Business Model Innovation at TutorVista: Personalization and Global Resource Leverage

Developed by: C.K. Prahalad, M.S. Krishnan

Description: How do you convince American parents living in the Midwest to hire tutors from India? How do you convince them to hire a tutor that they and their children will never meet in person? Can you build a personal connection between students and tutors when they are separated by thousands of miles and come from vastly different cultures? These are questions that faced Krishnan Ganesh as he began thinking about remote tutoring. A year later he found TutorVista, an internet-based remote tutoring services company. So far, the remote tutoring firm seems to have the right answers to all of the questions above.

Teaching Points:

After discussing this case study, students will be able to:

• • apply critical concepts from earlier learning to define a solution to the case,
• • successfully articulate data and information in support of the solution proposed,
  • critically analyze and discuss other responses and solutions to the case,
  • draw lessons from the case analysis,
  • generalize the learnings of this case to other business challenges and decisions in organizations other than the one analyzed in this case study,
• • demonstrate leadership and scholarship in analysis.