Case Type: new product.
Consulting Firm: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) 2nd round job interview.
Industry Coverage: healthcare: pharmaceutical, biotech, life sciences.
Case Interview Question #00346: Suppose you are the CEO of Baxter International Inc. (NYSE: BAX), a large global health care and pharmaceutical company with headquarters in Deerfield, Illinois, United States. The company had sales of $12.8 billion in fiscal year 2010, across three manufacturing 
divisions: BioScience, Medication Delivery, and Renal.
Recently, your company just discovered a breakthrough formula for treatment of common headaches. What would you do now? Remember to take the CEO approach and address the question from a top level management’s perspective.
Additional Information: (to be given to candidate if asked)
Product: The product has passed the first round of in-company testing very successfully. We are highly confident that it will be able to provide the masses instant relief from almost all types of headaches. This is a unique discovery, and no existing product comes close to it in terms of effectiveness.
The interviewer offered almost the same answers to all my other questions — “please make a reasonable assumption”.
No tables and no graphs are provided for this case.
Possible Solution:
1. Test structured thoughts:
What is critical – given the limited time, the candidate should first outline a high level picture (the scope) and then probe the
Interviewer’s Comments:
Essentially, to deliver a winning solution for this case, the candidate needs to provide a structure to the problem, flush out issues with probing analysis, and produce a clear next-steps summary for the firm.
