Product details

Alenvi, launched in 2016, has the purpose to humanize and professionalize elder care in France, as an alternative to nursing homes. The company embarked upon its mission by improving the quality of working environment of the caregivers who have a direct impact on the quality of care of the elderly recipients. The elder caregivers' roles are not valued as reflected by their low wages, lack of vocational training and career advancement. These jobs are staffed with people who are not properly trained, underpaid, with a management structure that disempowers and even demotivates them. Alenvi proposes to humanize and professionalize elder-care by emphasizing the role of the caregiver by ensuring a viable salary, continuous on-the-job training as well as autonomy to form self-managed teams. The company also aimed to reduce the cost of care for the elders, especially for those who could not afford to pay full price. Our case asks the learners to take the perspective of the three co-founders of Alenvi, Guillaume Desnoes, Thibault de Saint Blancard and Clement Saint Olive. The co-founders had started a fund-raising campaign to enable a scale-up of the model developed over the past 4 years. The key themes are about: how managerial innovation can help redesign a business model, how to include ambitious social objectives at the core of its business model, and the inherent tension of those objectives on profitability.