John Power and Aerogen: Leading a Scaling Business

Aerogen is one of the pioneering indigenous MedTech companies in Ireland, founded in the mid-1990s following the attraction of a range of multinational corporations to base manufacturing subsidiaries in Ireland, and the subsequent closure of a large facility belonging to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Galway which released human and financial resources into the local economy. The case is designed to enable discussion of strategy development and implementation in an innovative scaling business, focusing on the role of basic strategy concepts such as mission, vision and values and the implementation and use of management control systems. The case enables students to discover the specific challenges of scale-up management, including articulating the ethos of the business to many new employees and how to design and use control systems in the business to reward both radical and incremental innovation as the business scales across markets. The case is set in late 2019, the time when the CEO of Aerogen, John Power, had to decide on how he should manage the business as it scaled to a truly global organisation.