If you are teaching an International Business/Management or comparable course in 2011 Winter/Spring semester, you may be interested in the following teaching/research opportunity:

 

Last semester, we teamed up about 500 undergraduate students enrolled in IB/IM courses in seven different countries to collaboratively develop business proposals (simplified business plans) for a hypothetical IJVs. The project also involved pre- and post-project surveys which, coupled with team performance measures, provided data for an array of research papers. The project went very well and we would like to repeat it again this winter/spring semester – and we are looking for more partners.

 

How it works:

Students from different countries are randomly assigned in teams of 4-5.  Each student supposedly represents a parent company that has a preliminary agreement with a number of other foreign companies to create an IJV. The task is to collaboratively come up with an idea for an economically promising product/service for the IJV, decide on the location where the product will be produced, sold, provide suggestions for staffing policies (e.g., expats/locals), marketing strategy, describe challenges the company is likely to experience and suggest solutions, etc.

Project instructions used last semester could be found here: http://vtaras.com/International_Cooperation_Project.html

The project instructions may be modified for the next semester, but the main idea will likely remain the same.

 

Surveys:

To create further learning opportunities and to use the project for research purposes, the students are required to complete a pre- and post-project survey. The pre-project survey uses a series of Likert and open-question items to measures students’ demographics, cultural values, perceived differences among the participating countries (psychic distance), expected degree of ease/difficulty of collaboration with representatives from each participating country, and the list of challenges the students expect to encounter when working on the project.

The post-project survey is largely the same but in addition also includes peer evaluations, as well as asks to describe in detail the actual experiences of working on the project.

In addition, each team’s performance is evaluated based on the quality of the report, innovativeness and economic feasibility of ideas, thoroughness of the business plan, timeliness, peer evaluations, reported conflicts and challenges, etc.

 

Schedule:

We are looking for partners whose semesters start in January-February and end in April-May of 2011.

 

Additional Information:

More information about the project could be found here: http://vtaras.com/International_Cooperation_Project.html

If you would like to participate in the project, please contact Vas Taras ([log in to unmask]).

 

Recognizing that there may be interested parties whose schedule or preferences are different from what has been suggested above, I put together a page that helps find project partners who are on your schedule:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjNhzzXMdGmCdHVzSXZFZzJDaXFmZmZqUFczM0dBMkE&hl=en#gid=0

There are currently 34 listings, so chances are if you like the idea in general, you can find project partners that fit your specific preferences.