Blackrocks: Craft Brewing From Hobby To Business: Applying Strategic Management To The Small Firm

Blackrocks, a craft beer start-up company, first opened in Marquette, Michigan, a town of 20,000 residents, in 2010. The business evolved around a friendship and a mutual interest in craft beer and is located in Marquettes Village, an area close to the local university consisting of several full-service restaurants, sandwich shops, bars, and retail shops. The Village considers itself an independent retail section of Marquette.The ambience of Blackrocks is fun and good times. People of all ages are attracted to the bar to enjoy craft beer with their family and friends. The physical setting is rustic with a current capacity of 50 customers (soon to expand to 100 customers). Customers can bring in their own food or call a local eatery for pizza or sandwich delivery.Blackrocks has a very loose organizational structure which has worked well in the past. This case will allow students to identify the problems faced by Blackrocks in todays economy; to describe the internal and external environment of Blackrocks; to identify their core competencies; to identify Blackrocks strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; and to develop management strategies which could further enhance the business and help them attain their mission and goals

Micro Talk Systems

This case focuses on a unique and often overlooked product market – sporting event timing systems and supplies – and involves a Japanese manufacturer of radio frequency identification (RFID)-based timing systems called Micro Talk Systems or MTS.  Some of the challenges facing MTS, as they begin to penetrate the U.S. timing market, include identifying the size and scope of the timing market, which market segment(s) should MTS focus on, what is the competitive advantage(s) MTS holds compared to other timing systems being marketed in the U.S., and which channel(s) of distribution would prove to be the most efficient and cost effective to use

Phase shift keyed systems based on a gain switched laser transmitter

Return-to-Zero (RZ) and Non-Return-to-Zero (NRZ) Differential Phase Shift Keyed (DPSK) systems require cheap and optimal transmitters for widespread implementation. The authors report on a gain switched Discrete Mode (DM) laser that can be employed as a cost efficient transmitter in a 10.7 Gb/s RZ DPSK system and compare its performance to that of a gain switched Distributed Feed-Back (DFB) laser. Experimental results show that the gain switched DM laser readily provides error free performance and a receiver sensitivity of -33.1 dBm in the 10.7 Gbit/s RZ DPSK system. The standard DFB laser on the other hand displays an error floor at 10(-1) in the same RZ DPSK system. The difference in performance, between the two types of gain switched transmitters, is analysed by investigating their linewidths. We also demonstrate, for the first time, the generation of a highly coherent gain switched pulse train which displays a spectral comb of approximately 13 sidebands spaced by the 10.7 GHz modulation frequency. The filtered side-bands are then employed as narrow linewidth Continuous Wave (CW) sources in a 10.7 Gb/s NRZ DPSK system