IESE Publishing celebrates 20th anniversary

IESE Publishing is celebrating its 20th anniversary this academic year, with a renewed commitment to bring its cases and other academic materials to the classrooms of business schools across the world.

IESE Publishing distributes and sells academic materials produced by IESE professors as well as professors from 15 other universities: seven in Latin America, from Mexico to Chile, and others in the U.S., Europe, Canada and the Philippines. The collections from U.S. universities include Harvard Business School, the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and Stanford Graduate School of Business.

In total, its catalog features 53,000 cases, teaching notes and other products. Of those, approximately 8,000 were produced by IESE – many of them cases, but also articles published in IESE’s Insight magazine.

IESE Publishing currently sells around 290,000 copies of cases and other documents per year to customers in 82 countries.

At the same time, IESE Publishing works with other case distributors, such as Harvard Business Publishing and The Case Center, to sell English-language versions of IESE cases on those platforms.

Case method expertise

IESE Publishing’s most popular product is its cases, and that is where the most innovation will take place in the coming years. IESE, founded in 1958, has used the case method in its classrooms from its earliest days. It is one of the many discussion- and action-based methodologies it currently uses.

“The case method has evolved a lot since its creation,” says Christine Ecker, Executive Director of IESE’s Research Division. “The future of IESE Publishing lies in bringing new learning experiences to students and professors. We want to be leaders in innovation, just as we were in the beginning.”

To that end, IESE Publishing is working to produce cases in more digital formats. “We are experimenting with producing cases in all types of formats: videos, audios, web pages, simulations … and we’re adapting our platform for their sales and for this new digital era,” says Gemma Golobardes, Director of IESE Publishing.

While the first cases used in IESE classrooms were produced by other institutions – mostly Harvard and the Lille School of Management — IESE professors soon began producing their own cases, which reflected the business dilemmas executives were facing in Spain at the time. One of the first cases produced by IESE professors was written in 1959, by Rafael Termes and Josep Faus, and explored Industrias Soriano. Today, in a global and digital world, IESE Publishing’s bestseller centers around music streaming giant Spotify, a case written by Prof. Govert Vroom. It also has cases by IESE professors on Netflix, Amazon, Tesla – and, a sign of the times, how to manage amid COVID-19.

“IESE was the second-largest producer of cases in the world, and we thought that creating our own publishing unit would help to disseminate them, along with those of other schools,” says Carles Cavallé, a former IESE dean who helped create IESE Publishing. “More than 20 years of work have shown that this was the right decision.”