Other B-schools can access IIM-A’s over 3,500 cases.
It’s philanthropy of a different kind. The Ahmedabad-based Indian Institute of Management will soon allow B-schools across the country to access its vast pool of case studies, online.
IIM-A is in the process of taking its 3,500-odd case studies online giving easy access to the global management arena. The institute envisages this project to be useful to the smaller B-schools making their academic structure richer.
“The project will benefit smaller management institutes and researchers to get access to IIM-A’s high quality case studies. This will be done at a nominal cost for the institutes and corporate, while academics and researchers will get free access to the cases,” said a source from IIM-A .
Sale of such case studies is not new to the IIMs. Case studies by these premier management institutes have been in huge demand by other B-schools. “We have been selling the case studies to various interested parties. Of these, over 60 per cent are institutes, some are academic individuals and researchers. We however, get less corporate inquiries for the same,” stated another IIM-A source.
The online availability of case study will fasten the process of delivery as well as will provide huge options to choose from.
At present, there is a lot of manual effort involved in providing a case study.
“This is a time consuming process, sometimes even a term is over by the time the required case study reaches the person,” added the source.
The digitisation work of the 3,500-odd case studies is over and the editing work is underway at present. However, considering the complexity of the work, the institute declined to give a time-line for completion of the work.
While IIM-A has put up the bibliographic details and synopsis of the case studies on its portal, uploading of the cases will take place only after the completion of editing work.
A panel of editors have been assigned the job of editing these case studies to make it comparable with international standards.
IIM-A conducts an average of 50-60 case studies every year.
The case studies, which have been prepared over the past 50 years that varies in content, gives a closer look to the corporate and management happenings of the business circles in India. “The case studies are prepared with international standards and touches variety of subjects. Some of the cases are very interesting and give insights into the corporate happenings in the country,” said an official handling case studies at the IIM-A.
IIM-A, which gets case studies from Harvard Business School, says it is eager to spread this rich resource of case studies to smaller B-schools.
The cost involved is merely administrative and operational cost that the institute intends to recover. As an academic institute we cannot have an objective of profit-making by selling our knowledge resource,” said a source at the IIM-A.
The institute has also developed the gateway for financial transactions, which will enable payments via credit cards on these case studies.
