Abstract:
The IMP tradition has produced outstanding developments in the case study research method. However, even though case study research has become the methodology of choice for business-to-business qualitative researchers, the case study is reserved for research, and its application in teaching remains limited. Business schools often teach using cases, but case-method teaching is quite different from case-study research. Case-method teaching, developed at Harvard Business School, uses narratives inspired by managerial challenges, and teaches problem-solving skills through student collaboration. Case-method teaching has been criticized because of its inflexibility and lack of depth. In contrast to case-method teaching, case-study research is a decades-old tradition in business-to-business marketing, and its strengths are precisely in generating in-depth understandings and novel theorizations. This paper investigates the application of case study research as a teaching tool in business marketing education. We conducted a collaborative research effort together with students in the context of the Bordeaux wine market. The resulting experience suggests that conducting collaborative case study research with students constitutes a flipped classroom strategy that can be successfully integrated in the pedagogics of business, service and industrial marketing. Some of the benefits include: student collaboration in the research process enables in-depth familiarity with a business market that cannot be possible only with lectures; and lecturers can teach concepts from business marketing literature organically, thus students develop critically and strategically sound understandings of business marketing.