Applied Learning Goes Beyond Any Cultural Context


Ariff Kachra, Strategy Professor and Director of India Development at the Richard Ivey School of Business, talks to Meena Saxena , Assistant Director of the Case Development Centre at the Indian School of Business (ISB), about developing a case study culture in India.


One of the cornerstones of the ISB-IVEY partnerships is to help develop a case culture here in India. What have been your experiences?

We have had the opportunity to work with some phenomenally talented people in terms of training case-writers. ISB has helped us co-host workshops that are extremely in-depth, and have really tackled the craft of case writing. We have also done workshops that are much shorter and expand on the natural bridge between case writing with case teaching. Finally, we have done workshops that are tailored to the specific needs of faculty that are new to and/or use the case method. Our role has been that of expert promoters; experts because we are global leaders in case teaching and case writing and promoters because we have worked diligently with the ISB, using its knowledge infrastructure, to create a great deal of excitement about the case method. I would say that Indian business schools today are much more excited about the case method and its implementation, thanks to the joint efforts of Ivey and ISB.


The case method is widely used in other parts of the world. Do you think it is going to get more relevant and popular in India?

According to me, the power of the case method is applied learning. I don’t think applied learning has a cultural context. The notion of being able to take complex theoretical ideas, understand them, and apply them to a practical context is as relevant in Canadian business, as it would be in Australia, as it is in Indian business. So, the idea of applied learning goes beyond any cultural context. That definitely makes the case method powerful, because every business school in every country could benefit from its graduates being more practice-oriented.


Why is the case teaching methodology not as popular in Indian B-schools as it is in US?

A lot of the faculty in North America has gone through the case method as students themselves. Faculty in India may not have gone through the case method as students but may want to implement it as faculty. And so I think the learning curve is even more steep, it is more difficult for an Indian faculty member, who has never been the ‘learner’ in a case classroom, to now be the ‘teacher’. Cross culturally, faculty members are often viewed as the people with answers and students are people with questions. The case method really counteracts that because it is all about questions and no one has the absolute right answer. There are some answers that are better thought-out than other answers but there isn’t a right or wrong answer. I think for some students and some faculty that reality makes the case method very challenging.

We have already seen that some of the cases that come out of India are simply a story or an assemblage of information about a given company that is then called a case. My fear would be that schools would begin creating these information assemblages, calling them cases, and essentially creating documents that aren’t teachable. It is definitely a challenge to understand the complexity of a case, what it takes to publish a case, and more importantly what it takes for a case to be successful in the classroom.


The Centre for Case Development at the ISB is engaged in developing cases about Indian businesses. What is the potential of Indian cases in classrooms abroad?

I don’t think you can teach business today and not talk about India. Programmes that teach strategy or organisational behaviour or accounting or finance, and don’t have cases that involve Indian companies, essentially don’t have cases about some of the most important companies in the world. I don’t see it as Indian content for Indian students as much as I see it as part of the global economy. You can’t run a business today and not understand India. You can’t be in an industry where you are not going to face an Indian competitor. There is tremendous demand and the demand is only going to grow around the globe from students and executives who want to get a better understanding of the Indian business context.