Punch line: Publishing business case studies is big business, and more schools are looking to cash in.
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Excerpted from WSJ: “The Business of Case Studies”
The three largest case-study publishers and distributors jointly sell more than 10 million cases and see tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year.
Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. dominates the market, recording sales of 8.5 million case studies in fiscal 2011 and estimating that 80% of the cases used world-wide come from there.
To maintain its edge, about five years ago Harvard started offering “simulations,” or online role-playing exercises.
Though simulations still represent a minor share of sales, they are growing fast. Sales in 2011 rose 37% from the prior year, which was double the 2009 figure.
There also has been growing interest in short cases as publishers market to part-time M.B.A. programs for time-crunched working adults, which have seen a surge in enrollment in recent years.
Harvard’s “Brief Cases” and concise offerings from other publishers can run just three or four pages, about one-quarter the length of a traditional case.
Case publishers and distributors are pushing hard into emerging markets, too, accepting cases written by faculty at up-and-coming schools in India, China and Latin America and selling products to those same institutions.
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Top five cases from Harvard Business Publishing, fiscal 2011
- Cola Wars Continue: Coke and Pepsi, 2006 — Competitive strategies of the soft-drink giants
- Starbucks—Delivering Customer Service — Efforts to improve customer-service satisfaction
- Apple Inc., 2010 — Can the iPad take the company to new heights
- Walt Disney Co. — The Entertainment King—Disney’s 1980s turnaround and strategic challenges in the early 2000s
- Toyota Motor Manufacturing, USA, Inc.—Solving assembly problems with the Toyota Production System
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