Explore the interactive timeline of our 50 years

Distribution started in 1973 with cases from Harvard Business School (via the Intercollegiate Case Clearing House), IMEDE (now IMD), London Business School, and from individual authors. By 1974 there were 4,000 items available for distribution.

In 1974 our office opened at Cranfield School of Management and we gained formal charitable status. Our charitable status remains a key pillar of our identity in 2023; find out more in our values statement.

In 1987 agreements were reached with the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia, the School of Business Administration at the University of Western Ontario (now Ivey Business School) and IESE at the University of Navarra to distribute their case collections.

We launched the world's first online case search - COLIS (Case OnLine Information System) - in 1989. UK institutions could access COLIS over the JANET network, whilst those outside the UK had to dial up to access the server using a modem.

A service for paper inspection (preview) copies of cases was introduced in 1990 to allow educators the opportunity to assess the suitability of a case for classroom use.

By 1991 the team had grown to seven full-time members of staff. From the outset our customers have been at the heart of everything we do, as reflected in Jeff Gray's comment in 1991: "Although we use increasing numbers of computers, information processors and networks which are vital to the efficiency of our business, our mission lies in the personal attention and service which we give to all our customers."

To meet the demand in North America for cases written in other parts of the world, we opened our US office at Babson College in 1992. Pictured below are the members of the first ECCH at Babson Board (Jean-Pierre Jeannet, Ralph Sorensen, Douglas Dalrymple, Hans Klein, Philippe Haspeslagh, Melvyn Stanford and Avram Goldberg) with Office Manager Wendy Carmichael.

In 1994, for the first time non-English language cases were introduced to the collection, with 80 available in French, German and Spanish. Most were from INSEAD and IMD and were translations of popular English language cases. In 2023 this has grown to over 7,700 cases in 20+ languages. 

In 1996 a case writing scholarship programme was established. Ten scholarships were offered annually to PhD students at member organisations, with the aim of developing cases from field research undertaken during their studies. They included a financial award of £500, and a free place on a case writing workshop.

The first multimedia case on CD, Pacific Dunlop China (A): Beijing, was submitted for distribution from Harvard Business School in 1998. The case included video interviews, video tours of the Pacific Dunlop plant in action, an operations simulation, tests for different models to increase profitability, and "hypertext links to other resources to harness the power of the World Wide Web as a research tool"!

In 1999 we began distributing cases from the Asian Case Research Centre, this was the first agreement to distribute a collection from Asia. 

We began offering a monthly email update service in 2000 to allow customers to sign up to receive details of new cases directly to their inbox.

In 2001 the first online cases were added to the collection. ChemUnity.com - eMarketplace for the Chemical Industry, and Nextrom: Procurement through an Online Marketplace were both written at IMD by Petri Lehtivaara under the supervision of Professors Carlos Cordón and Thomas E Vollmann.

The move away from paper took off in earnest in 2002, as 'electronic permission masters' of teaching materials became available for staff at member organisations to buy. This early facility included a manual process to encrypt each PDF file ordered, and customers were required to login to the files using a unique ID and password. 

We published a list of our bestselling cases from the previous year for the first time in 2003.

To further speed up the process of selecting a case for classroom use electronic copies of teaching notes were made available via the website in 2003.

In 2005 we changed our name to 'ecch' to reflect the global reach of our operations. The new logo featured a strapline to convey the focus of our activities.

Jeff Gray passed away unexpectedly in 2007, and the Executive Committee began a search for a new Director. Richard McCracken, formerly Head of Intellectual Property at the Open University, was appointed in 2008.

Our programme for schools in developing countries (previously the Concessionary Pricing Scheme) was improved and expanded in 2011 to become more inclusive and provide up to an 80% discount on case prices.

The digital delivery of teaching materials was revolutionised in 2011, when the manual process of encrypting PDFs was replaced with an automated process to secure PDFs with a sidenote on-the-fly as orders were placed. Customers could then download the customised copy from their digital library, with no need to login to the file separately. Two years later 95% of orders were being delivered digitally in this way.

As part of our 40^th anniversary celebrations we were renamed The Case Centre to clearly communicate our status as a world-leading case distributor, expert and knowledge centre.

2013 saw the introduction of a competition to recognise excellence in case teaching. Initially a competition for innovation in case teaching, it became the Outstanding Case Teacher Competition in 2015. In its first year the winners were Sabine Emad, Geneva School of Business Administration and Wade Halvorson, SP Jain School of Global Management.

The case writing scholarship programme was enhanced in 2014 to offer financial support of £1,000 ($1,200, €1,150), a free place on one of our expert-led case writing workshops, and professional feedback on the first draft of the case. We also broadened who could apply to any unpublished case writers who are faculty members or PhD students with teaching responsibilities. By the beginning of 2023, 97 case writing scholarships had been awarded.

A new delivery option, CoursePack Creator, was launched in 2014 enabling faculty to create online collections of course-specific learning materials (CoursePacks) for students to access.

To recognise the contribution and impact of case authors, in 2016 we revealed the first annual list of our top bestselling case authors. Faculty whose cases sell the most copies during the previous academic year appear in the list. The late Debapratim Purkayastha, ICFAI Business School (IBS), has topped the list every year since its launch.

2016 saw the launch of a new faciliity for case authors, allowing them to submit their cases online for global distribution. This development also provided authors with access to usage data and downloads of the master copy of their teaching materials.

Learning with Cases: An Interactive Study Guide was launched in 2018 to take students through the process of learning with cases, providing practical tips, tricks and tools.

To recognise the increasing demand for short cases, the Outstanding Compact Case Competition was introduced in 2019. The first winner was a cartoon case, Turbulence on the Tarmac, by Debapratim Purkayastha and Sid Ghosh, ICFAI Business School (IBS).

We ran our first webinar in 2019 in collaboration with the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. Since then our webinar programme has become firmly established, and we have hosted over 40 webinars on a diverse range of topics including multimedia cases, teaching and writing role-play cases, implementing diversity, equity and inclusion in cases, and many more.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 we faced the same challenges for the delivery of our workshop programme as our colleagues in education were facing around the world. The Events Team worked with our group of expert tutors to quickly pivot delivery to online. This was very successful, and online programmes will continue to run alongside our in-person events in the future.

A new website was launched in 2021, designed to make the user experience quicker, more intuitive, and more visually appealing. For the optimum browsing experience at all times, the new site used a responsive design, meaning that it automatically adjusted to the device it was viewed on (mobile, tablet, laptop etc.). 

LiveCases, multimedia chat simulations that engage and challenge learners, were added to the collection in 2022. In a LiveCase learners don’t just read a case, but live and feel the events as the protagonists of a carefully crafted dynamic journey.

At the beginning of 2023 the collection has grown to 143,000 items, and includes cases, teaching notes, book chapters, videos, journal article reprints and multimedia materials.

In our 50^th anniversary year our mission remains the same as when we were first established, to advance the case method worldwide. Our dedicated team of 25 (two based in Boston, US, and 23 in Cranfield, UK) still follow the original ethos outlined by Jeff Gray, providing personal attention and service to the case community all around the world.