Report by India Education bureau, Boston: Three members of the Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty have won awards in the 2013 European Case Clearing House (ecch) Awards Competition. First presented in 1991, these annual awards aim to recognize worldwide excellence in case writing and raise the profile of the case method of learning.

This year's HBS winners are Professor Emeritus Christopher Bartlett for "Levendary Café: The China Challenge" (coauthored with Arar Han), which won for the Economics, Politics and Business Environment category; Professor Stefan Thomke for "Design Thinking and Innovation at Apple" (coauthored with Barbara Feinberg), which won in the Entrepreneurship category; Adjunct Professor Timothy Luehrman for "New Heritage Doll Company: Capital Budgeting" (coauthored with Heide Abelli), which won for the Finance, Accounting and Control category.

Bartlett's case about Levendary Café, a $10 billion US-based fast food chain, looks at the challenges the new CEO faces during a global expansion into China. Frustrated by the company's China branch president, who is not conforming to corporate planning and reporting processes, the CEO is trying to figure out how to best manage the situation and her counterpart in China.

Thomke describes how Apple, ranked the most innovative company in the world, has achieved its success while obsessed with company secrecy. It also examines the ingredients of Apple's success and its quest to develop, in the words of CEO Steve Jobs, "insanely great products."

Luehrman's "New Heritage Doll Company" is about a manufacturer and retailer of specialty doll products who must decide which of two projects to fund. The decision requires the student to compute cash flows for the two projects, discount values to the present, and compare and contrast different project performance measures.

The largest single source of management case studies in the world, ecch, based in both Europe and the United States, is dedicated to supporting authors and users of case studies and promoting the case method of learning, first applied to management education more than 90 years ago at Harvard Business School.

All cases registered with ecch during the past five years are put forward for consideration. The winning case in each category is the one that has achieved the highest growth in popularity worldwide, based on sales to individual organizations during the last calendar year.

Last year's HBS winners were Prof. Emeritus Christopher Bartlett for "United Cereal: Lora Brill's Eurobrand Challenge" (coauthored with Carole Carlson), which won in the Economics, Politics and Business Environment category; Prof. John Deighton for "Dove: Evolution of a Brand," which was recognized in the Marketing category; and Asst. Professor Hanna Halaburda for "One Game to Rule Them All: Lord of the Rings Online and the MMO Market" (co-written with Ivan Nausieda, Robert McKeon, and Willam Collis) in the Hot Topic competition, which focused on social media and change.