Our Annual Case Awards

Case writers are often under recognised in comparison with colleagues of similar stature publishing in refereed journals.  So it's always a pleasure and a privilege for ecch to play some part in redressing that imbalance through our annual Case Awards.  We took the decision only two years ago that the Awards should reflect our global presence by being open to entries from around the world, so it's such a pleasure to see our winners this year represent thirteen schools, seven countries and four continents.

This year’s Awards demonstrate the widespread excellence in case writing and teaching taking place around the world and the relevance to the current economic climate of subjects being taught. The era of cases originating predominantly in only the historically most well known business schools is past. Relevant and effective cases are being demanded, used – and produced, worldwide.

Congratulations to all our winners and especially to James A Erskine, Michiel R Leenders and Louise A Mauffette-Leenders of the Richard Ivey School of Business who were awarded the Outstanding Contribution to the Case Method award in recognition of their work in bringing the case method to thousands of faculty worldwide through more than 400 case writing and case teaching workshops in more than 50 countries over the past 40 years.

Full details of the Awards may be found here: www.ecch.com/awards2012.

As the Olympics approach, the Hot Topic for next year’s awards is The Business of Sport.

What We Mean When We Talk About the Digital Classroom

The problem with new technology is that by the time most people know what they mean by 'new technology' it's no longer new.  New has moved on like someone you'd like to be friends with but they've upped and left for another school, another job, or sometimes just died.  And yet we all (sort of) know what we mean when we talk about new technology, or the digital classroom, or whatever else we call the business of transacting at a distance what we used to do face to face.  It would help if we could separate the long term relationships and values being expressed and the temporal technological developments we might use and which flit by too quickly for the non-obsessed to keep pace with.

In fact, I'm not bothered by this dislocation between retaining (not preserving - retaining) long-term values and keeping up with what's novel.  It seems to me it's a healthy place to be, that tug back against a too ready acceptance of the new.  Remember the craze for CB radio?

Today's FT carries a feature on an innovative use of technology by Boston University School of Management, where they are bringing live contributions from business leaders into classroom  project work and case discussion.  The article identifies how this radically alters the role of faculty from 'sage on the stage' to 'guide on the side'.  It certainly looks like the BU faculty and students benefit from this digitally enhanced learning and it reinforces my own sense that moving from sage to guide chimes precisely with the strengths of the case method so that case discussion is positioned strongly to take advantage of new technologies (whatever they might be), and in any event certainly better than other approaches to teaching and learning.

The article quotes Ellen Rubin, vice-president at Terremark, "No matter how well the case is written, to hear from someone who was in the trenches and had to make a decision, there's no comparison".   I take that as a call to take advantage of the opportunities technologies give us to develop the case method rather than replace it.