ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA

Cases which meet the following 8 criteria are eligible for the case writing competition.

1. Cases must not have been previously used in a case competition, published by a case center, published in a journal, or publicly available.
2. Going beyond a simple description of an organization, the case must present a specific managerial challenge.
3. Regardless of the organization, its size, industry, or geographic region, the managerial challenge in the case must be related to social and environmental responsibility.
4. Cases may be submitted by any author or group of authors (internal or external to HEC Montréal).
5. Cases must be written in English or in French.
6. Cases must present a real-life situation (based on public data, non-public non-disguised data, or non-public disguised data). Fictive cases are not admissible. Cases must be submitted along with the authorization of the company presented in the case or an indication that only publicly available information was used to develop the case.
7. Cases must have a maximum of 12 pages of text.
8. By submitting a case, authors authorize that—if their case wins this case writing competition—it can be used in the 2022 HEC CSR Challenge case competition (i.e., distributed to competition participants and judges).

EVALUATION

All submitted cases which meet the submission criteria will be evaluated by a panel of judges. The panel will include representatives from: HEC Montreal, the IJCSM, the Pôle Ideos, MBA alumni and experts working in the industry. The panel will evaluate the submissions according to the following criteria:

• Fit of the case with the CSR Case Competition theme of social and environmental responsibility.
• Potential of the case to elicit interesting ideas, discussion, and analysis by students at an MBA level.
• Presence of adequate information for students to develop a solution to the issues identified without needing to consult external information.
• Quality of the case writing (logic, consistency, structure, flow, etc.) such that it could be used as-is (or with minor modifications) in an international case competition.

All decisions made by the selection committee are final.

IMPORTANT DATES

October 15th, 2021 (11:59pm EDT): Deadline for submitting cases with cover letter.

October – December 2021: Case selection by the jury. Note: non-winning cases will be released back to authors by January 15^th, 2021.

December 2021 – February 2022: Working with authors, the selected case will be edited and translated as needed to prepare it for the competition. While authors are not required to submit teaching notes for the case writing competition, authors of the winning case will be encouraged to prepare a 2–3-page document for competition judges which should include a summary of the case, tips for solving the case, and general examples of potential solutions.

March 2022: Selected case(s) will be used in the CSR Challenge. The case writing prize will be announced at the closing ceremony of the CSR Challenge. Winning case(s) will be released back to authors at the closing of the 2022 HEC CSR Challenge.

Note: The case writing prize cannot be announced before the competition as the cases which are being used in the competition cannot be known in advance by teams competing in the CSR Challenge.