Harvard Business School Has the Market Cornered on Case Studies
The school has cornered the market with a product its rivals use
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Business schools like to say they’re at the leading edge of corporate innovation, boasting on-campus incubators and electives on design thinking. But almost all rely on a teaching tool that’s barely changed in more than a century. To learn how to lead companies, MBA students read hundreds of case studies—stripped-down narratives about a strategy problem at a real company—and discuss how they would tackle the challenge.
For Harvard Business School, which created and popularized the method— the school taught its first case in 1912—case studies are a cottage industry as well as a bedrock of the curriculum. Harvard Business Publishing says it sells to about 4,000 schools globally; its cases account for 80 percent of the case studies used.