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Kaleidofin was co-founded in 2017 by Puneet Gupta and Sucharita Mukherjee; former CFO and CEO of IFMR (Institute for Financial Management and Research) Holdings Pvt Ltd. As part of their roles at IFMR, Gupta and Mukherjee focused on designing products and developing technology to push for financial inclusion. In their field interactions, the co-founders had an epiphany of the challenges faced by people while trying to save towards important life goals. They saw an opportunity in the large segment of financially under-served people in India and quit their jobs to start Kaleidofin. Kaleidofin was conceptualised as a digital platform that offers customised financial solutions to help customers meet their life goals. The start-up partnered with mutual fund companies for solutions on one hand and network partners (NGOs, microfinance organizations, cooperative banks) on the other for access to their existing customers.

Kaleidofin grew from 50 customers in January 2018 to 15,000 customers by March 2019. Aiming to grow to 1 million customers in the next 30 months Kaleidofin faces a dilemma about its future course. The start-up could continue to grow by expanding its current target segment which is the low-income households and preserve its vision at the risk of increasing costs. The second option would be to look at other potential target segments, such as, middle-income households and risk diluting their vision. The case study highlights the unique customer-centric model of Kaleidofin and the need for start-ups to understand the value proposition of their products/services.

BotGo was started in 2007 by Ravi Panchal, an engineer, after he lost motivation to continue at a managerial role at his job. A hands-on technical person, Panchal was inspired to create an underwater tank-cleaning robot. He started BotGo by bootstrapping it with his savings and roped in his friends for key positions in the company. He also started workshops for robotics education in colleges in order to sustain the company; he called this initiative BotLearn. In 2009, BotGo was incubated and Panchal started franchises for BotLearn as part of his growth plans. This led to a crisis within the company, escalating to a point where Panchal was forced to consider options.

This case highlights the importance of a product-to-market fit and examines the decision to franchise in view of the case facts. The case also points towards the mistakes in crisis management, with particular emphasis on channel management.

Towards the end of the case, Panchal is faced with a dilemma on whether to continue with the franchises or close them down. The dilemma is further accentuated since Panchal's decision would ultimately affect the growth of BotGo as well as directly challenge his intention to franchise.

Optifit, an international brand of fitness equipment, had entered the Indian market in 2010 and had rapidly opened 45 stores in 8 years in the four metros (NCR region, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata). Jaiveer Roy was identified by Pravin Gupta (South Zone head) and Raghav Mehta (HR head) to join as Optifit's Store Manager for its Alwarpet branch, Chennai, a store that had leadership difficulties from the day it started in May 2018. Roy joined the store in May 2018 and did very well soon after his appointment to the store. However, in less than three months, both Roy's and his store's performance began to suffer and his relationship with Gupta began to crumble. This case highlights issues in people management, especially support for people selected for leadership positions and examines the performance indicators of an individual's performance at a broader level. The case also points towards the mistakes or errors leaders may commit vis-a-vis their own role as a leader and mentor.

This case describes the evolution of MHFC, a player in the Indian informal housing sector. As a new entrant offering micro home loans to the financially excluded lower income families of urban India in 2008, MHFC had grown to an annual number of 18,000 loans worth INR 8 billion with an average ticket size of INR 0.43 million (USD 6,000).

With a 53.5% purchasable equity stake in MHFC, Chopra and his team were left with certain decisions to make. Should the company on-board a new social investor? Or should it bring on the more readily available and capital-rich private equity investors interested in the lucrative prospects of the microfinance housing sector?

The case discusses two key objectives: (1) to understand the entire entrepreneurial journey of a group of entrepreneurs and how they plan to exit the venture, and (2) to enable classroom discussion on how to develop a business model from scratch, get it funded, achieve scale and then exit.

Ujwal Kalra founded Memorable Shaadi in 2014 while awaiting admission to the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. The startup offered services connecting clients and vendors in the Indian wedding industry. The case elaborates Ujwal's journey as an entrepreneur and the choices he made including hiring a co-founder and working remotely while pursuing an MBA. Ujwal now faces a dilemma: should he accept a plush consulting job through campus placement or go back and scale the firm? Memorable Shaadi highlights the classic dilemma facing entrepreneurs and the choices they need to exercise at different phases of their venture.

The pace of transformation in the business landscape has made it mandatory for the human resource function within the organisation to evolve, adapt and adjust to the demands of the marketplace. This chapter focuses on HRM 4.0 and the change in employer branding strategies due to rapid increase in digitalisation, for example, through analytics and big data. A conceptual framework is provided that links HRM 4.0 with employer branding strategies.

Appraisal is recognised as a crucial step towards the development of human resources and their performance. This article proposes an integrated, innovative model for managing the performance appraisal process of full‐time faculty members at the Palestinian public universities in the West Bank. The integrated model SOFIA is a result of an empirical study of the impact of performance appraisal process on faculty members in five major universities. In constructing this model, several issues including setting a clear institution’s strategy, participation in goal setting, coaching, two‐way communication between faculty members and their superiors, feedback, developing and rewarding faculty members have been emphasised. Also, it is recommended that external factors that may influence faculty members’ performance, appraisers’ training and top management support and ownership of the process must be seriously considered. The obstacles to the application of the proposed performance model and possible solutions have been explored. In light of the above, relevant conclusions have been reached.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between altruistic leader behaviors, organizational learning capability and organizational performance.

The sampling frame consists of several databases or listings of business that consider people as a key element of the organization and are considered by their employees to be good firms to work for or organizational environments where human resources management has high priority (n=251). The authors use structural equation modeling to test if the relationship between altruistic leader behaviors and organizational performance is mediated by organizational learning capability.

Results suggest that organizational learning capability fully mediates between altruistic leader behaviors and organizational performance. Thus, organizational learning capability plays a key role in explaining how altruistic leader behaviors affect organizational performance, essentially because it facilitates the creation of a creative, participatory and dialogue-based environment that promotes organizational learning.

The database used in the study is very heterogeneous. Future research might delimit the database by organization size or sector. Qualitative studies may also improve our understanding of the relationships studied and enable other concepts to be included.

This study provides evidence of the positive relationship between altruistic leaders and performance. However, recruiting and fomenting altruistic leaders is not sufficient on its own to improve performance, and should be accompanied by implementing other facilitating factors of organizational learning such as dialogue or experimentation.

In recent years some studies have linked leadership with organizational learning. However, this is one of the first studies to concentrate on altruistic leader behaviors as such, a concept that has received scant mention in the literature despite its importance in a number of leadership styles, and its relevance today as an alternative to the egotistic leader. The authors offer empirical evidence of the role of altruistic leader behavior as an antecedent of organizational learning capability and subjective measures of performance.

This paper aims to explore Living Labs (LL) as knowledge systems for urban service projects. This empirical study aims to identify and characterize knowledge in LL dedicated to urban service projects. It also aims to understand how through knowledge path, LL redefine the management of projects. First, the praxeologic and academic context underlining the main challenges associated to urban service projects is presented. It mainly concerns the growth of the cities (Haouès-Jouve, 2013), the problematic of social acceptability (Savard, 2013) as well as the normative approaches to manage projects (Kerzner, 2010). Second, a literature review on co-innovation and Livings Labs is presented. (Chesbrough, 2004; Gaglio, 2011). This paper also presents the concept of knowledge applied in an LL system (Sanders and Stappers, 2008). Here, knowledge refers to dynamic knowledge, as suggested by Argyris (1995).

In the third part, the goals of this study as well as the abductive and “partnership” qualitative methodology that was used are explained (Fontan and René, 2014). The constitutive and the operational definitions on knowledge that have been mobilized are detailed (Piaget, 1974; Gadille, 2012). A special focus is made, here, on distributed knowledge (Nowotny et al., 2002; Trepos, 1996), on “users” as “experts of uses” (Chen et al., 2010). Then, the sample and the four cases of LL that were explored are described.

Finally, the findings are presented. This paper exposed how knowledge lying in the loops of the LL system was characterized and how knowledge is mobilized in an LL. This paper also draws a theoretical model of project management referring to knowledge, LL and co-innovation approach.

To conclude, several implications in project management research and urban studies are presented.

Several implications concern the current practices of project management. Due to some new societal challenges, it is considered that a new professional posture is required.

Several implications concern citizens as users and stakeholders of urban projects.

The originality of the study lies in its content and its format. A specific participative approach was used to explore LL. This paper investigated knowledge in LL, which are new entities dedicated to very actual projects, where users are co-managers.