Overview of Course

Business happens in a landscape—a complex backdrop shaped by national borders, government policies, natural resources, and cultural norms—which is becoming increasingly global. Changes in technology and the political economy are eroding and reshaping the barriers between countries, allowing firms with a home-market competitive advantage to create and capture value in new national markets. New business models rise and old ones collapse as cheaper sourcing options develop. Global trends spread to consumers in distant and diverse cultures. BUS405B is designed to distill, synthesize, and build on insights from academic domains that inform the topic of global competition: economics, international business, global strategy, business strategy, and corporate strategy. Together, these insights illustrate how competing globally differs from doing business in a single country and suggest frameworks that provide options for global value creation and value capture. Global value creation is an extension of the concept of competitive advantage—that is, it depends on growing the wedge, relative to competitors, between the price customers are willing to pay for a product and the cost an organization incurs to produce it. Doing so is far more difficult on the global stage. In the first part of this course, we will explore patterns of economic development and global trade to best contextualize opportunities for organizations to compete globally by capitalizing on geographic market similarities and differences. The second part of this course explains the advantages and constraints of competing globally and guides future managers on selecting among multiple countries and explores what happens after a firm selects a global strategy. This course will visit organizations executing global value-creation strategies at select ports along our shared cross-continental voyage.