IIM-A Case Studies to Be Available Online Soon

Ahmedabad: The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A) will soon allow b-schools across the nation to access its vast pool of case studies, online. IIM-A is in the practice of taking its 3,500-odd case studies online offering easy access to the worldwide management arena. The institute anticipates this project to be beneficial to the smaller B-schools making their academic structure richer.

According to the statement of a source from IIM-A, the project will benefit smaller management institutes and researchers to get access to IIM-A’s high quality case studies. It also mentioned that this will be done at a nominal cost for the institutes and corporate, while academics and researchers will get free access to the cases.

In addition, another source from IIM-A has stated that the 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. The institute has been selling the case studies to various interested parties. Of these, over 60 per cent are institutes, some are academic individuals and researchers. However, the institute gets less corporate inquiries for the same.

Moreover, the source also mentioned that 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.

As per sources, presently, the digitisation work of the 3,500-odd case studies is over and the editing work is underway. 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 has 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.

An official handling case studies at the IIM-A has said that 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. It also added that 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.

Also, another source at the IIM-A has said that 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 they cannot have an objective of profit-making by selling their knowledge resource. Besides, the institute has also developed the gateway for financial transactions, which will enable payments via credit cards on these case studies.