Expert Case Developer: AI & Entrepreneurship

Expert Case Developer — Business School Teaching Cases (AI & Entrepreneurship) I teach an undergraduate entrepreneurship course at a U.S. business school. The course examines how AI tools change what an evidence-based founder can do — and, as importantly, where they do not help. I am hiring an experienced case developer to build teaching material for the Fall term. This is not content writing. A teaching case is an instrument: it puts a student in a decision-maker's position at a moment when the right answer was genuinely undetermined, and it stops there. If you have written case studies that summarize what a company did and why it worked, this is a different craft and the fit will be poor. **What the work involves** You will produce three kinds of material: *Short cases (800–1,500 words).* Press-driven, current, built around a single decision. Each opens a class session and has to carry a 20-minute discussion. Roughly 8–12 of these, plus short entries for an existing case bank. *One full-length case with teaching note.* A decision case of publishable length with a matched teaching note (learning objectives, board plan, discussion questions, analysis, epilogue), original exhibits, and instructor slides. Built to a university case publisher's format standards, which I will provide. *Quantitative and lab companions.* Scaffolding students work with directly: a Monte Carlo simulation notebook in Python (NumPy/SciPy/Matplotlib, runnable in a plain Python 3.10+ environment or Colab), a unit-economics workbook in Excel and Google Sheets, structured worksheet templates, and optionally a self-contained interactive HTML rendering of a case. **Standards this work is held to** - **Verify before assert.** Every statistic, figure, date, and quotation traces to a primary or original source before it enters student-facing material. Company filings, regulatory documents, court records, original reporting. Not a secondary summary, and not a model's recollection. Anything you cannot verify gets flagged to me, not smoothed over. - **The decision-horizon wall.** The case body ends at the protagonist's decision. Every post-decision fact — outcomes, later financials, subsequent reviews — belongs in the teaching-note epilogue. No exhibit, timeline, or reference title in the case body may reveal how it turned out. This rule is strict, it extends to the reference list, and it is where most otherwise-competent case drafts fail. - **Currency is the product.** Prefer the most recent verifiable facts, date-stamp every figure, and call out details likely to age. - **Citations follow the destination.** Endnote style for one house, footnote style for another. Do not hard-code a style into the draft; apply it at export. **About the subject matter** The cases sit at the intersection of AI tooling and new-venture strategy. Some feature AI-native firms. Some feature firms that deliberately resist AI adoption, and those are as pedagogically important as the first group — the course teaches students to discriminate between cases where AI helps, cases where it hurts, and cases where it substitutes for thinking. If your instinct is that "uses AI" is a proxy for "good venture," we will disagree constantly. **Structure and terms** - Hourly contract with an **8-hour weekly cap**, run through Upwork's Time Tracker. Every time entry carries a one-line memo naming the deliverable. - Roughly a six-week production window, front-loaded so material exists before it is taught. - Weekly check-in by message; a short video call when a case needs a decision made. - I review and give written feedback in rounds. Expect substantive revision requests. That is the process working. **Intellectual property — read this before applying** Material produced under this contract for classroom use is work made for hire and belongs to me: session cases, case bank entries, notebooks, worksheets, templates, and slides. **This does not extend to independent scholarly work.** If you have existing research, working papers, or case drafts under review elsewhere, those remain yours; bringing related expertise to this contract does not transfer them. If any deliverable here has a plausible path to separate academic publication, we agree the authorship and ownership terms in writing before the work starts, not after. I have made this explicit because it is the term most often left ambiguous in freelance academic work, and ambiguity here is expensive for both parties. **To apply** Send a short cover letter — five or six sentences, not a template. Tell me: 1. One teaching case you have written or would want to write, and where its decision point sits. 2. How you verify a financial figure that appears in three secondary sources and no primary one. Attach one writing sample you own outright and can share. I read every proposal. Generic applications and AI-generated cover letters that do not answer the two questions are declined without reply. --- ## PART 4 — Screening questions (Upwork's question fields) 1. Describe a teaching case you have written. What was the decision point, and why was the outcome genuinely uncertain at that moment? 2. A figure you need appears in three news articles and in no filing, release, or regulatory document. What do you do? 3. Which of these have you built: a Monte Carlo simulation in Python, a unit-economics model, a teaching note with a board plan, a case exhibit from original data? Name the ones you have actually done. 4. What is your availability over the next six weeks, and what is your hourly rate for this scope? ---