Borusan Cat is an international distributor of Caterpillar heavy machines. Esra Durgun (Director of Strategy, Digitization, and Innovation) and Ozgur Gunaydin (CEO) seem to have bet their careers on developing Muneccim, a new predictive technology that is designed to reduce downtime of heavy construction machines that Borusan Cat sells. While they have been able to manage to develop the technology to a level that beats any human expert in predicting machine failures, they still have not been able to find a way to monetize the technology. After spending a few years and millions of dollars developing the technology, they are both under pressure from Borusan Group, Borusan Cat’s holding company, to show monetary results. Sales have been declining due to the economic downturn in Turkey, and the Company has been losing market share to their strong domestic competitors. Gunaydin and Durgun must decide about their monetization strategy for Muneccim and pick which segment of the market they want to target with this technology.
The case follows Ziad Abi Chaker, founder and CEO of Cedar Environmental, an environmental engineering company in Lebanon, as he weighs his options for how to grow the company despite facing barriers to growth, most notably the prevalent public corruption in his industry which he refused to participate in. Abi Chaker had established Cedar Environmental soon after the Lebanese Civil War with a vision of introducing a “Zero-Waste” concept to Lebanon by building and selling recycling plants, which used his proprietary dynamic composting technique, to local municipalities. But he soon found the public sector lacking the capacity to manage these plants as he envisioned. In parallel, Abi Chaker continued his research and development by developing new innovative products, most notably Eco-boards, a multipurpose building material made out of recycled plastics. In 2015, Lebanon suffered from a severe garbage crisis as the main waste collection companies had stopped collecting household waste, leading to country-wide protests. Seeing an opportunity, Abi Chaker aimed to shift his business model to run his plants and charge the municipality for the service, instead of selling them the plant and let them run it. While he launched a successful pilot, this model was fraught with other challenges, most notably finding the right municipality to partner with. Meanwhile, an opportunity presented itself to take his business abroad but might require moving his operations to that country. As his home country’s economic and social stability were under increasing pressure, he needed to decide on the future direction of the company. Should he remain in Lebanon, despite the challenges, to fulfill his dream of a “Zero-Waste” Lebanon or should he focus on growing the company and use his innovations to help other countries manage their municipal waste?
The case opens in November 2020 as Eyad Alkassar and Mahmoud Fouz, co-founders of Iran’s first and leading ride-hailing platform, Snapp, eagerly await the results of the U.S. presidential elections. The case takes us through the challenging times between November 2019 and November 2020, as the confounders navigated Snapp through an increasingly challenging environment of sanctions, stricter restrictions of big tech companies, and since February 2020, through the operational difficulties exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that shook Iran to its core. The case highlights the challenges of operating under sanctions and the different ways the co-founders try to find to keep Snapp alive and asks how the U.S. election results could change the environment in which Snapp operates, as the two presidential candidates have vastly different approaches to their policy to Iran.
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