Guidelines for Prospective Authors
The submission form can be found below the following guidelines.
Thank you for your interest in publishing a Quick Case. Please read these guidelines carefully. The criteria below distinguishes successful submissions from unsuccessful ones. If your submission suggests you have not read this guidance, we will decline your submission without comment.
You should also review several published Quick Cases and teaching guides on our website to understand what these materials look like and how they are written to facilitate rich discussions. Some particularly strong examples include DineTogether: Discriminating Tastes?, Golden Careers: Money Isn’t Everything, VirtuAI: Who Should Our Software Be?, Onboarded and Included, and AFS: Flagging the Next Product Line.
What a Successful Quick Case Does
A good Quick Case does the following:
It has neutral language that shows the story and enables readers to infer insights on their own. It does not use interpretive language that tells the reader what to think. For instance, a passage should not state that Company X was the most successful firm in its industry and that its founder was a genius with a revolutionary idea. Instead, if these assertions are true, the details presented in the Quick Case can enable students to piece together this truth with sentences such as, “From 2019 to 2023, Company X had a CAGR of 75%” and “Company X’s founder developed a new technology that reduced marginal production costs by 30%.”
It is concise. Quick Cases do not exceed 750 words; as such, they should cover only one or two topics. A good submission can be much shorter than 750 words.
It places The Scenario near the beginning to quickly orient the learner into the situation. The Scenario identifies the role that the learner is assuming, summarizes the context for this role, and establishes the tension or quandary the learner must resolve.
It has a defined decision point (The Ask) that has real stakes for the decision-maker and the organization. The Ask should contain only one or two questions. It should be concise. If The Ask comprises multiple questions, delete those that preface a “real” Ask. For instance, it should not include a first question that asks readers to identify what factors the protagonist should consider.
It has a decision-maker who possesses the authority and responsibility to respond to The Ask.
It has dramatic tension and suggests uncertainty about what the protagonist should do. Quick Cases should not read like histories that explain an event, retrospective stories of success or failure, or magazine articles written to justify a certain conclusion.
It contains enough information to enable students to analyze what is going on, decide what the protagonist should do, and contribute to the class discussion. Quick Cases do not assume students are subject-matter or industry experts. There should be enough material in the Quick Case to help students induce relevant insights for a productive class discussion.
It has potential answers to The Ask that are not obvious. If the answers are easy, the Quick Case is not worth writing or using class time to discuss.
Note: Most Quick Cases are about fictional companies, although they can be inspired by real events. The action in The Scenario can also occur outside a real company, such as in a fictional consulting company that is attempting to pitch its services to a real company. If your submission focuses on a real company with a real person as the protagonist, you should have a contact at that company who can facilitate the company’s signoff. We cannot publish a Quick Case about a real company without authorization.
What a Successful Quick Case Teaching Guide (TG) Does
A Quick Case needs a good teaching guide to succeed. Many prospective adopters will not use a Quick Case if the associated teaching support is inadequate. An effective TG does the following:
It sets context. The TG should begin with a synopsis that identifies the Quick Case’s key facts and the decision point in The Ask. It should then identify one or two learning objectives and any references to relevant research that informs them. When applicable, it can also identify useful optional approaches for engaging students, such as analyses they can submit in advance, poll questions, or breakout groups. However, it should not make student presentations or small-group discussions central to the class experience because these approaches do not work for all audiences.
It includes a full discussion plan. A TG should offer a plausible sequence for how class discussion might flow, typically from general to specific topics that lead toward recommending courses of action. This plan should cover 20–40 minutes of class time.
It provides questions that can facilitate a discussion with diverse perspectives. The answers a TG suggests should be sufficiently nuanced to require some elaboration and account for disagreement. If the answers are straightforward and obvious, the teaching guide—and possibly the Quick Case—is inadequate to sustaining a good discussion. For especially challenging topics, the TG should anticipate and highlight potential difficulties during the discussion, including concepts that students may not understand, facts they might not identify, or emotionally sensitive material, and suggest tactics for mitigating these challenges.
It has a scope of coverage comparable to that of the Quick Case. The amount of material a TG covers should correspond roughly to the scope of information in the Quick Case. TGs that contain topics extending well beyond the Quick Case material and that assume extensive familiarity with the new topics often lead to disengaged students and a lecture rather than a discussion.
It shows how to integrate theory and frameworks with the Quick Case. If the TG contains conceptual material, the relationship between the concepts and the discussion should be clear. A TG should not contain a long discussion of theory that fails to reflect material in the Quick Case. For instance, if a TG contains a discussion of informal networks, the Quick Case should give students specific facts about how the networks operate among the individuals and organizations it depicts. The TG should explicitly guide the instructor about how to incorporate the conceptual material into the discussion.
Using Generative AI and ChatGPT
We understand our contributors may want to use generative AI such as ChatGPT to research story ideas and examples. When creating the Quick Case, teaching guide, and supplemental materials, you are always accountable for the work, its accuracy, and its integrity. As such, please refrain from using generative AI to create Quick Case content.
Contributor Guidelines
Submission form can be found below the following guidelines.
Inspiring Minds is an online publication from Harvard Business Publishing Education.
Our mission is to share the insights of our global network of educators and experts to help instructors, administrators, and academic leaders find new ways to tackle classroom challenges and better prepare students for today’s workforce.
Our content is filled with advice, frameworks, and best practices for improving teaching. We also explore strategic issues around higher education and where it’s heading.
If you have an innovative pedagogical idea or a technique that’s worked well for you and your students, we would love to hear from you.
Below are some helpful guidelines and tips for submitting to our publication.
How to get started
Please submit a pitch that explains your central idea or message. Tell us what is important, new, or valuable about your idea, and how educators can apply it in their work and teaching. Provide a sense of the research, experience, and examples you’ll draw on, and tell us a bit about yourself—let us know why you’re the best author to address the topic.
What we look for
We receive many thoughtful pitches, and we read every one of them. Here are some tips for submitting a pitch that’s more likely to capture our interest:
■ We gravitate toward ideas that are backed by research and have actionable relevance to today’s higher-education classrooms. We want evidence that your idea works in practice.
■ We prefer the practical to the theoretical, the relatable to the esoteric. Let us know the challenge your idea helps educators overcome and how you successfully worked through that challenge.
■ We look for ideas that introduce something new. We cover a wide swath of topic areas—from classroom management and course design to case teaching; digital learning; diversity, equity, and inclusion; generative AI; and more—so we’re always looking for novel and interesting ideas.
We strive for authenticity in our articles and your work should be original. We don’t publish pieces that have appeared elsewhere, that don’t properly credit the ideas they present, or that come across as promotional.
On the use of generative AI, we understand our contributors may want to use these tools to research story ideas and examples. We ask authors to share whether and how they’ve used these tools. And importantly, our authors are accountable for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of their content.
We do not accept research papers. If you have been involved in a study or research project, we would love to hear about it in a pitch for an article that explains the significance of the information, summarizes its findings, and shows actionable relevance to today’s higher-education classroom.
Our editorial process
Once your idea is accepted and you’re ready to submit your draft to our editors, we ask that you do the following:
■ Submit your article as a Word document. It should be no longer than 1,500–1,800 words.
■ Include a headshot image as a .jpg, as well as a short bio (no more than 60 words).
■ Include any audio, video, and graphic elements that accompany your article, as well as required permissions to use them.
Our editorial process is thorough; you may be asked to do multiple rounds of revisions. We hope this process and the extra care given to your work proves to be a valuable experience for both you and our readers.
We retain final decision rights over headlines and article layout. We may rework your title or headings because we believe the revisions will help your idea reach the audience it deserves.
Social media toolkit
This document outlines some of the ways we will promote your article on our social media channels and provides some suggestions for sharing the article within your own network.
Copyright permissions
We will ask you to sign a copyright form before we publish your final piece. Articles may be reposted with written permission from Harvard Business Publishing Education, as long as HBP Education is cited and there is a link back to our site. While HBP Education holds a copyright on the finished product, authors continue to own the underlying ideas in their articles.
Sample language: “This article was originally published in Inspiring Minds by Harvard Business Publishing Education and is reprinted here with permission from the publisher.”*
*Hyperlink “This article” to the original article and “Inspiring Minds” to our site page: hbsp.harvard.edu/inspiring-minds.
Thank you for your interest in working with us.
For a downloadable PDF version of these guidelines, click here.
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