The Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB) is making a case for itself not just in India, but in nearly 50 other countries as well. After extending its reach through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), IIMB has seen a spurt in demand for its case studies as well.
It witnessed a 39 per cent increase in sales of its case studies in 2015 compared to the previous year, with the number of clients exceeding 385 universities and organisations as compared to 360 in 2014.
Every year, the institute publishes and sells case studies of challenges faced by companies. In 2015, IIMB sold 46,662 copies of its case studies in 47 countries. On an average, each case study sold around 486 copies. In 2014, the number of copies distributed was 33,407.
This apart, 15 cases saw more than a thousand copies being sold last year. The bestsellers included topics on Bollywood, apparel, cars and oil.
The interest in case studies from India is intriguing.
“Traditionally, most cases were based on American companies. However, in the recent past, there is a lot of interest to understand business/management challenges faced by companies in emerging markets, especially India. Most cases published by IIMB on are Indian companies or multinational companies operating in India, and this could be the primary reason for the spurt in cases published by IIMB,” said U. Dinesh Kumar, Chairperson, Executive Post Graduate Programme in Management (EPGP), and Chairperson, Decision Sciences and Information Systems area and the Data Centre and Analytics Lab, IIMB.
The cases are written by the IIMB faculty in collaboration with the students and/or case writers. Though case writing is not a course requirement for students, many do it out of their own interest. It takes anywhere from six to nine months for a case study, which “describe a current challenge or dilemma faced by a company along with all the information required for students to arrive at a solution/decision for the challenge”.
IIMB has a Centre for Development of Cases and Teaching Aids (CDOCTA), which supports case writing. Cases are chosen based on whether they deal with problems that are new and have not been well-analysed in the past.
“Recent cases focus on topics such as analytics and big data since there is a huge demand for such cases,” Prof. Kumar added.
BLURB
IIMB was adjudged the best management institute in the country by the MHRD’s National Institutional Ranking Framework
Bollywood is a popular topicBollywood is a big draw even in IIM classrooms. Among the top-selling cases from IIMB is ‘1920 Evil Returns: Bollywood and Social Media Marketing’. U. Dinesh Kumar, Chairperson, Executive Post Graduate Programme in Management (EPGP), and Chairperson, Decision Sciences and Information Systems area and the Data Centre and Analytics Lab, IIMB, worked on the case with Suhruta Kulkarni.
Prof. Kumar said, “Movie promotion is an integral part of the business. In this instance, the production house wanted to understand how digital and social media campaigns (such as Facebook pages and YouTube trailers) are associated with box office collection. Case studies based on marketing/strategic challenges in general and about sectors that are not previously understood well, such as Bollywood, have more demand from the educators.”
Link to Harvard Business PublishingIIMB was reportedly the first management school from India to distribute cases through Harvard Business Publishing (HBP), an affiliate of Harvard Business School. At present, 102 cases are being distributed through HBP with 24 new ones added in 2015. IIMB faculties say this has given IIMB cases much wider visibility.
