Research

This report explores the motivations, challenges, and success factors shaping modern social entrepreneurship through interviews with four Toronto-based founders: Bruized, Kind Karma Company, Culcherd, and Biofect Innovations. It identifies two main catalysts for social ventures—personal experience with a social issue and transformative awareness—and finds that most founders rely on passion-driven, trial-and-error approaches rather than formal feasibility studies. Despite their diverse industries, these entrepreneurs share common obstacles: securing funding, achieving product–market fit, measuring impact, and scaling operations without compromising their mission. The analysis reveals that social entrepreneurs combine purpose with pragmatism, often using innovation to address environmental and societal challenges while maintaining financial viability. The paper concludes with recommendations on measuring impact, testing hypotheses, refining business models, and engaging impact investors to ensure sustainable growth and accountability.

This paper examines Amazon’s strategic evolution from an online retailer into a global technology and information ecosystem. Using VRIO, SWOT, and financial analysis, it explores how Amazon leveraged data, cloud infrastructure, and platform integration to build a sustainable competitive advantage beyond retail. The analysis identifies Amazon’s shift toward a dual differentiation strategy, combining broad differentiation in consumer-facing platforms with focused differentiation in enterprise services, enabled by innovations such as AWS, Prime, and recommendation systems, underpinned by large-scale data utilization. However, it highlights critical strategic challenges, including continued reliance on legacy revenue streams, strategic misalignment with Whole Foods’ premium positioning, and intensifying competitive pressure in the cloud sector. Recommendations focus on integrating open-source software, expanding Prime penetration internationally, and divesting Whole Foods to refocus on higher-margin digital businesses. The paper concludes that Amazon’s long-term success will depend on disciplined strategic alignment, continuous innovation, and sustained leadership in the global data-driven ecosystem.

This case study examines how XYZ, a rapidly growing French tech company, applied operational excellence to sustain value delivery during its scale-up. Initially, the firm’s fast expansion created complexity, inefficiencies, and quality issues that hindered customer satisfaction and productivity. A systemic analysis revealed that the engineering department had become the organization’s primary bottleneck. Drawing on the Theory of Constraints and Operational Excellence frameworks, the study identifies root causes across people, processes, and management systems, emphasizing the limits of the start-up mindset and the lack of mature engineering practices. The paper proposes practical recommendations — forming cross-functional feature teams, reducing work in progress, allocating time for unplanned tasks, and applying root cause analysis — to increase throughput and simplify operations. By embedding agile and continuous-improvement principles, XYZ rebalanced performance, enhanced collaboration, and restored value delivery capacity, demonstrating how operational excellence can transform a start-up’s growth into sustainable scalability.

This paper analyzes the ethical, economic, and strategic dilemmas faced by Kruger National Park following government funding cuts that led it to sell rhinos at auction. While this decision generated short-term revenue, it contradicted the park’s conservation mission and exposed it to reputational and ecological risks. Using stakeholder mapping, materiality assessment, and risk analysis, the paper identifies key threats — including extinction, poaching, and NGO backlash — and opportunities such as international partnerships, technology adoption, and new revenue models. Recommendations focus on rebalancing the park’s natural, social, human, and financial capitals through actions like monetizing conservation expertise, fostering ecotourism and film partnerships, leveraging technology for anti-poaching efforts, and increasing international entry fees. The study concludes that long-term sustainability for Kruger Park depends on aligning its financial strategies with its conservation values and meaningfully engaging local communities in protecting wildlife.