Session 1 asked why firms globalize. Session 2 asks how they should globalize — with what values, and through what internal innovation structures. Two very different lenses on the same ultimate question: how do entrepreneurial firms create and sustain competitive advantage across borders?
Ventures that embed mission (social or environmental) into their competitive strategy — not as CSR afterthought but as core differentiation. Tony's Chocolonely is the archetype: slavery-free cocoa is the product, not the marketing.
Large incumbent firms trying to maintain entrepreneurial velocity inside bureaucratic structures. ART Inc. ($11B) invests in "tinker time" and decentralized innovation — but structural tensions with risk-averse hierarchy still kill promising projects.
The why behind the venture. A positive mission that creates differentiated value: brand equity, customer loyalty, talent attraction, premium pricing. Tony's mission — eliminate child slavery from cocoa — is why customers pay a 30% price premium and why the brand went viral without advertising.
Managing material risks across Environmental, Social, and Governance dimensions. ESG is about not getting destroyed by preventable risks — not about standing out. Only 7% of startups have a net-zero plan; that's a liability, not just an oversight.
An employee who acts entrepreneurially within an existing organization — identifying opportunities, mobilizing resources, and driving innovation without the authority of a founder. The key constraint: no equity upside, limited formal authority, existing hierarchy as friction.
Can you persuade stakeholders without formal authority? Vyas needs to sell Cynthia Jackson, his own GM team, and ITC — all simultaneously, with conflicting risk tolerances.
"Apologize, don't ask permission." Takes initiative before formal approval. Steve Jobs example: borrowed Xerox PARC ideas before leadership knew what to do with them. Vyas already spent $400K of tinker time before asking for $2M.
Builds coalitions; gives credit; brings others along. Janice Wagner's role in ART: she's not just marketing — she's Vyas's coalition-builder inside the firm. Without her buy-in, RIMOS dies even if the product is good.
Intrapreneurs don't wait for the org chart to give them the innovation mandate — they carve it out. Vyas has done this: his role as GM Filtration Unit doesn't formally include frontier R&D, but he's made it his mission. The risk is misalignment with what the firm actually rewards.
Half a day per week for discretionary innovation. Like Google's 20% time. Creates psychological safety and idea pipeline — but only works if leadership actually protects the time from operational pressures.
10% of revenue from products <2 years old; 15% from products 2-5 years; 20% from 5+ years. Makes innovation a measurable KPI, not an aspiration.
30% of revenue from products introduced in last 4 years. Structural pressure to keep innovating, not coast on incumbency.
Phase 1: Idea generation (loose, exploratory). Phase 2: Feasibility (technical & market validation). Phase 3: Commercialization (full commitment). The question: where is RIMOS?
Tony's Chocolonely was born from an act of activism, not commerce. In 2003, Dutch journalist Teun van de Keuken investigated child slavery in West Africa's cocoa supply chain and publicly self-prosecuted for consuming slave-labor chocolate — the resulting media storm became the seed of a brand. The company launched in 2005 with a mission not to sell more chocolate, but to make the entire global chocolate industry slavery-free. Its theory of change: become commercially successful enough that the industry can no longer ignore you, then use that platform to pressure peers (Mars, Nestlé, Cadbury) to adopt traceable, fair-pay supply chains. By 2017, with €44.9M in revenue and 3% of the Dutch chocolate market, Tony's had proven that ethical sourcing could be commercially viable — and that its unequal chocolate bar design and activist storytelling could build a genuine mass brand.
The case is set in 2017, as CEO Henk Jan Beltman (who acquired a 51% stake for €330K in 2012 and professionalized operations) must decide how to scale internationally. A US launch in Portland (2015) is significantly underperforming European markets — not because Americans don't care about ethics, but because Tony's story is Dutch-specific and hasn't been localized. The "unequal" design and Van de Keuken's origin story resonate deeply in the Netherlands but land flat with US consumers who have no existing frame for West African cocoa slavery as a consumer issue. Beltman must decide: do you adapt the story (and risk mission dilution), or stay true to the Dutch activist voice (and accept slower growth)?
The deeper structural tension is governance and succession. Beltman's 51% stake is the only lock protecting Tony's mission from acquisition by an MNE (the Innocent → Coca-Cola or Ben & Jerry's → Unilever scenarios). If he exits, the mission may not survive the capital markets. This makes Tony's the session's anchor case for socially-responsible global entrepreneurship: it forces the question of whether mission and commercial scale are ultimately compatible, and what governance structures can preserve mission across borders and ownership transitions.
This isn't CSR — it's a theory of change. Tony's doesn't want to be the only ethical chocolate company; it wants to make ethical sourcing the industry standard. The commercial success of the brand is instrumentally necessary to the mission, not in tension with it.
Full ownership stakes in farmer cooperatives; active lobbying; premium placement. Netherlands is the model.
Significant revenue; some direct farmer relationships; building awareness campaigns. Belgium, Germany.
Early-stage; distributor relationships; brand awareness only. US is struggling to move beyond Bronze — the question is why.
Applied Research Technologies (ART) is a diversified $11B industrial MNE with an explicit culture of internal entrepreneurship: 30% of revenue must come from products launched in the last four years, and managers are formally encouraged to use "tinker-time" budgets to develop new ventures outside their core responsibilities. The case focuses on the RIMOS (Remediation & Isolation Mini-Oxidation System) — a water purification technology developed at ART's India Technical Center (ITC) in Delhi. After two prior commercial failures under different teams, the RIMOS is now in the hands of Peter Vyas, a 32-year-old GM of the Filtration Unit, who believes the technology has finally reached market readiness.
The central decision is Cynthia Jackson's: a newly-appointed VP of Water Management who must decide whether to approve Vyas's $2M funding request to advance RIMOS to commercial phase. Vyas is a textbook intrapreneur — he built cross-functional coalitions, leveraged tinker-time, ran a prototype with ITC, and identified real B2B customer demand with marketing lead Janice Wagner. But Jackson faces the innovator's dilemma in concentrated form: two prior failures, thin contracted demand (Wagner's conviction is not a signed purchase order), an unresolved cultural friction between the US team's speed-to-market ethos and ITC's perfectionism, and a quarterly budget under pressure. Approving RIMOS is a bet that ART's innovation culture is real; rejecting it is a signal that it's rhetoric.
The ART case is the session's anchor for intrapreneurship within MNEs. It sits in deliberate contrast to Tony's Chocolonely: where Tony's represents the externally-motivated, mission-driven entrepreneur who must commercialize to survive, ART represents the internally-motivated intrapreneur who must navigate organizational hierarchy to innovate. The ITC subplot adds a critical layer that connects directly to Session 3: cross-cultural team management in global R&D is not just an HR challenge — it determines whether innovation actually reaches market or stalls in technical perfection.
Age 32. Classic intrapreneur: proactive, coalition-builder, cross-functional. Convinced RIMOS has real market despite 2 prior failures. Spent tinker-time budget building prototype with ITC. Now needs $2M and formal approval from new VP.
Newly appointed. Skeptical of RIMOS given prior failures and thin market data. Under pressure to hit quarterly numbers. Faces classic innovator's dilemma: protect existing margins or bet on unproven project?
Champion of the RIMOS market case. She has the customer relationships and market intelligence that Vyas lacks. Without her advocacy, the $2M ask is technically strong but commercially unanchored.
ART's Delhi R&D hub. Developed the RIMOS core technology. Cross-cultural tension: US team values speed-to-market and MVP; ITC culture values technical perfection before release. Vyas must manage both.
Source: Benoit Leleux & Jan Van Der Kaaij; IMD 954
Source: Christopher Bartlett & Heather Beckham; HBS 4168
Six ready-to-deploy contributions. Open with 1–2 early; hold the cross-case synthesis for the last 20 minutes.
Tony's doesn't have a purpose strategy — it has a purpose architecture. There's a difference. A strategy is a choice you make. An architecture is something you embed into cost structure, supply chain, and governance so it can't easily be undone. Ask: is the class conflating the two?
The RIMOS decision is being framed as "go or no-go" but that's a false binary. Jackson's real choice is between unconditional yes, unconditional no, or structured conditional yes. Most managers default to yes or no because conditional approvals require more work. Push the class to design the stage-gate instead of just voting.
The "purpose pays" narrative is real — but survivorship bias is massive. For every Tony's, there are 50 purpose-driven food brands that failed not because their mission was wrong but because their unit economics were. Ask: what's Tony's COGS vs. Cadbury's? Does the ethical sourcing premium survive a recession?
The intrapreneur literature is almost entirely written from the perspective of successful intrapreneurs. What about the ones who "apologized instead of asked permission" and got fired? The bias in the HBR article is that it's post-hoc rationalization of Steve Jobs's success, not a replicable playbook.
Both cases are really about the same thing: when does the organization protect the entrepreneurial impulse vs. absorb and neutralize it? Tony's fights it from the outside (MNE acquisition risk). Vyas fights it from the inside (hierarchical risk aversion). The answer in both cases is structural design — not individual heroism.
RIMOS is a water purification product. The addressable market isn't suburban America — it's Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. ITC Delhi may literally be 3 degrees of separation from Tony's RIMOS's best customer. The case artificially constrains the market framing to the US. Challenge that assumption: what changes if Jackson asks, "Where globally is the fastest-growing water purification need?"
Tony's is a born global — it was thinking internationally (mission to change the chocolate industry) from inception, not after domestic success. Apply OLI: their Ownership advantage is the mission+supply chain moat; Location advantage is operating in cocoa-producing countries directly; Internalization advantage is keeping relationships proprietary rather than licensing.
ART's India Technical Center is the first subsidiary we encounter. Next session applies Birkinshaw's framework formally: ITC looks like a "Contributor" (technical expertise, limited strategic mandate). But the RIMOS dynamic suggests it could graduate to "World Mandate" if Vyas's market thesis is right. Session 3 gives us the vocabulary to see this properly.
Tony's international expansion (Netherlands → Belgium → Germany → US) avoids JV — it goes direct. Session 4 will ask whether a JV with a local ethical food brand in the US would have been a better US entry mode. Nora-Sakari gives us the JV design tools to answer that question retrospectively.