Carnegie Mellon University

Eberly Center

Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation

Team Discussion of Business Cases and Application to Current Events

Lu, J.

In my introductory Marketing course, students read business cases and turn in written responses to a company’s specific problem. The challenge is to have students understand the richness of these business contexts and to be able to generalize the case method to other contexts. In one class, I assigned students to small teams of 3-6, each responsible for sharing with the class a different aspect of the case analysis. Prior to class, students were also assigned to read two related current event articles, and in their teams they applied the same analysis to the business problems covered by the articles. The key lessons learned were that giving the students time to discuss among themselves before sharing increases the level and quality of the responses, and that students enjoy debating the pros and cons of different strategies. I would share the slides outlining the case analysis and class discussion format.

Joy Lu, Tepper School of Business