations that create value must be strategically protected by the innovating company so that the profits from its efforts can be “appropriated” by it rather than competitors (Teece, 1986). In the landmark federal antitrust case United States v. Google LLC, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had maintained an illegal search monopoly in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, explicitly pointing to its exclusive multi-billion-dollar default distribution payments to Apple. The final remedy secured by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) banned Google from entering exclusive default contracts across mobile operating systems. It also extended regulatory oversight into generative AI search distribution.
 
Concurrent with these US federal actions, antitrust enforcement was taken by the European Commission under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The US DOJ’s broad monopolization suit against Apple forced open the iOS to alternative app stores and external payment links. While Judge Mehta did not rule that the agreement with Google to pay Apple should be dismantled, the threat of high-margin default search payouts and potential commission cuts means that Apple cannot assume this will continue. This passive ecosystem that has subsidized Apple's R&D and profit margins is protected for now, but its continuation is uncertain. 

Building vs. Partnering for AI Capacity:
 
The capital requirements of the generative AI era presented an operational bottleneck for Apple. Frontier models require huge investments to develop, train, and deploy. Competitors like Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta aggressively expanded their cloud capital expenditures, securing massive computing clusters powered by modern AI accelerators.
 
Recognizing that building frontier-scale foundation models from scratch would dilute financial returns and delay time-to-market, Apple has adopted a pragmatic, hybrid strategy. Rather than competing head-to-head on general-purpose world-knowledge models, Apple formed major strategic alliances with industry rivals such as Google (Gemini and Cloud), OpenAI (ChatGPT), Meta (Llama and Muse).
 
Design Thinking and the Privacy Defense: Private Cloud Compute (PCC)

 
In order to reconcile reliance on third-party AI models with its brand commitment to privacy, Apple applied design thinking at the system architecture level. Rather than treating privacy as a legal policy or a settings toggle, Apple engineered Apple Intelligence around two core pillars:

·        Personal Context Over Generic Knowledge: Instead of competing to answer general web trivia, Apple focused on personal utility. It analyzes emails, calendar events, text messages, photos, and on-screen content to automate everyday tasks directly on the device.
 
·        Private Cloud Compute (PCC) Architecture: For complex reasoning tasks exceeding on-device capacity, requests are routed to Private Cloud Compute. This is a stateless cloud compute system built on custom Apple Silicon servers, meaning that no data is saved on the system. PCC enforces end-to-end cryptographic privacy so that user data is used exclusively to fulfill the specific prompt and delivered to the user, but not saved. It is never accessible to Apple administrators or third-party cloud providers.
 
To scale PCC globally, Apple extended its PCC workloads into third-party cloud environments, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP). By deploying hardware confidential computing protocols (such as Intel TDX and NVIDIA Confidential GPUs), Apple ensured that queries executing on partner infrastructure remained cryptographically isolated. Most importantly, independent security researchers were granted verification access to audit PCC software images. This reinforces Apple’s claim that privacy was mathematically guaranteed rather than merely promised.
 

As John Ternus prepares his first annual strategic plan for Apple’s Board of Directors in late 2026, he faces a delicate strategic balancing act. Financial markets demand new avenues for revenue growth to justify Apple's premium valuation multiple, even as regulatory mandates threaten to dismantle high-margin default search search payouts ($20B) and App Store fees. At the same time, Ternus is aware that integrating Google Gemini and OpenAI into the core iOS user experience risks turning Apple's hardware into a distribution shell for rival AI platforms.
 

[1] Please see the definition of disruptive innovation on the Christensen Institute website: https://www.christenseninstitute.org/theory/disruptive-innovation/