History

Origins

The concept for the Muma Case Review originated in May 2015. At that time, the 25 participants in the first cohort of the Muma College of Business‘ new Doctor of Business Administration program had submitted one page proposals to develop discussion case studies as part of a required publication course. Upon looking over these proposals, it became clear to the college’s Dean and the DBA program’s Academic Director that a substantial number of publishable case studies were likely to result from these efforts (and from the efforts of subsequent cohorts). This presented a number of challenges:

1. Only a very limited number of outlets accepted discussion case submissions.
2. Very often, these outlets had length and formatting restrictions that would require substantial rewriting of cases prior to submission.
3. The peer review process of these outlets tended to be quite time consuming.
4. Once published using these outlets, cases tended to be distributed through high cost sources such as Harvard Business School Publishing.

This was a particular concern for the DBA program’s academic director, who had been working on case development in many regions, such as Vietnam, South Africa and Eastern Europe, where the price of HBS cases could become a serious barrier to their use.

For this reason, the Dean and DBA Academic Director of the Muma College of Business agreed to launch a new journal specifically devoted to publishing open access discussion cases.

Timeline