From Teaching with Cases to Teaching through Case Development: Making Purchasing Managers and Students the Designers of Learning Journeys

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The prevailing approach to producing and teaching case studies in purchasing and supply management (PSM) education involves faculty members’ creating and providing finished cases for course participants to work with. This traditional approach still has merit; but PSM education also must evolve to meet the increasing and changing demands that PSM executives face in practice. We offer an advanced and experiential learning method, wherein participants both in degree courses and in executive education programs develop a case study and the accompanying teaching material based on their engagement with real-life PSM challenges. In particular, the process of crafting a teaching note requires participants to adopt a teacher’s mindset and competencies, enhancing their effectiveness in practice as facilitators of ecosystems and as change managers. We also encourage faculty members to broaden the application of case studies beyond working on past situations. Case studies can be the end-product of field projects (consulting cases), and their development and use can be an integral part of a change management process when they become the means to gain employee commitment for ongoing strategic initiatives (implementation cases). The latter approach is particularly fruitful when case development is used in customized executive education programs because it allows the participants’ learning to feed directly into major ongoing change projects in their company. As such, cases and the case development process have the potential to develop participants’ competencies and to create direct business impact in far broader ways than traditional case study pedagogy allows.