Case studies have become a powerful instructive lifeline for business schools. Management education has changed because of them, which even helped globalize it. Many more changes are also sweeping in (culled from experiences):

• Internet has a gold mine of information that, if channeled properly, can grow into rich knowledge. This trend has even altered the role of a teacher - from a knowledge provider to a learning facilitator
• Students are seeking more than classroom learning. Just analysing case facts and figures is no longer making classes come alive
• Not every faculty can work out a case study as it must be. It requires strenuous hard-work and disciplined training.
• Business schools can shape the best talent but can't get them to teach. Teaching doesn't seem to fit in as a lucrative job

Closely observing these pertinent changes have got us, at Icfai Business School Case Development Centre (IBS CDC), thinking as always. Solutions were hard to come by, but we got around this dilemma too. Months of shrewd thinking and careful testing created a novel product, Executive Brief.

Executive Brief is by nature a video presentation. It recounts dilemmas faced by an executive, who can be an entrepreneur, manager, VP, CEO, etc. These dilemmas can either be retrospective or futuristic. Of course, business schools have to instill valued corporate virtues in their students.

Their multimedia edge can take learning to the next level, seizing student's fleeting attention for quite some time. That's not to say that they can replace case studies. But Executive Briefs can become nice add-ons to student's learning, as case studies are. This, we strongly feel, after we tested them out and got a glowing response from students as well as the faculty. And if the executive is around when the Executive Brief is played out, nothing like that. Running through some of these Briefs, one can feel the joy in using - and learning from - this powerful pedagogical tool. This product tries to speak to the students in their language - the language of videos (YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter!!!).