What is a Case Study ?

Many times you'll visit corporate websites and they'll mention case studies and even offer pdf's of them within their web pages.

A case study is a research-based method used to investigate an individual, group, or event to explore what caused something, and to find the underlying principles that drive that cause.

Case studies involve an in-depth, long term examination of a single event - a case.

There is usually a systematic way of looking at events, collecting data, analyzing information, and reporting the results. Case studies are great for generating and testing hypotheses.

An example would be a consulting company that has a website and is trying to sell their services to another company. The consulting company can perform a "case study" on one of their previous projects to show how their contributions helped to achieve some defined goal of their client.

In keeping with our GM example, here is a case study that can be used to understand the electric vehicle marketplace.