The economic concept of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) (Kaplan/Norton 1992), has been widely spread in the profit- and non-profit-sector (Scherer/Alt 2002). Over the years, the BSC has evolved into an integrated management system (Kaplan/Norton 2007), helping to implement a strategy by the need to formulate distinct objectives, that are derived from the overall strategy, as well as supporting the management process by its clear structure and combination of goal setting with feedback processes. Speckbacher, Bischof and Pfeiffer showed that there exist three primary types of BSC usage: a specific strategic performance measurement system, a system with cause and effect relations and a fully developed scorecard with action plans and links to the reward system (Speckbacher et al. 2003). Especially type one of the BSC has also been applied to institutions in an educational context, although generally on a conceptional, theoretical basis and mostly for institutions on a tertiary level. There are no reports, however, for using the BSC in schools in Switzerland, even though there are adaptations known in public schools in Germany (Thiele 2008). Against the background of an extensive literatur survey and the experiences reported from Germany the question arises, if the introduction of the BSC in the Zurich School System could be of use as well. To prevent the repetition of bad experiences made in the past with the transfer of economic concepts to an educational context (see for example Scheytt 2007), it is necessary to examine a possible transfer thoroughly. Is there a need for such an instrument and is there any room for improvement? The aim of this paper is a description on how to gain evidence to answer the question raised above. The decision for the methodological approach (see a.o. Coghlan/Brannick 2005; Van de Ven 2007) is presented as well as the methodological design of the explorative case study (see e.g. Gerring 2004; Lamnek 2005; Yin 2003).

The educational context of public schools in Switzerland and especially in the canton Zurich is illustrated. The Balanced Scorecard is presented very briefly. The main part of the paper focuses on the description of the methodological approach as well as on the methodological design of the explorative case study. This part relies heavily on the relevant scientific literatur.

The paper illustrates the process and the methodological approach on how to gain evidence for the usefulness of the Balanced Scorecard in an educational context.