The Universidad Privada Boliviana (UPB), the Private University of Bolivia, was founded in 1993. Not long after, in the late 1990s, civil unrest erupted with coca growers battling police in the streets outside the campus. Students and faculty fled, the prior President retired, and the University was functionally insolvent.

The Marvel Way: Restoring a Blue Ocean explains one of the greatest turnarounds in modern business history. This case comes with a two-part video interview with then Marvel CEO Peter Cuneo who turned around the business and launched a blue ocean. Founded in 1939, Marvel Comics initially struggled in a red ocean producing primarily me-to knock-off comic books.

This case accompanies 1) a collection of business press articles; 2) two video clips; 3) a teaching note; 4) lecture slides. While the case and articles will be assigned as pre-reading, the video clips and lecture slides will be shown in the classroom by the instructor.

This is the first of a two-case series. The first Case (A) discusses the evolution of the circus industry up until the emergence of Cirque du Soleil. This case provides a detailed discussion on the structure of the circus industry to make possible a rich analysis of how its industry attractiveness has changed over time and the challenges the industry now confronts.

This is the second of a two-case series. Cirque du Soleil very successfully entered a structurally unattractive circus industry. It was able to reinvent the industry and created a new market space by challenging the conventional assumptions about how to compete.