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 interconnected. 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.
MGMT 475 is designed to distill, synthesize, and build on insights that inform the topic of international business, global competition, and the world economy to better understand how managers competing globally differs from doing business in a single country. This International Business Management course provides frameworks that consider options for global value creation and value capture for multinational enterprises. Global value creation, versus domestic optimization, positions managers to consider how to best grow 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 beyond the home country market. Doing so is far more difficult on the global stage, given all the complexities to consider in managerial decision-making. Throughout this highly interactive course, students will learn and apply international business concepts in geographically relevant ways as they explore a diverse set of industries both in class and at various ports along the voyage. The course will explore patterns of economic development and global trade flows to best contextualize opportunities for multinational organizations (such as Netflix, Hershey, Nestle, Ikea and Intel) to compete globally by capitalizing on geographic market similarities and differences.
In small groups and individually, students will practice making global decisions that take advantage of unique global opportunities or navigate the constraints of competing globally. As the course progresses, multiple country comparative analytical tools will be introduced to optimize global decision-making processes. This course will visit multinational organizations and their subsidiary locations along the voyage to experience how firms compete globally.