No. 17, November 2022.
"Nice touch," the supervisor told me after reading the draft of my first case as an investigator for INCAE. "But not teachable." Too long, with lots of "interesting" but nonessential attachments.
MBA programs at schools like INCAE and Harvard teach students how to analyze cases, not write them. And the reverse is also true: some professors with several years of teaching cases have not written any.
There are two reasons for doing so: first, the process of developing a case can make us better instructors. After a workshop on case writing, the professor at a Latin American university told me that "I now understand what the ingredients of a good discussion are." Second, without good quality case sources, there are not going to be cases to teach.
And now there is a third reason: it is much easier to gain international recognition for case writing 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 professors from INCAE met virtually with the director of the CBCC, María Helena Jaén, and some members of her staff to learn about the Consortium and 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 pedagogical material on the reality of Latin America, to achieve its own collection that concentrates 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."
Members -CLADEA, BALAS and nine schools from seven Ibero-American countries- commit to submit two cases per 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, because of their quality and relevance to developing environments, are discussed worldwide. "I received congratulatory messages for my case from Turkey and other countries outside the Latin American region," said one participant at the meeting.
The alliance with SEKN, founded under the leadership of Jim Austin of Harvard Business School and with an extensive collection of cases on social and environmental sustainability management issues, is another advantage because it expands publishing 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 NACRA 2022 Conference.
What I have found most valuable are the criteria established for the review of candidate cases for the CBCC collection that determine whether a case is "teachable": among them the presence of a management problem that is relevant and that generates tension in the debate; essential data for the analysis of alternative solutions, without large paragraphs that can be deleted; and a protagonist with whom one can identify...
