Why ‘EasyJet: The Web’s Favourite Airline’ Still Rules The MBA Classroom

The case method was invented at Harvard Business School, where the first-ever case was published more than 100 years ago

The most popular business school case ever written isn’t about a Silicon Valley unicorn, a Wall Street titan, or a globe-spanning conglomerate. It’s about a low-cost airline. 

EasyJet: The Web’s Favourite Airline, authored at IMD a quarter century ago, sits at No. 1 on The Case Centre’s list of the 50 bestselling cases of all time. The story of a scrappy low-cost carrier’s rise in the cutthroat European airline market remains a mainstay in MBA and executive classrooms because it fuses strategy, marketing, and execution into one tightly crafted narrative.

For more than two decades, faculty have leaned on the easyJet case to demonstrate how a challenger business model can upend an industry. “It is an easy-to-identify category, elucidating a strategy, low-cost airlines, that was just emerging in Europe, and had a colorful protagonist in Stelios,” says Nirmalya Kumar, professor of marketing of the Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Singapore Management University and one of the case’s two authors. “It is also a case that can be used by faculty in a variety of disciplines like strategy, marketing, operations, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Furthermore, it is easy to read and with a detailed teaching note. The first time I taught it, the student reaction told me that we had a hit. But for it to be so successful, luck is also involved as there are so many great cases.”

STRATEGY & ENTREPRENEURSHIP DRIVE THE TOP TITLES

Besides easyJet, strategy cases dominate the broader Top 50, a list of which was provided to Poets&Quants by the Case Centre. Unilever in Brazil: Market Strategies for Low-Income Consumers (INSEAD) and Swatch (Harvard) are perennial favorites, forcing students to wrestle with emerging-market growth and brand differentiation. They show why strategy remains the backbone of MBA pedagogy — it offers problems without easy answers, the kind that spark debate from São Paulo to Singapore. (See the full list below, with links to each case.)

Leadership dilemmas are also common on the list. Harvard’s Wolfgang Keller at Königbrau and Benihana of Tokyo continue to generate adoption worldwide, inviting discussion on management style, cross-cultural leadership, and organizational design. Entrepreneurship and innovation — stories that allow students to experience the uncertainty of product launches and market entry decisions — round out the list, with titles like Aqualisa Quartz: Simply a Better Shower still in heavy circulation.

THE CASE METHOD FACES NEW PRESSURES

Harvard has 21 cases among the top 50 bestsellers, most of any school — appropriate for the place where the first case was written more than 100 years ago. INSEAD of France and Singapore boasts 14 of the bestselling cases, including six of the top 10. IMD has six others after easyJet.

For all its durability, the case method itself is not immune to disruption. Generative AI now allows students to instantly summarize, analyze, and even propose solutions to cases before they walk into class — a shortcut that threatens to sap the spontaneous debate that has long been the hallmark of case teaching. Faculty at many schools worry that when answers are only a prompt away, it becomes harder to draw out genuine disagreement, uncertainty, and creativity in the room.

At the same time, new teaching formats — from AI-driven simulations to immersive role-plays — are gaining traction as schools experiment with more experiential learning. These approaches can put students “inside” a dilemma rather than observing it from the outside, raising the question of whether static written cases will still anchor the MBA classroom in ten years. 

For now, classics like easyJet remain essential, but the rise of AI is forcing schools to ask how the case method must evolve to stay relevant.

THE TOP 50 BEST-SELLING CASES OF THE LAST 50 YEARS

Source: The Case Centre

DON’T MISS RANKING THE TOP 50 BUSINESS SCHOOL CASES OF THE LAST 50 YEARS and HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL’S CASE METHOD IS OFFICIALLY 100 YEARS OLD

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