Case publishing helps business knowledge find its way into classrooms across the globe to be passed down to future business leaders. However, many aspects of this practice often go unnoticed by educators and students who engage with the case method.  Recently, the Case Center at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) and their Director, Professor Shimin Chen had a conversation with Ivey Publishing and shared unique insights into case development and publishing at the CEIBS Case Center, discussed trends in Chinese cases, highlighted opportunities and successes, and shared their vision for chinacases.org to become the most influential China case library globally.

IVEY PUBLISHING: CEIBS has been publishing cases since 1994. How has your case publishing approach evolved over time?

PROFESSOR CHEN: The Chinese Government and European Union jointly founded CEIBS in 1994. The original teaching mode relied on translated English cases developed in the West for the CEIBS classroom. However, with the development of China's economy, our students became dissatisfied with this practice. In 2001, the school established the CEIBS Case Center with a professional case writing team to support CEIBS faculty in developing China-themed cases for teaching, dramatically improving our student learning experience. As part of our core competitiveness, over the past 22 years, we have produced about 1500 China cases.

2013 was a milestone year for the CEIBS Case Center when we received a recurring grant from the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission to construct the "Shanghai MBA Case Development and Sharing Platform" with top-tier business schools in Shanghai. As a result, CEIBS started building a case library called the Global Platform of China Cases (chinacases.org). While the original purpose of case development at CEIBS was to serve classroom teaching, with chinacases.org, we aim to promote the case method in management education and exert more significant influence in China.

If the first five years of the last decade laid a good foundation for chinacases.org, the second five years have witnessed it emerge as one of China's most influential case libraries. Through rigorous case entry criteria and review processes for chinacases.org, we have substantially improved the quality of CEIBS cases. We now publish our cases at chinacases.org and globally through the distribution channels of Harvard, Ivey, and The Case Centre.

IVEY PUBLISHING: What are some of the key aspects of your case development and publishing process, from initial submission to final publication? What makes it unique?

PROFESSOR CHEN: A vital and unique aspect of our case development and publishing is that the CEIBS Case Center houses two well-established and dedicated professional teams. More than a dozen full-time case researchers have played an essential role in case development and publishing. They work closely with CEIBS faculty co-authors on case texts and teaching notes.

Over 90% of the case researchers at CEIBS hold PhDs with experiences in publishing academic articles before their case development career at CEIBS. All case researchers share the same value that case development is creating practice-relevant knowledge with meanings beyond business schools' knowledge dissemination. Undoubtedly, our case researchers' deep involvement substantially helps develop teaching notes and publish more quality cases. And our case publishing team further ensures the quality of the case publishing process.

As CEIBS organizes an annual "Global Contest for the Best China-Focused Cases," all participating cases will undergo a rigorous evaluation process, including initial reviews, blind reviews, and area editor's reviews, and receive comprehensive comments. All revision cases are subject to further evaluation to ensure quality before acceptance into chinacases.org. With our rigorous review process, we also provide professional editing and typesetting services for all accepted cases to ensure quality in substance and formality.

IVEY PUBLISHING: What trends are you seeing in case submissions at the moment?

PROFESSOR CHEN: Internally at CEIBS, we observe three trends. First, our case authors increasingly focus on quality than quantity. Along with the development of chinacases.org, our authors have better understood what constitutes a good teaching case. Second, well-crafted and user-friendly teaching notes play a more prominent role as people better appreciate the importance of quality teaching notes in case adoption after publication. Third, our authors pay more attention to emerging interests or cutting-edge topics, such as digital transformation, ESG, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).

Externally, we see a steady increase in submissions to chinacases.org through the Global Contest for the Best China-Focused Cases. When we started the Contest in 2015, we received 126 submissions by 195 authors from 80 institutions. The same numbers increased to 368, 765, and 125 in 2022. We expect the growth will continue in the coming years due to an increased emphasis on teaching quality and the case method teaching by the Chinese Government and the leadership of business schools in China. We hope to attract more authors to the Contest through our differentiated services. Participating in this process will help case developers and teachers to learn, share and grow.

IVEY PUBLISHING: What criteria do you use to determine which topics are most relevant and impactful?

PROFESSOR CHEN: We judge topical relevance in several dimensions. First, the topic should be relevant to business education in China. As CEIBS' mission is to educate responsible leaders versed in "China Depth, Global Breadth," we promote China-themed cases with international standards. Second, the topics should be specific business challenges and dilemmas or critical decisions that compel students to analyze through discussions and debates. We encourage cutting-edge or emerging issues that have not received much attention in case studies but could profoundly impact business, such as new business models, patterns, consumption, technological innovation, and other innovative practices. Third, we promote topics with analysis and discussion based on theory or literature with potential generalizability.

While relevant topics tend to be impactful, we further measure case impact in five ways: (1) continuously used in the CEIBS classroom; (2) enabling faculty to create new courses on cutting-edge issues, such as digital transformation, women in business, and ESG; (3) widely adopted in other business schools; (4) highly rated and liked by students; and (5) winning awards in global case writing competitions.

IVEY PUBLISHING: How do you collaborate with authors to ensure that your cases have the highest quality and are engaging?

PROFESSOR CHEN: Our full-time case researcher team supports over 80% of the CEIBS cases developed yearly. We implement several working mechanisms to ensure high-quality collaboration between our case researchers and faculty members. When a professor submits a case writing need to us, we assign a researcher with expertise matching the teaching areas of the faculty.

To ensure sufficient time for case development, we soft cap the number of ongoing cases each researcher and faculty member can simultaneously engage. We have designed and continuously improved our internal collaboration mechanisms to facilitate learning and grow talents, such as mentoring, co-authorship, internal reviews, etc. We also organize workshops regularly to upgrade our team's case development skills.

IVEY PUBLISHING: What are your authors' biggest challenges to overcome and opportunities to explore these days?

PROFESSOR CHEN: One of the biggest challenges faced by all faculty authors in China is the demand for time between teaching and research. As case development involves significant time investment, we generally need a better supportive environment for high-quality teaching and case writing in business education in China. Another related challenge is the incentive and motivation for the faculty to develop an internal teaching case into a publishable one to generate a broader impact, as publication requires further if not more, efforts in developing user-friendly teaching notes. While we greatly encourage innovation in the content and form of case studies, authors often struggle between innovation and classic criteria for high-quality teaching cases. Finally, balancing a case company's expectations and our teaching needs for field-based cases challenges almost every case author. While many companies still consider a teaching case an external endorsement and a tool for favourable publicity, case authors must maintain an objective and neutral tone in case development.

While challenging, there are plenty of case development opportunities in China. As an increasingly important growth engine in the global economy, China prioritizes high-quality development in many areas, including the economic, social, cultural, and ecological fronts. There are many innovations, emerging business practices, and cutting-edge topics that case authors can explore for business education in China and the world. Advances in digital technologies also bring more possibilities for innovation in case studies. Furthermore, as the case method gets more recognition and acceptance in China's education system, more companies will be open-minded and willing to support business school education.

Since business schools vary significantly in China in case development maturity, we at the CEIBS Case Center organize the Case Master Development Camps and the Case Co-creation Community annually for faculty members and case researchers to help improve their case teaching and development skills. We can collectively better deal with the challenges and catch the above opportunities.

IVEY PUBLISHING: What recommendations would you offer authors who want their cases to get published and widely used in the classroom?

PROFESSOR CHEN: First and foremost, a good teaching case must be well-designed to be educational rather than just promotional for a company's best practices. We strongly advise authors to study the criteria of chinacases.org for the case text and teaching note. Authors should develop a case concerning a specific course's learning objectives. It should identify a company's dilemmas, challenges, and issues that students can discuss and debate in class. An adequate and strong teaching note should connect case analysis to some theory or literature for generalizability and help other instructors adopt the case quickly. In addition, authors shall pay attention to cultural differences if they aim to publish internationally. And finally, we want to advise case authors to keep some of the often-mentioned good case characteristics in mind – significance, complexity, conflict, objectivity, generalizability, and an "aha" moment.

Further, we advise authors to pay particular attention to various aspects of effective communication in case development. First, within the author team, there should be a consensus on learning objectives, key case issues, and analytical frameworks. Second, for field-based cases, authors should build good relationships with the case company and protagonist to ensure the source of in-depth information. Third, we recommend authors collect student feedback based on class discussions for continuous improvement. And finally, when submitting the case for publication, authors should be open-minded and try to incorporate reviewers' feedback wherever possible.

IVEY PUBLISHING: What has been your experience with technologies like simulations or digital products?

PROFESSOR CHEN: CEIBS has developed a comprehensive business simulation used quite successfully in most degree programs' 3- or 4-day opening module. In addition, we have been exploring video cases in the past few years, including video clips as supporting materials for case teaching and standalone video cases designed to replace paper cases. Such attempts are often time-consuming and costly but lead to more interactive and engaging products for students.

While our experience with new technologies in case development is somewhat limited, we expect more efforts in this regard as we have recently established a position within our case writing team to further explore innovations in case studies.

IVEY PUBLISHING: What is the vision of CEIBS for the future of case publishing?

PROFESSOR CHEN: Our vision for chinacases.org is to become globally the most influential China case library. By focusing on China-themed cases with international standards, we aim to bring more China cases not only to the classrooms of business education in China but also globally.

We publish CEIBS cases through three global case distributors: Ivey Publishing, Harvard Business Publishing, and the Case Centre. As the next step, we plan to select some high-quality non-CEIBS cases through our rigorous contest review process and help to publish them in international case libraries like Ivey Publishing. We believe this will help bridge the gap between the demand for and supply of China-themed management cases in the global business education market.

IVEY PUBLISHING: Can you share any upcoming projects or initiatives that CEIBS is currently working on?

PROFESSOR CHEN: While we have multiple ongoing projects, our most important initiative is to increase the user base of chinacases.org from the current 70 business schools to 200 to 300 by 2025. With growing institutional subscribers, our case library will impact business education in China more significantly. Our greatest challenge is to change teaching behaviour in China from pure lecture-based to lecture-case mixed mode and to develop faculty capacity for case development. We currently organize a two-day case teaching workshop, the CEIBS Case Master Camp, and a two-day case writing workshop, the CEIBS Case Co-creation Community, annually on our campus. Together with our efforts to promote chinacases.org, we have started to provide more tailor-made training services to our users.

Internally to facilitate case development and usage, we are developing a lifecycle case management system as a part of the school's Smart Campus Project. The system will help manage the whole life cycle of case development from case lead to case writing, usage, and publication. It will also become a communication platform for CEIBS case authors and connect with other CEIBS databases, such as the alum database, the course system, and the case library, for more efficient data analysis and management.

Meet Professor Shimin Chen

Professor Shimin Chen is the Zhu Xiaoming Chair Professor in Accounting and Director of the Case Center at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). Previously, he was the Associate Dean for MBA at CEIBS and Associate Head at the School of Accounting and Finance, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. After obtaining a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, he also taught at the Clarion University of Pennsylvania, Hong Kong Lingnan University, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Professor Chen has extensive experience in teaching and research. He has taught various courses in different degree and executive education programs, received many teaching/research awards and grants, and published numerous articles in leading academic journals internationally. He is currently an Elsevier Highly Cited Chinese Researcher. He is also an award-winning case author, with his cases published at chinacases.org, Harvard Business Publishing, Ivey Publishing, and the Case Centre. He is a Certified Management Accountant in the U.S. He actively participates in corporate governance by serving as an independent director in companies listed in Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.