Meet The Three Harvards

A few months ago, I was researching family business governance, specifically how Indian family companies hand power to the next generation, and wanted to know if any institution anywhere had actually built this into permanent, ongoing work, rather than something a few professors just happened to write about now and then. I expected Harvard to be the obvious answer, because Harvard basically invented the field. The Three-Circle Model, the framework almost every family business course in the world still teaches, was sketched by a Harvard doctoral student and a Harvard professor in 1978. Harvard has kept producing real material since: a case on Dabur's transition from family to professional management, a case on a Saudi conglomerate's governance overhaul, and decades of disguised-name cases on Indian business families from one professor's own research. What I couldn't find was an institution behind any of it. What Harvard actually runs is executive education courses, taught by individual faculty, not a standing research center whose full-time mandate is producing this material. IMD, a business school a fraction of Harvard's size, runs exactly that: a dedicated Global Family Business Center with its own ongoing India and Asia research. Harvard gave the field its theory. IMD gave it an institution.

That contrast sent me down a strange path, because the question stopped being "does the research exist" and became "why doesn't producing it get to be anyone's actual job." The answer turned out to be bigger than family business. Harvard Business School runs its own case operation: dedicated researchers, eight regional centers, one specifically for India. Harvard Kennedy School, a different school inside the exact same university, runs a completely separate one: over 2,000 documents, used across more than 1,000 institutions in 114 countries, running since 1978. Then there's Harvard's own School of Public Health, which has its own case-based teaching and learning center too, again separate, again with its own collection. Three case-writing operations, one university, and none of them merged into the others. That's the moment this idea actually clicked for me, not the missing family business institution, but the discovery that even Harvard hadn't built the version that crosses its own front doors.

So I went looking for whether anyone, anywhere, had done what Harvard hadn't. The Case Centre, a UK nonprofit, distributes cases from more than 500 member organisations in over 85 countries, and it carries Harvard's collections, ISB's, IIM Ahmedabad's, all of them, side by side. But it's a shared mailroom, not a shared kitchen. LSE and Sciences Po run a genuine joint public policy degree together, a real, working cross-institutional structure, but nothing like a shared case-writing arm sits underneath it. INSEAD's collection is business, full stop. I widened the search past business schools too. Yale's case programme is genuinely known for cross-sector cases, a single business decision that pulls in government and nonprofit angles, but it's still one team, inside one school, producing management cases. I checked government training academies too: India's own LBSNAA, Singapore's Civil Service College, and consultancies. All of them produce real material inside their own single discipline. None of them share a production charter across two or more. I checked the US, the UK, Europe, and past education altogether. The pattern held everywhere: whoever writes the cases is locked to whichever one discipline their home institution happens to teach, no matter how good the underlying distribution is.

That's the actual find, and it's bigger than "India needs to write more cases." Nobody, anywhere, has built one case institution with a mandate wide enough to cover business, policy, public health, executive education, or whatever else turns out to matter, under a single roof, funded and run as one thing instead of as separate departments that were never built to talk to each other.

India's own version of this gap is worth sitting with in numbers, because it shows the problem twice, not once. IIM Ahmedabad's collection available through The Case Centre, the largest among Indian business schools on that platform, sits at just over 240 cases, out of a much larger internal case bank the institute has built over six decades but hasn't opened up globally at the same scale. Ivey Business School, in Ontario, Canada, had already logged 864 India-focused cases on its own site as of its last published count, more than IIM Ahmedabad's and ISB's entire Case Centre collections combined. That count is almost certainly higher today; Ivey adds a couple hundred new cases a year and has kept building the India collection since. On the policy side, ISPP runs a genuine case study and research centre, a small team, real partnerships with the Capacity Building Commission and NITI Aayog, real output, but set next to Harvard Kennedy School's fifty-year, 2,000-document operation, it's a promising start next to an entire industry. India isn't just missing the cross-disciplinary version. It hasn't even built a strong single-discipline version yet, in either discipline.

Here's what an actual factory would need to do differently from every version that already exists, Harvard's included. It would need to be one institution, not three schools that just happen to share one name, so a business team, a policy team, a public health team, and whatever team turns out to matter next all sit under a shared charter and a shared funding source instead of each having to independently reach Harvard's scale on its own timeline. The crafts stay separate; a business case and a policy case are genuinely different kinds of writing and deserve their own specialists, but the institution behind them wouldn't be. It would need to actually produce India-context material at a volume that stops depending on whichever school has spare faculty hours that semester, which is presumably how a Canadian school ended up outproducing every Indian one. It would also need to hook straight into distribution that already works, The Case Centre, the way IIM Ahmedabad already does, rather than spend years rebuilding a pipe that exists and functions fine. Production and distribution, treated as one job instead of two separate half-solved problems.

IIM Ahmedabad, ISB, and ISPP would keep doing exactly what they already do well; none of this replaces them. It does the one thing none of them, and no version of Harvard either, were ever chartered to be: a single, funded, cross-disciplinary institution whose entire reason for existing is documenting India at the pace India is actually changing, in whichever field the moment calls for, not just the one its founders happened to teach.

I went looking for one institution that had made family business governance its actual job and ended up finding that even the most resourced case-writing machine on earth never built the version that crosses its own hallways. Harvard didn't get there first. India still can.