We are delighted to announce the winners of our 31st annual Awards and Competitions, celebrating excellence in case writing and teaching at schools of business, management and government worldwide.

The 2021 Awards and Competitions reveal a new generation of case method talent emerging across the globe with an astonishing, record breaking, 30 new laureates. Particularly noteworthy is that all six Competitions were exclusively won by a total of ten, first-time winning individuals.

Established authors at schools long associated with the case method still took several Case Award categories, but the 31st Awards’ and Competitions’ winners also included six new schools, from five countries.

Congratulations to all our winners! We hope you enjoy finding out more about them.

Winners in full

Paul Beamish Ivey Business School		Mats Urde Lund University School of Economics and Management

Award winners

Dollar Shave Club: Disrupting the Shaving Industry Jamie Anderson, Antwerp Management School Karin Kollenz-Quétard, EDHEC Business School Nader Tavassoli, London Business School				Tesla's Entry into the US Auto Industry Donald N Sull and Cate Reavis MIT Sloan School of Management
IKEA in Saudi Arabia (A) Karthik Ramanna, Jérôme Lenhardt and Marc Homsy Harvard Business School		TikTok's AI Strategy: ByteDance's Global Ambitions Jason Davis, Minh Vo and Anne Yang INSEAD		Enel's Innovability: Global Open Innovation and Sustainability Felipe Monteiro and José Miguel García Benavente INSEAD
Ferrari: The 2015 Initial Public Offering Michael J Schill and Jenny Craddock University of Virginia Darden School of Business		Amazon as an Employer An Ivey Publishing case by Jyotsna Bhatnagar and Shweta Jaiswal Thakur Management Development Institute (MDI), Gurgaon		Disney Enters Streaming Space: Can It Disrupt the Disruptor? Syeda Maseeha Qumer and Debapratim Purkayastha ICFAI Business School (IBS)
TomTom: Mapping the Course from B2C to B2B Steven Sweldens, Stefano Puntoni, Niela Kleinsmith and Tao Yue Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Matthieu Campion TomTom Automotive		Ant Financial (A) Feng Zhu, Krishna G Palepu, Anthony K Woo and Nancy Hua Dai Harvard Business School Ying Zhang Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University		Ryanair: Flying Too Close to the Sun? An Ivey Publishing case by Ciaran Heavey and Dorota Piaskowska UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School

Competition winners

Kobe Influencer Marketing: Building Brand Awareness via Social Media Patricia Lui and Lipika Bhattacharya Singapore Management University		Barnana: Adventures in Upcycling Jeremy Dann Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, USC Marshall School of Business
Nora Lang: Pay Equity at FTS Matthew Sooy, Lauren Iuliani and W Spencer Ashby Ivey Business School		The Roy René Confectionery Is 100 years: Celebrating Brand Heritage to Sustain a New Strategy Fabien Pecot York Management School Virginie de Barnier IAE Aix-Marseille Graduate School of Management

The 2021 awards will be presented to the winning authors at a series of online ceremonies where the authors will discuss their win with The Case Centre's Director, Richard McCracken. Stay tuned for coverage on our website and social media channels.

Read the press release

What's trending?

The 2021 results are characterised by a record 30 individuals winning their first Award or Competition, consolidating a three-year, rising, trend: 2020: 22; 2019: 18. All six Competitions went to first-time winning individual educators. Six schools in five countries also made their debut winning appearance.

This year saw a resurgence of interest in multinational companies, in particular those with an online or technology focus. For the first time, we also saw a case relating to the social media phenomenon of ‘influencers’ (Kobe). Broadly ethical issues also keep their place including energy sustainability (Enel), food upcycling (Barnana) and gender pay equality (FTS)

27% of winning cases featured female protagonists, down on 31% in 2020.

View previous award winning cases