Smith Living Cases
A Smith Living Case is a business case study designed to help students work with real problems in the classroom. These customized cases, written to meet the specific teaching needs of Smith faculty, feature organizations grappling with real business challenges.
What is a Smith Living Case?
Unlike more traditional business cases, which tend to have fixed or ‘correct’ answers, Smith Living Cases put students in the role of consultants, analyzing live or active business problems in order to solve them for real organizations. Smith Living Cases are housed in an online portal and can be easily tweaked and updated as those business problems evolve. These customized cases see students coming up with creative solutions to help organizations grappling with business problems. They also provide students with hands-on, experiential learning.
Partner Benefits
- Receive high-quality analysis, recommendations, and creative solutions to a business problem
- Engage top student talent from across Smith School of Business
- Provide a valuable opportunity for students to apply their classroom learning
- Strengthen relationships with Smith students and faculty
- Raise your organization’s visibility at Smith
- No financial commitment required from project partners
What is the process for creating a Smith Living Case?
Smith’s in-house writing team within the Centre for Content Development creates original case studies in all business areas – from marketing and finance to strategy and organization. We work with companies of all sizes, from small commercial start-ups to established non-profits, to everything in-between.
When building out a new case, we start with a kick-off meeting to learn more about the company and any potential case scenarios that might be of interest to our teaching faculty and students. Once we have found a fit for that business problem in one of our courses, we conduct more in-depth interviews and then get down to crafting the original case study.
Participating companies and organizations have a chance to review the content in detail before it’s used in the classroom, and representatives often have the chance to sit in on final student presentations when their case scenario is discussed in detail.
Previous case example
In 2022, we were approached by CI Global Asset Management, one of Canada’s largest investment companies, about working with them on a new case. We worked with Dr. Salman Mufti, who saw the proposed case problem as a perfect fit for one of his upper year undergrad courses in digital strategy.
The resulting case is called Dream or Disaster? Implementing a New Digital Workflow System: CI Global Asset Management, and it examines the company’s implementation of a new digital workflow system. CI Global Asset Management saw the case as an opportunity to have students consider whether they had taken the right steps when deciding on the new system, and what they could have done differently.
All participants were pleased with the outcome – from the commissioning professor to company stakeholders to the students who had the chance to ‘crack’ the case.
Testimonials
“Being a part of a case study with Smith Living Case encouraged me to reflect upon CI GAM’s work management system implementation from a new perspective. It was incredible how well the students were able to grasp the challenges outlined in the case, addressing them with comprehensive feedback and plausible actionable solutions. Their ideas were helpful to our team in coming up with potential next steps for improving the employee experience with the system in the future.”
Marketing Project Systems Coordinator
CI Global Asset Management
“The Smith Living Case created in conjunction with CI Global Asset Management provided my students with an in-depth and personal look at the implementation of a digital initiative. As the case is written from an entry-level professional’s perspective, it allowed the students to truly relate to the case protagonist and learn from her experience. This case provided an excellent way for students to gain understanding of business and technology challenges with digital transformation.”
Associate Professor
Smith School of Business
“The CI Funds Living Case was a pleasure to read and analyze! Being able to evaluate a case from a junior analyst point of view was a very realistic perspective of a business problem we as students will face when we start our careers. Additionally, having Chelsea – whom the case was written about – join our class was extremely helpful. Once we presented our ideas, we were able to receive her immediate detailed feedback which my team and I found very beneficial to our learning process!”
Commerce Student
Ready to get involved?
Complete and submit the following expression of interest form. If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact the Experiential Learning Team.