Teaching cases, as defined in an educational context, are stories that may include reports of situations in organizational life, built with specific educational purposes, thus constituting an inductive method of teaching and learning. In a perspective of entrepreneurship education, their main objectives are to enhance the development of skills and attitudes considered as key for achieving managerial success; and allow familiarity with the organisations and their environment in a social, economic and environmental perspective.
This tool for entrepreneurship education is based on the construction of a case-problem method, which has been used for about a hundred years in the North American Business schools and more recently in Europe and Asia. This Case Method was developed by Harvard Business School and established to enable participants to identify and solve managerial problems and dealing with risk factors. Indexed Journals that publish teaching cases give preference to cases-problem, although they may accept other cases to be used as complementary.
Teaching cases are stories that resemble to factual journalism, including a substantial content of facts and testimony, mostly presented in a chronological order. Its goal is to provide a well-informed discussion of the case in the classroom. In a case, there is no narrator advocating an idea or opinion, or even analyzing practice-based theory, as in an academic text. Nor is there room for rhetoric and ideology, because the purpose is not to persuade the reader, but allow the emergence of different interpretations emerging from the discussion of probabilities and approaching the factual reality.
See 1 introduces a list of the ten most important characteristics of good cases, which are summarized below: a) it must contain one or more management issues to be confronted and selected through debate; b) it must deal with topics relevant to the geographic area; c) it must provide a journey of discovery that separate the symptoms of some more fundamental problems; d) it must raise controversies providing different interpretations, decisions and action plans; e) it must contain contrasts and comparisons; f) it must allow participants to generalize lessons and concepts underlying the case for other situations; g) it must contain accurate data such as product description, the industry and markets; h) it must exhibit a personal touch with a dialogue and the description of the formal and informal organizational processes; i) it must be reported and well structured, and; j) it must be short, for a maximum of 10 pages.
The distribution of the Harvard cases happened in Brazil during the 70s, by the establishment of a Brazilian Cases Center, with three poles of diffusion in three specific universities, cataloging and regulating its distribution in parts of the Brazilian territory 2. The system worked until the 80s and was then disabled. Ultimately, there seems to be a resurgence of the use of cases in business Faculties, albeit incipient, through the interest of some professor and educational institutions, which research, develop and utilize local teaching cases.
However, most new cases used in Brazil are of foreign origin, some translated into Portuguese, with the permission of Harvard Business School and other institutions, the others are mostly passed on to students in English 3. The local relevance of the case is crucial to the interest of the students in a discussion because it promotes the identification of micro and macro-environmental variables that affect the analysis to resolve conflicts and problems presented in the case 4.
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