Quick Case Proposal Guidelines 

Thank you for your interest in contributing to our Quick Cases portfolio. Here we provide information and guidance for submitting your idea for our consideration. 

What is a Quick Case?  
Quick Cases are short, pointed scenarios through which a student deepens their understanding of a specific topic or concept by actively deciding what to do. Quick Cases can be based on real or fictional organizations, but all real information must be cited (citations do not add to the word count). 

To help shape your idea, keep in mind two key elements of a Quick Case: 1) each Quick Case must focus on a specific topic you intend to teach, and 2) each Quick Case should focus on one or two well-defined learning objectives.

Each Quick Case is accompanied by a 3 to 6-page teaching guide that offers a 20-40-minute discussion plan. Teaching guides should specify learning objectives, appropriate audiences, and potential courses in which the related Quick Case(s) can be used.  

How to get started
Before you submit a proposal, please consider the list below to inform your idea:

• Have you reviewed several Quick Cases in our catalog to understand the product?  
• Does the scenario have a defined decision? Have you written a precise Ask? 
• Have you used neutral language that does not interpret the situation for students?  
• Is there dramatic tension? 
• Is the solution not obvious? 
• Can you draft the student-facing Quick Case in 750 or fewer words?

Using Generative AI and ChatGPT  
We realize our contributors may want to use generative AI to research story ideas and examples. However, when creating the Quick Case, teaching guide, and any supplemental materials, the authors 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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