The case describes the lead-up to the offer to acquire Baxalta Inc by Shire PLC in the summer of 2015, weeks after Baxalta was spun out of Baxter’s BioScience business. The setting is the biopharmaceutical sector – the fastest-growing in the global pharmaceutical industry in 2014, when M&As reached a record $219.4 billion.

The case focuses on the financing of blockchain and its pros and cons. The use of security tokens, initial coin offerings (ICOs) and related issues in terms of financing costs, liquidity and governance are analysed.

The cases deals with the acquisition by Disney of the Murdoch group and the strategies employed by the firms in the media industry to manage disruption.

This case describes the Tata Group’s governance and the role it played in overseeing 150 years of growth of the Tata empire of companies. The Tata Group is one of India’s premier and oldest industrial and services conglomerates in India. The Tata Trusts (charitable foundations) own two thirds of the Group; private investors own the rest of it.

The case focuses on blockchain (and distributed ledger technology or DLT) – a ‘hot’ area of fintech – and on R3 as a fintech consortium that includes some of the world’s largest banks, financial institutions and regulators. R3 started out as a family office in 2014 and evolved into a fintech company focused on the application of distributed ledger technology (DLT).