Marketing Faculty, Dr Uchenna Uzo is the recipient of the Lagos Business School 2019 Dean’s Case Award for his case, Research in Motion: Managing Channel Conflicts.
Published in 2013, the case reflects on distribution channel management in Nigeria and Africa by exploring market penetration challenges faced by Canadian manufacturer of smartphones, Research in Motion at the time.
Being the case with the highest number of downloads, Dr Uzo’s case has earned 29.3 percentage sales from top institutions such as IE Business School, Spain; Webster University, Switzerland; Ghent University, Belgium among others.
Speaking on the continued relevance of the case, Dr Uzo said, “A lot of companies still face some of the issues addressed in the case, and there is hardly any culturally contextual knowledge about how to design a distribution strategy that either wards off the grey market or, at least, create a mutually beneficial relationship with them.” He also added that the case was inspired by a realization of the lack of Africa-centred cases that capture the idiosyncrasies of distribution channels.
The Research in Motion: Managing Channel Conflicts case also won the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) Case Writing Award in the African Business Cases category in 2013. Another case, The Indomie Noodles in Africa: Lessons on Digital and Cultural Branding also authored by Dr Uzo won the Best Teaching Case Award at the 2018 Academy of International Business (AIB) Conference for his case, Indomie Noodles in Africa: Lessons on Digital and Cultural Branding.
The award was presented to Dr Uzo by LBS Dean, Professor Enase Okonedo who encouraged other members of the LBS faculty to write and publish more cases. LBS employs the case study method to facilitate learning among students and with 239 cases and 99 technical notes, the School has one of the most extensive collections of case studies in Africa.
