And The Winners Of This Year’s Case Centre 2025 Awards Are ...

Case Centre Awards winner Joerg Niessing, courtesy photo

The Case Centre has announced the winners of the 35th annual Case Centre Awards and Competitions. Unsurprisingly, AI and sustainability featured prominently once again — especially the latter, with seven of 15 winning cases focused on sustainability-related topics, much like last year’s awards.

The 2025 winners included cases with household names like Netflix, Schneider Electric, Red Bull, Heineken, and Nespresso.

IMD SECURES FOUR AWARDS

The case method is a rigorous teaching approach that takes students through real-world business situations to hone their critical thinking, decision-making, and collaboration skills. The nonprofit Case Centre has an impressive collection of over 75,000 case studies going back decades and it offers tons of support and resources for case teachers and writers.

This year, IMD Business School in Switzerland took top honors for the most-awarded university, with four prestigious accolades. IMD won the Overall Award for Nespresso: Strategy Reset for Growth: The Youth Market, which examines how Nespresso coffee is recalibrating its strategy to appeal to a younger demographic. It goes in depth on consumer trends, marketing innovation, and the evolving coffee industry.

This marks IMD’s sixth Overall Award to date and brings the university’s total Case Centre accolades to a very respectable 47 awards. IMD also triumphed in the three categories Strategy and General Management, with “Future-proofing HEINEKEN: The EverGreen Strategy“; Outstanding Case Writer with “AMAG: Creating Its Own Future in a Disrupted Automotive Industry“; and Outstanding Compact Case with “Not So Black and White: Grupo Inca’s Black Alpaca Dilemma.”

Workshop with Martin Kupp and Urs Mueller, courtesy photo

NEW TALENT & OLD TALENT

This year’s Case Awards honor a solid mix of both new and seasoned contributors. The late Debapratim Purkayastha earned his 13th award, joining the late Sumantra Ghoshal as the joint most-awarded Case Center Awards author.

On the new talent front, Rozanne Henzen from the Sasin School of Management was recognized as the Outstanding New Case Writer for her work on “Driving Sustainable Transformation: Michelin’s Road to Natural Rubber Sustainability and Meeting the EU Deforestation Regulation.” Henzen’s innovative approach marks her as a rising thought leader in the field.

More fresh first-time winners were Christine Hinz, Carolin Rüdiger, Henriette Siemens, and Mats Schaper from Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Julia Grimm from Jönköping University, and Stephanie Schrage from Hamburg University of Technology. Their case “Social Justice versus Environmental Sustainability?” poses a scenario where a procurement manager must choose between two batteries, one ethical but expensive, and the other cheap but ethically questionable, for their new electric car.

Martin Kupp (left) and Urs Mueller (right), courtesy photo

SPECIAL RECOGNITION IN THIS YEARS’ AWARDS

Some awards went beyond individual cases to showcase exceptional contributions to the case method and teaching excellence. The Outstanding Contribution to the Case Method award was given to Martin Kupp from ESCP and Urs Mueller from SDA Bocconi, a dynamic duo of case education.

Through their workshops, Kupp and Mueller have trained thousands of educators, adding to the quality and reach of case method teaching across the globe.

This year’s Outstanding Case Teacher award went to Joerg Niessing from INSEAD for his use of virtual reality cases and AI-aided strategy platforms. In his courses, students are active participants. His methods have proved invaluable and have elevated case-based learning and engagement.

2025 CASE CENTRE AWARD WINNERS

Overall Winner
Nespresso: Strategy Reset for Growth: The Youth Market. Kamran Kashani and Goutam Challagalla, International Institute for Management Development (IMD)

Economics, Politics and Business Environment
Singapore: ‘Facing Challenges Together.’ Richard HK Vietor, Harvard Business School

Entrepreneurship
Nordic Technologies AB. Rob Johnson, IESE Business School

Ethics and Social Responsibility
Social Justice versus Environmental Sustainability? Facing and Handling Paradoxes in the Procurement and Production of Electric Vehicles. Christine Hinz, Carolin Rüdiger, Henriette Siemens and Mats Schaper, Leuphana University of Lüneburg Julia Grimm, Jönköping University Stephanie Schrage, Hamburg University of Technology

Finance, Accounting and Control
Schneider Electric: Linking Pay to ESG. Gaizka Ormazabal, IESE Business School

Human Resource Management / Organisational Behaviour
Netflix’s Organizational Culture. Sanjib Dutta and Hadiya Faheem, ICFAI Business School (IBS)

Knowledge, Information and Communication Systems Management
Broadband-X: Enterprise Resource Planning Implementation. Fatih Yegul, Conestoga College

Marketing
Red Bull Spreads Its Wiiings. Nader Tavassoli, London Business School

Production and Operations Management
Li & Fung: Battling the Global Supply Chain Challenge. Hadiya Faheem and Debapratim Purkayastha, ICFAI Business School (IBS)

Strategy and General Management
Future-proofing HEINEKEN: The EverGreen Strategy. Niccolò Pisani and Inès Augier, International Institute for Management Development (IMD)

Free Case
The Coffee of Andradas: A Community Branding Project. Stefano Puntoni and Carla Gatt, Rotterdam School of Management

COMPETITIONS

Outstanding Contribution to the Case Method
Martin Kupp, ESCP Business School and Urs Mueller, SDA Bocconi School of Management

Outstanding Case Teacher
Joerg Niessing, INSEAD

Outstanding Case Writer
AMAG: Creating Its Own Future in a Disrupted Automotive Industry. Stefan Michel, Daniel Gerber, Esther Lind, Vikas Munjal, David Rivière and Stephan Thalmann, International Institute for Management Development (IMD)

Outstanding Case Writer: Hot Topic ‘Taking action on the environment?’
POOK Technology: How AI Drives Business Value and Productivity Enhancement. Yinliang (Ricky) Tan and Geng Liu, China Europe International Business School (CEIBS)

Outstanding Compact Case
Not So Black and White: Grupo Inca’s Black Alpaca Dilemma. Vanina Farber, Carolina Duran Silva, Baris Silahcioglu, Hugo ten Zijthoff and Shih-Han Huang, International Institute for Management Development (IMD)

Outstanding New Case Writer
Driving Sustainable Transformation: Michelin’s Road to Natural Rubber Sustainability and Meeting the EU Deforestation Regulation. Rozanne Henzen, Sasin School of Management