HBR Business Case Assignment
1. This case starts out in a lab that is located in a building that is operated by Crescordia. Crescordia is a company that makes a range of products such as artificial hips and scalps but also is one of the few companies that sell fixation devices. At the beginning of the case Crescordia holds a seminar for orthopedic surgeons so they can better familiarize themselves with the products and procedures that are needed when dealing with using these fixation plates. During this seminar the CEO Peter Walsh enters excitedly to see what is going on. You can tell right from the start that he is a very big people person and is incredibly interested in finding out the needs and what surgeons are saying about the products that he puts out. After Peter Walsh enters the seminar is put on hold and they all go out to lunch. During lunch one of the surgeons launched into a story about having to remove a resorbable plate, which are fixation devices that instead of having to be removed by doctors after the bone is healed these would just disintegrate after the bone had been healed which would mean that you would not have to have surgery again to remove the plate. The story however takes a sad turn as you find out that most resorbable plates have a lot of problems that have not been figured out and is still a technology that is not capable of doing what it says. The surgeons asked Peter Walsh when Crescordia would plan to launch its own resorbable’s and his response was that Crescordia is a company that has a reputation for quality and that resorbable’s were not at the stage where they would live up to what they set out to do. Resorbable’s are a huge potentially untapped market so Peter Walsh made it his first priority to find out where Crescordia is at with its resorbable’s. He talked with Gary Miskimen who is the head of R&D. He basically confirmed to Walsh that resorbable’s still are not perfect and that they could not do any more lab