Business Case Studies & Business Publications

Corteva Agriscience: Seeding a New Compa...

West, June A., Sim...

Case

Corteva Agriscience: Seeding a New Company (A)

West, June A.; Simko, Paul J.; Maiden, Stephen E.; Soltis, Steve

BC-0295 | Published December 13, 2022 | 17 pages Case

Collection: Darden School of Business

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This case introduces Corteva Agriscience (Corteva) and its CEO, Jim Collins. Corteva was the corporate offspring of a 2015 merger between Dow and DuPont, two of the world’s largest chemical companies. It was created to be the agriculture business that tied together DuPont’s specialty-products and Dow’s materials-science businesses, a company focused on seed biotechnology and crop protection at a time when agriculture faced a tremendous challenge: a need to feed a growing global population while balancing preserving natural resources and the environment with meeting farmers’ economic needs. The case explores Dow and DuPont as individual companies, the merger of those companies from initial discussion to completion, and the work that went into creating Corteva from the ground up—work that Jim Collins oversaw from the beginning. Collins had led Corteva first as COO of the agriculture division, then as CEO of the separate company. He had helped spearhead an integration of Dow and DuPont’s legacy cultures, create a vision and branding for the agriculture company, and build an innovation powerhouse capable of balancing the needs of employees, farmers, distributors, end consumers, regulators, and shareholders. But within just a year and a half of going public, Corteva became the target of an activist hedge-fund manager who criticized, among other aspects of the business, its leadership—which meant Collins. A battle was being waged to determine Collins’s future with the company he had helped found. He had brought Corteva step by step to where it was, but was he the right person to continue leading?