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If you teach with cases, write some

November 01 2022
John C Ickis

No. 17, November 2022. “Nice detail,” the supervisor told me after reading the draft of my first case as an INCAE investigator. "But it's not teachable." Too long, with many “interesting” but not essential annexes.

MBA programs at schools like INCAE and Harvard teach their students how to analyze cases, not write them. And the opposite is also true: some professors with several years of teaching with cases have not written any.

There are two reasons for doing this: first, the process of developing a case can make us better instructors. After a workshop on case writing, a Latin American university professor told me that “I already understand what the ingredients of a good discussion are.” Second, without good quality case sources, there are going to be no cases to teach.

And now there is a third reason: it is much easier to gain international recognition for writing a case thanks to the CLADEA-BALAS case consortium (CBCC). CBCC is a collection of high-quality pedagogical cases in Spanish and English that brings together eleven institutions from Latin America and Spain and whose partner for the publication and distribution of the cases in the collection is Harvard Business School Publishing.

On October 26, several INCAE professors met virtually with the director of the CBCC, María Helena Jaén, and some members of her staff to learn about the reason for the Consortium as well as the advantages of publishing with the collection.

María Helena, founder of the CBCC, collaborated with the Consortium as a professor at IESA (Venezuela) and UNIANDES (Colombia) before assuming the role of editor, explained that it was created to have educational material on the reality of Latin America, achieve a collection that concentrates the efforts of Ibero-American schools in the production and use of cases in management education, and to be a partner with HBP, which is "the Amazon of cases."

The members—CLADEA, BALAS and nine schools from seven Ibero-American countries—commit to sending two cases a year to the CBCC or to SEKN (Social Enterprise Knowledge Network), the allied collection. They are evaluated through a rigorous double-blind process.

One advantage is that the cases, due to their quality and relevance to developing environments, are discussed worldwide. “I received messages of congratulations on my case from Turkey and other countries outside the Latin American region,” said a participant in the meeting.

The alliance with SEKN, founded with the leadership of Jim Austin of Harvard Business School and with an extensive collection of cases on managerial issues of social and environmental sustainability, is another advantage because it expands publication opportunities.

Several cases in the collection have won awards in recent years, including the Oikos Award (2018), at the EFMD Case Competition (2018 and 2021), and the Silver Award at the 2022 NACRA Conference.

What I have found most valuable are the criteria established for the review of the candidate cases for the CBCC collection that determine if a case is “teachable”: among them the presence of a managerial problem that is relevant and that generates tension in the debate; the essential data for the analysis of alternative solutions, without long deletable paragraphs; and a protagonist with whom one can identify…