From the role of social media in elections to the business model of online grocery stores, case studies published by the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) cover a wide range of topics, which are proving to be increasingly popular not just in India but also world over.
The year 2017 saw a 47% increase in sale of case studies when compared with 2016. Last year, sales figures touched 59,116, at an average of 405 copies a case study. This was a sharp increase from 2016 when 40,230 cases were sold. Buyers comprise 418 universities across 75 countries.
U. Dinesh Kumar, Chair, Data Analytics Lab at the IIMB and Chair of the Executive Post Graduate Programme in Management, IIMB, said the majority of the case studies sold were in the marketing domain. It remains the most popular segment of case studies sold and constitutes of 32.7% of the total sales. However, he pointed out that there had been a surge in the sale of analytics case studies, which comprised nearly 29.1% of the sales last year. Another 16% are in the field of strategy domain.
A majority of the case studies are written by faculty members, while a few of are written jointly by the faculty members and candidates pursuing doctoral programmes at the IIMB. Professor Kumar said some of the popular case studies include positioning of Saffola Cooking Oil, Volkswagen in India, Analytics at BigBasket, and Use of WhatsApp by the BJP in the Maharashtra Assembly elections. As many as 20 new cases were added in 2017, and 153 case studies by the IIMB are distributed through Harvard Business Publishing.
Some of the international universities that purchased IIMB’s case studies include Harvard University, MIT, Cornell University, Duke University, Columbia University, Imperial College of London, New York University, Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan. Within the country, IIMB’s counterparts at Ahmedabad, Kolkata, and Lucknow have purchased its case studies.
