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The case is suitable for undergraduate and MBA courses: strategic management, social entrepreneurship.

Masters, Bachelors.

In Fortaleza, January 2008, an urban microfinance manager and the planning committee of Crediamigo, Brazil's largest microfinance institution need to devise an entry strategy to Rio de Janeiro's microfinance market. A part of the Banco do Nordeste, and a regional development bank for ten years, Crediamigo has 400,000 clients in the Northeast of Brazil. Its objective is to double its clients base for 2011; Rio de Janeiro's market was the next priority. Crediamigo has two options. The first consists of partnering with VivaCred, a small experienced microcredit non-governmental organization (NGO) which operates in Rio de Janeiro's slums. VivaCred was a microfinance NGO with relatively low organizational capabilities and with a low performance in terms of loan repayment. Its lending methodologies were different from Crediamigo's experience. The second option was to set up a new branch of Crediamigo in Rio and to shape it in Crediamigo's image. The committee was aware that this, “far away from home”, would be a costly and slow venture.

After using this case, students will: have been exposed to the strategic, managerial and operational challenges of microfinance expansion in an emerging country; understand better the market entry strategy (acquisition/integration of an organization vs green field) in such a context; have discussed the conditions related to the replication of microcredit methodologies (individual, group and village lending methodologies) in their contexts of operations.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

International business, Strategic management

BA and MA; courses: International business, Management courses with special focus on emerging and developing countries, Intercultural management, Strategic management.

Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa, June 2013 – Representatives of the London Mining Corporation and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH were discussing the details about the official launch of the From Mines to Minds project. The From Mines to Minds project consisted of two components technical, vocational and educational training at St. Joseph's and functional adult literacy for people who could not benefit from the upgrade of St. Joseph's in 17 communities around the mine site. Each of them had committed 200,000 euros to the project. While the mining company favored an early launch due to internal and external pressures, the development agency evaluated that they needed to have a consolidated program before advertising it locally and nationally. This joint decision on the official launch revealed more structural issues in the “fit” between these two organizations in this cross-sectoral partnership designed to contribute to local and national sustainable development.

The purpose of the case is twofold. The first aim is to introduce students/participants to the challenges that arise when entering into a cross-sectoral partnership with another organization in a development project. The second aim is to expose students to the operational, business and strategic challenges related to operating in the volatile local and national context of a least developed economy.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email: support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

Urban poverty, mobilization, leadership, communication

This case is intended for graduate/postgraduate and MBA courses that discuss management issues in relation to corporate social responsibility, business and society or global issues. This case was successfully tested in an MBA course on sustainable development. These teaching notes result from this in-class experience.

The morning of January 22, 2009. Cali, Colombia – Alicia Meneces was a member of the inaugural panel of the Simposio Internacional: Microfinanzas y Construcción de Paz (International Symposium: Microfinance as a Tool for Peacebuilding). The panel was composed of Álvaro Uribe (President of the Republic of Colombia), Enrique Garcia Rodriguez (President of the Development Bank of Latin America-CAF) and Luis Alberto Moreno (President of the Inter-American Development Bank). Her presence contrasted with that of the other panelists on several accounts: she was the only woman, she was the only panelist with direct and daily experience in poor neighborhoods and she was the only one familiar with the everyday processes of community mobilization in relation to microcredit in underprivileged communities. The case focuses on the message that Alicia Meneces intended to deliver to the audience of the Symposium based on her trajectory as a woman, as a community leader, and as the founder of the first Grameen microfinance institution in Colombia.

After using this case, students will be able to improve their understanding of poverty traps in developing countries; appreciate the challenges of living in poverty and the mechanisms of poverty production; and understand different forms of leadership.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

Stakeholder thinking has contributed considerably to the organizational literature by demonstrating the significance of the environment in managing organizations. Stakeholders affect and are affected by organizations’ daily operations and decisions. They have varied and often conflicting interests, making it necessary for managers and organizations to know who they are as well as their attributes. Consequently, Mitchell et al. (1997) developed the stakeholder salience theory to help managers and organizations identify the power of certain stakeholders and their salience to the organization. With a few exceptions, the mainstream stakeholder salience theory is in many ways still largely static, short-term oriented, and firm-centered. The aim of this paper is to revisit certain conformist assumptions concerning the role of marginalized stakeholders, or “dormant” stakeholders, in stakeholder thinking. Overall, this chapter is a call to a new conceptualization of stakeholders that reintroduces stakeholder dynamics at the core of stakeholder thinking to overcome its restrictive shortcomings. We argue that managing stakeholder relationships is not simply meeting stakeholder demands but also involves taking into account the long-term dynamics of stakeholder interactions.

Blanc de Gris (BDG) is producing oyster mushrooms from organic waste (coffee grounds and spent grains) in Downtown Montreal. This project brought the two co-founders of this circular enterprise into a challenging journey. Based on an ethnographic account of BDG, including observations, interviews, and a four-month internship into the business, this chapter highlights the difficulties of creating an industrial symbiosis. From gaining legitimacy among their peers and bankers to facing operational problems, this chapter outlines the network’s resilience behind this story. This chapter ends by discussing the case in regard to the challenges related to the emergence of circular business models, identified by a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Over the last decade, several innovative business‐community partnerships have emerged to address simultaneously two pressing development issues: poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation. The purpose of this paper is to identify relevant models and to propose a first evaluation of these models in relation to development.

The models were identified following a literature review and were evaluated using Amartya Sen's definition of poverty.

The paper identifies two models: the local enterprise model and the global investment model. While the local model relies mainly on local resources, the global investment model includes local and global organizations and institutions. The paper has analyzed the respective impacts of these new business‐community partnerships, including their governance schemes, on communities and ecosystems through the lens of Amartya Sen's definition of poverty and development. The key finding is double. First, both these models are still in their very early stages. Second, the paper has identified the strengths and weaknesses of each of these models: while the global investment model provides access to solid and important financial resources and markets, the local enterprise model emphasizes local empowerment.

This paper reports innovative initiatives and models of governance that could inspire future private sector based approaches to biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction and help build the theoretical bases for such approaches.

The social licence literature contains two quite different accounts of the concept. Sometimes social licence is presented as an essentially empirical matter; sometimes it is portrayed as having normative significance. Both advocates and critics assume that the normative version is easy to generate from the empirical version but the author argues that it is difficult to account for the normativity of social licence. It is commonly claimed that social licence is a ‘metaphor’ or ‘analogy’ drawing on familiar understandings of institutional licences, and standard accounts purport to ‘build in’ normativity. Neither strategy establishes the normativity of social licence. If that is correct, we have reason to be sceptical about the normative significant of claims about the possession of empirical social licence. The approval or acceptance by affected communities may be one factor to be taken into account in such analysis, but it will not itself settle whether a practice ought to be approved or accepted or licenced.