INSEAD professors dominate The Case Centre’s Awards and Competitions 2020

INSEAD, the business school for the world, has received the highest number of awards of any school or institution globally at The Case Centre’s Awards and Competitions 2020.

The Case Centre’s Awards and Competitions celebrate worldwide excellence in case writing and teaching at schools of business, management and government worldwide and are now considered the case method community's annual 'Oscars'. INSEAD faculty won in three categories this year including the 2020 Outstanding Case Writer: Hot Topic, which was awarded to Zoe Kinias, Associate Professor and Chair of the Organisational Behaviour Area  and Academic Director of the INSEAD Gender Initiative, for her first ever published case, Mirvac: Building Balance (A) & (B).

Horacio Falcão, Senior Affiliate Professor of Decision Sciences, won the Entrepreneurship category for his case, Boost M6700 (A) and (B): Buyer-Seller Negotiation.

Professors of Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, co-directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute and co-authors of the New York Times Bestseller and a #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller, Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing - Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth (Hachette, 2017), and the global bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy (2005, Expanded Edition 2015)  and Institute Executive Fellow, Michael Olenick, won the Strategy and General Management category for their case study,  The Marvel Way: Restoring a Blue Ocean.

“We are thrilled that our faculty have once again received great recognition for producing world-class teaching materials and cases,” said Ziv Carmon, Dean of Research at INSEAD. “INSEAD professors and writers have a proven track record of teaching excellence which they leverage to provide case studies of the highest standard. Prestigious achievements like these help INSEAD remain a world leader in business education.”

Kinias’ Mirvac: Building Balance (A) and (B) case study, co-written with Felicia A. Henderson,  Leadership Consultant at Henderson Advising, features the establishment of a bold plan to introduce flexibility into the Construction workplace as part of the implementation of the Mirvac Group’s new Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) policy. Kinias expressed her delight that a case such as Mirvac, which was so well aligned with INSEAD’s institutional value of diversity, had been acknowledged by The Case Centre.

“The topic of developing a gender inclusive work culture is critically important for business and society,” Kinias said, noting that in intervening to focus on normalising flexible arrangements for men – a topic that often marginalises women – the case study’s protoganist, Mirvac CEO Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, had demonstrated leadership that was both effective and powerful.

“The diversity space often focuses on problems, and the Mirvac case is refreshing in that it provides an opportunity to explore a solution – to understand how and why it worked. This provides us hope for progress in developing positive change,” she said.

Horacio Falcao’s winning case study, Boost M6700 (A): Buyer Seller Negotiation, is a role play format where students assume a business character in an interaction negotiation involving sales and procurement of IT equipment. Co- authored with Kriti Jain, Assistant Professor in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources at IE Business School, and Heather Grover, Negotiation and Strategy Consultant, it is the second role-play case study ever to win this prestigious award.

The first, also written by Falcão, was Oxipouco: An Endangered Species Resource Negotiation which took the 2017 award in the Human Resource Management / Organisational Behaviour category.

“That a negotiation role-play case study has now been recognised in the Entrepreneurship category gives us confidence we are producing a format valued by professors of different subject matters around the world,” said Falcão.

“Role-plays are powerful pedagogical tools where students learn by doing. They need to know the theory and be able to put it in practice, as opposed to a normal business case where theories are debated but students are not faced with the intensity and the risks of the decisions themselves,” he said.

Taking a business everybody knows and loves, like Marvel, was a fun way to illustrate how long-term strategic work is often ultimately more profitable than short-term profit-taking, Kim, Mauborgne and Olenick said of their case study Marvel Way: Restoring a Blue Ocean.

“It is rewarding and an honour to learn our Marvel case has been so well received by professors, students, and executives,” they said. “It’s thrilling to see the strong response to the theme of the case - how a company’s strategy can turnaround even the most challenged business."

“Marvel executives were incredibly gracious with their time, especially former CEO Peter Cuneo and the original head of Marvel Studios, David Maisel who later told us this case is the most accurate narrative related to Marvel’s turnaround and the establishment of Marvel Studios.”

The Case Centre’s Awards are presented in nine management categories and recognise cases that have been used in the largest number of organisations across the globe in the past year. The Outstanding Case Writer competition is judged by a panel of internationally renowned case method experts. INSEAD won the highest number of accolades of any school in 2020 ahead of Harvard Business School and ICFAI University which won two each.