Page 11 - Case Lab Summary

experience generate solutions. It is therefore, through this

combination of stimuli, this marriage of theory, practice, and

experience that conclusions are generated. These

conclusions provide the key to good case solution generation

for it is they that provide the underpinning and justification

for the actions and resolutions chosen.

So, ‘case studies are not meant to be read rather, they

are meant to be interpreted.’

However, students are not passive recipients of knowledge.

They do not simply soak-up and absorb information and

concepts. Nor does knowledge simply download directly into

their brains. They are sentient with a desire to use their

accumulated knowledge and experience not plug and play

automatons (Wertheim 2006). Business case studies allow

them to use theory in anger and to test the boundaries of

their knowledge.

Case studies are designed to bring out the details from the

viewpoint of the case participants by using multiple sources

of data (Tellis, 1997). Essentially it is used to amalgamate

disparate sources of information into a structure and analysis

that makes sense of a complex unstructured problem. Reva

Brown 1995 put it succinctly when she observed that: