Applying Theory to Practice: Implementing a Live Case Competition in a Capstone Strategic Management Course

Abstract

When facilitating large-scale instructional change, leaders face stakeholder tensions that arise from different institutional pressures. Over the past 4 years, we have created an innovative live case competition in a strategic management course as our college’s signature undergraduate experiential learning opportunity. This case has integrated the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business’ (AACSB) business knowledge and skill areas with grounded learning elements and course learning objectives. Each semester, over 350 students apply strategy concepts to analyze challenges provided by a local company. Course section winners present to executive judges in the final competition. We contribute to the literature by describing the live case competition created from a six-step collaborative process that managed stakeholder tensions as institutional pressures changed. Using distributed leadership and information-sharing approaches, our collaboration model helped us address different needs, share resources, adapt to institutional pressures and create sustainable experiential learning opportunities. With shared decision making and constructive dialogue, we developed high-quality student learning experiences that respected faculty autonomy, addressed resource limitations, and institutionalized business partnerships. We describe our motivation, context, and key stakeholders’ (faculty, students, executives, and administrators) challenges and solutions. We hope our collaborative model helps others successfully implement large-scale instructional change.

Closing the Gap between Graduates’ Skills and Employers’ Requirements: A Focus on the Strategic Management Capstone Business Course

“…This paper seeks to spur a shift in strategic management to align theory more effectively with practice in the classroom. This realignment is needed as evidenced in recent articles ubiquitously and implicitly concluding that the capstone strategy course be taught in a highly theoretical manner, largely absent of any tools and techniques utilized in the actual practice of strategic planning (Buckley 2018;Hanney 2018;Hansen 2011;Lebron et al 2020).…”

University–industry collaboration: Enhancing students’ business acumen and aptitude through competitive SCM challenges

“…Relevant to this article is the collaborative interaction between university and industry stakeholders to create a live case competition (Charlebois and Giberson, 2010; Lebrón et al, 2020). For example, Lebrón et al (2020) followed a six-step collaborative process to organize a live case competition in a capstone strategic management course. In the first step, the purpose of the case competition was developed.…”

“…The collaborative process in Lebrón et al (2020) is closely aligned with the approach we used to create our case-competition activity at UNK in 2019. Figure 1 helps to compare and contrast our process with that of Lebrón et al (2020).…”

“…The collaborative process in Lebrón et al (2020) is closely aligned with the approach we used to create our case-competition activity at UNK in 2019. Figure 1 helps to compare and contrast our process with that of Lebrón et al (2020). In the figure, we maintain the basic purposes of the six steps from Lebrón et al (2020) but insert our action plans in each step.…”

“…Figure 1 helps to compare and contrast our process with that of Lebrón et al (2020). In the figure, we maintain the basic purposes of the six steps from Lebrón et al (2020) but insert our action plans in each step. A detailed description of these plans is provided in the next sections.

Figure 1.Case competition collaboration process.

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