Jiangsu Nadu: Aligning Value Creation and Capture in Business Model Iteration

Name: Jiangsu Nadu: Aligning Value Creation and Capture in Business Model Iteration (English version)
SKU: W51184

Yongfa Li, Qinglian Lin, Jingcheng He, Ruoxi Qin, Wenwen Liu, Yang Li, Linhu Du, and Yanlin Jin

Product #:W51184

Supplier:Tsinghua/Ivey

Discipline:Marketing, Strategy

Setting:China, 2025

Details:Case (PDF) • 13 pages • 2026-08-26

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In 2025, Jiangsu Nadu Cultural and Creative Industry Co. Ltd. (Nadu) founder and chair Hu Liping faced a difficult question about the future of the company’s growth model. Established in Jiangsu Province in 2012, Nadu had evolved from a tourism advertising agency into a cultural tourism enterprise that designed destination marketing campaigns, destination intellectual property (IP) events, and immersive cultural experiences. Across four successive business model iterations, it had shifted towards creating and operating its own cultural tourism IPs. Self-developed projects such as YOLO Life Festival and Aura Epoch Jinling attracted strong consumer interest, yet commercial results lagged. High production costs, an immature supply chain for authentic set construction, and a narrow revenue base generated recurring losses despite growing demand. Hu had to decide which tourist segments to serve and whether to retrench to the core marketing business, adopt a light-asset IP codevelopment model, or seek external capital to continue self-developed IP.

Learning Objectives

This case is appropriate for graduate and executive business administration programs, as well as advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses in business administration, marketing, strategy, and tourism management. In marketing management courses, it supports discussion of market analysis, segmentation, targeting, positioning, experience design, and the conversion of customer value into revenue. In business model innovation and strategic management courses, it facilitates analysis of business model evolution, value creation–value capture alignment, strategic alternatives, dynamic capabilities, and implementation under resource constraints. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to do the following:

Analyze how Nadu’s business model evolved across four stages and explain the internal and external drivers of each transition.
Conduct a market analysis of China’s cultural tourism sector and use segmentation and targeting to identify the end-tourist customers best suited to the YOLO Life Festival and Aura Epoch Jinling.
Analyze the reasons why value creation and value capture became misaligned during Nadu’s self-developed IP stage.
Assess potential approaches for improving Nadu’s business model loop and propose practical strategic recommendations.