The Case Centre Impact Index 2024: No. 12

Columbia Business School was established in 1916, with 11 faculty members teaching an inaugural class of 61 students, including eight women. The School occupies an important position in business education, connecting the world-class education and research of Columbia University to the global business hub of New York City. 

Over the past 100 years, Columbia Business School has not only helped define the importance of an MBA degree, but championed research and innovations that have changed the landscape of how businesses operate, how institutions create value, and how leaders promote the larger social good. 

Research from CBS faculty created the field of value investing; made milestone contributions in the area of behavioral finance and systematic investment strategies; helped develop the field of supply chain management; helped create – and led the advancement of – the field of algorithmic pricing, which rippled from airlines to hotels to physical retailers to the entire online economy; introduced, in a seminal paper, the widely adopted macroeconomic policy of inflation targeting adopted by most central banks in developed economies; advanced our understanding of consumer psychology and the field of behavioral marketing; created the foundation and measurement of customer lifetime value; published foundational work in the area of financial market microstructure; and designed optimization and scheduling protocols for emergency resource deployment that were used, for example, by the New York Fire Department on 9/11. 

Connected, holistic and future-focused, the School continues to advance both the theory and practice of business. Columbia CaseWorks develops cases that leverage the energy, creativity, and intellectual capital of Columbia Business School. “The case method of teaching is and will continue to be a pillar of business education,” notes Dean Costis Maglaras. “It serves as a vehicle to immerse students into ambiguous and complex settings and then use the ensuing discussion as a mechanism to build intuition about business problems, glean frameworks for thinking about them, and ultimately learn how disparate ideas and concepts can often be leveraged towards their solution. It brings forward business situations / decisions / challenges in a rich and textured way, which is hard to achieve through a lecture, a homework set, or by reading an article from the press. It is collaborative and experiential. For all of these reasons, the case method is very relevant.” 

Columbia’s cases deliver unmatched insights and learning across key areas of business, including digital transformation, entrepreneurship and innovation, 21st century finance, the intersection of business and society, and climate and sustainability. Columbia’s case collection - authored by Columbia faculty - includes cases in all major disciplines and supports an expanding and evolving curriculum from pioneering courses to STEM certification to unique, immersive and experiential learning opportunities. 

Since 2023, The Case Centre has received ten new cases for distribution from Columbia authors. In total the collection available through The Case Centre numbers 558 cases, many with accompanying instructor materials, software and videos. 15 of those are prize-winning cases.