Research - Global - Harvard Business School

September 2025
Case

Oriental Weavers: Handing Over the Loom

Over the course of forty years, Oriental Weavers had grown from a modest Egyptian family business into one of the world’s largest manufacturers of machine woven carpets and rugs. Managing a family-led company at that scale was no easy task, but the business was guided...

August 2025
Teaching Material

Social Enterprise in Sub-Saharan Africa

By: Brian Trelstad, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Maagatha Kalavadakken

August 2025 (Revised September 2025)
Case

Bridging Trust and Tech: Digitizing Morocco's Financial System

By: Lauren Cohen and Sophia Pan

Fadwa Jouali, Senior Expert of Payment Development and FinTechs at Bank Al-Maghrib (Central Bank of Morocco), wondered how she could fast-track adoption of the country’s mobile payments system. Historically, many Moroccans had never held a bank account, perhaps due to...

August 2025
Case

Beko: Leveraging Sustainability for Growth

By: Gunnar Trumbull, Joseph B. Fuller, Emilie Billaud and Gizem Cihan Dincsoy

In July 2024, Hakan Bulgurlu, CEO of Beko, reflected on the early integration of Whirlpool’s European operations. The merger expanded Beko’s scale and market reach but posed significant challenges, particularly aligning Whirlpool’s carbon-intensive legacy with Beko’s...

June 2025 (Revised August 2025)
Case

Redefining the Edge: Jahez’s Strategic Pivot in Saudi Arabia’s Food Delivery Battle

By: Krishna G. Palepu and Ahmed Dahawy

Jahez made its mark in Saudi Arabia’s food delivery market by serving customers willing to pay more for reliable, high-quality service—a segment largely overlooked by other platforms. As the company grew, it expanded into the mass market and developed a network of...

May 2025
Case

stc Group: DARE to Transform

By: Sunil Gupta and Sadika El Hariri

Established as a government-owned entity in 1998, stc Group was the sole telecommunications operator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Soon after it was privatized in 2003, regional players started entering the Saudi market. To deal with the competition and to...

May 2025
Case

Boutiqaat: Influencing Retail in MENA

By: Juan Alcacer and Noor Al Qadhi

Boutiqaat, a Kuwait-based e-commerce platform, scaled an influencer-driven beauty retail model across MENA and now faces critical strategic choices about offline expansion and globalization. Founded in 2015, Boutiqaat combined social commerce, localized logistics, and...

May 2025
Teaching Material

Boutiqaat: Influencing Retail in MENA

By: Juan Alcacer and Noor Al Qadhi

Boutiqaat, a Kuwait-based e-commerce platform, scaled an influencer-driven beauty retail model across MENA and now faces critical strategic choices about offline expansion and globalization. Founded in 2015, Boutiqaat combined social commerce, localized logistics, and...

April 2025
Teaching Material

Aramco: Navigating the Energy Transition

By: Tarun Khanna and Samir Junnarkar

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 725-358.

April 2025
Teaching Material

Tabby: Winning Customers' Digital Wallets

By: Eva Ascarza

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 524-056. Tabby, a Saudi-based fintech founded in 2019, rapidly became one of the MENA region’s first unicorns by offering buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services with a unique twist: instead of charging end consumers, it partnered with...

March 2025 (Revised May 2025)
Case

ING Türkiye: Flexible Work in a Competitive Banking Environment

By: Ashley Whillans and Nico Schaefer

This case explores ING Türkiye’s journey toward workplace flexibility within the traditionally conservative Turkish banking sector. Beginning with early remote work experiments in 2015 and culminating in the FlexING model, by 2024 ING Türkiye had positioned itself as a...

February 2025
Teaching Material

Intenseye: Powering Workplace Health and Safety with AI (B)

By: Michael W. Toffel, Shane Greenstein and Sadika El Hariri

Intenseye used its $25 million series A funds to refine and expand its digital safety platform while refining its target markets and ideal customer profile. As the company implemented new approaches to create value for its clients, such as developing an AI-powered...

February 2025
Case

K Health: Scaling an AI Medical Clinic

By: Iavor I Bojinov, Karim R. Lakhani, Sarah Sasso and Carin-Isabel Knoop

K Health, an AI-driven healthcare platform, faced the challenge of scaling its operations to reach 10 million annual visits within two years. Founded in 2016 with the vision of leveraging AI and data to improve healthcare accessibility, the company evolved from a...

February 2025
Case

Doing Business in Casablanca, Morocco

By: Karen G. Mills, Ahmed Dahawy and Choetsow Tenzin
This case examines the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Morocco. The case explores the various historical, cultural, and social factors that impact the business environment. It also highlights Morocco’s unique economy where cash remains a dominant...

January 2025 (Revised April 2025)
Case

Doing Business in Cairo: Navigating a Path to Economic Resilience

By: A. Zelleke and Ahmed Dahawy

Egypt has long been a pivotal force in the Middle East and North Africa. Located at a crossroads of global trade routes, the country was a strategic partner for numerous regional and global powers. However, a substantial currency devaluation in 2016 brought many...

December 2024
Case

Enerjisa Üretim: The Digital Era of Electricity Generation

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Sadika El Hariri
Launched in 2017, Enerjisa Üretim was one of Türkiye’s largest private sector electricity companies. In its early days, the company faced some financial and operational troubles. When İhsan Erbil Bayçöl, the current CEO of Enerjisa Üretim, joined the business in 2018,...

November 2024
Teaching Material

Social Enterprise in the MENA Region

By: Brian Trelstad and Ahmed Dahawy

This research note provides an overview of the socio-economic landscape of social enterprise in the Middle East and North Africa. It highlights the diversity of players in the region including social enterprise organizations (in their many forms) and supporting...

November 2024
Case

Group AMANA: Built to Last

By: Hise Gibson and Fares Khrais

The case chronicles the Bsaibes brothers’ journey in founding and operating Group AMANA; a contracting business founded in 1993, based in the United Arab Emirates with operations across the Middle East. Over the years, the business found itself grappling with major...

October 2024
Case

Sacoor Brothers: From Co-Family CEOs to No Family CEOs?

By: Lauren Cohen, David Ager and Alpana Thapar

Sacoor Brothers, a luxury clothing retail company, was founded in 1989 in Lisbon, Portugal, by four brothers—Malik, Salim, Rahimo, and Moez. After establishing a strong presence in Portugal, the brothers were drawn to the rapidly growing retail markets in the Middle...

September 2024 (Revised February 2025)
Case

Aramco: Navigating the Energy Transition

By: Tarun Khanna and Gizem Cihan Dincsoy

In March 2024, Amin Nasser, president, and CEO of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco), had just delivered a speech about the future of energy at a global energy conference. The world was behind schedule in meeting long-term climate change goals. The global shift...