Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies of 2020

Case Study Research & Development (CRDT) | March 25, 2021

A case study on the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore claimed the top spot in the annual review of case usage conducted by the Yale School of Management’s CRDT.

A case study on the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore claimed the top spot in the annual review of case usage conducted by the Yale School of Management’s Case Research and Development Team (SOM CRDT), dethroning "Coffee 2016", the top case in the last two annual surveys. Marina Bay Sands case examines the intersection of marketing, operations, and sustainability at the luxury resort.

Coffee 2016 fell to second place and a note on Search Fund Company Boards took the third spot. Cases on Shake Shack, Volkswagen, Cadbury, Netflix, Endesa, and the Mayo Clinic rounded out the top ten.

All of the top 40 cases are available for purchase from Yale Management Media.

The list had a particular international flavor this year with 19 of the cases featuring organizations located outside the United States. The top 40 featured 27 "raw" online cases and 13 "cooked" .pdf cases. The functional perspectives of the cases spanned the full range of interests at the Yale School of Management, from customers, the workforce, state & society to investors, entrepreneurship, and sourcing and managing funds.

Other year-end data for 2020 showed:

Consumption of “raw'' online cases by numbers of users and countries remained steady in 2020 as compared to 2019, but over 50 more titles were viewed, a roughly 30 percent increase.
Just under half of raw case users were from the U.S., up from a third the year before.
Customers bought 197 titles, 70 more than in 2019.
A third of the top 40 cases featured women in leadership positions.
Interest in SOM case studies remained steady with almost 150K page views of the SOM CRDT case directory.
Close to 80 percent of those who browsed the directory were from outside the U.S., a 20 percent increase over 2019.
The top 40 cases were supervised by 22 different Yale SOM faculty members, several supervising two cases or more.

SOM CRDT compiled its third annual top 40 list by combining data from publishers, Google Analytics, direct sales, and other measures of interest and adoption.

The complete list of Top 40 cases studies for 2020:

RANK	CASE STUDY
1	Marina Bay Sands
2	Coffee 2016
3	Search Fund Company Boards: How CEOs Can Build Boards to Help Them Thrive
4	Ant Financial: Flourishing Farmer Loans at MYbank
5	Shake Shack IPO
6	Volkswagen: Engineering a Disaster
7	Cadbury
8	Netflix
9	The Battle for Endesa
10	Design at Mayo
11	SELCO
12	Golden Agri Resources and Sustainability
13	Children’s Premier
14	Mastercard: Marketing Transformation for a New World
15	Project Masiluleke: Texting and Testing to Fight HIV/AIDS in South Africa
16	Bovard and Majid
17	Netflix and Qwikster
18	AgBiome
19	Polaroid
20	Santam: Crop Insurance and Climate Change
21	IBM Corporate Service Corps
22	Business Leadership in South Africa's 1994 Reforms
23	The Alibaba Group
24	Searching for a Search Fund Structure: A Student Takes a Tour of Various Options
25	AXA: Creating the New CR Metrics
26	360 State Street: Real Options
27	Herman Miller
28	Palm Oil 2016
29	What's Next? Search Fund Entrepreneurs Reflect on Life After Exit
30	Toyota 2010
31	The Future of Malls: Was Decline Inevitable?
32	FARM: An Impact Investing Collaborative
33	FieldFresh Foods
34	Connecticut Green Bank 2017: In Pursuit of Institutional Legitimacy
35	Seven Theaters in Search of Revenue
36	Nathan Cummings Foundation
37	Fondaco dei Tedeschi: A New Luxury Shopping Destination for Venice
38	Aadhaar
39	Israel-Palestine
40	Synchrony Financial