International business strategy

This course offers a comprehensive master-level overview of the field of International Business Strategy.

The course builds on business and corporate strategic management on the one hand and on industrial organization on the other hand. We focus on the development and implementation of strategies in firms that operate internationally. Such firms have become ever more common over the past decades, owing to advances in information, communication, and transportation technology and increasing liberalization of international trade and investments. Firms that operate internationally need to craft international business strategies, both for the individual foreign countries in which they operate and for their entire international network. Overall, such strategies are aimed at effectively and efficiently matching a firm’s internal strengths (relative to competitors) with the opportunities and challenges found in institutionally and geographically dispersed environments that cross national borders. Such matching is a requirement for creating value and satisfying internal and external stakeholders’ goals and thus for survival and good performance.

Developing and applying a unifying framework of the practitioner-oriented literature on international business strategies, the course will cover the most important classic and recent models and ideas on such strategies, thereby increasing students’ understanding of successful international strategy formation and implementation. The precise topics that will be discussed are:

• (De)globalization, reshoring and friendshoring and the changing environment for investment and trade flows;
• The conceptual foundations of international business strategy;
• The critical role of firm-specific advantages;
• The nature of home-country location advantages and the problem with host-country location advantages;
• Global market opportunity assessment;
• Cultural distance and cross-cultural management;
• Headquarter-subsidiary relationships in a multinational network; the roles of foreign subsidiaries;
• Entry modes; mergers and acquisitions – a strategic perspective;
• Strategic alliances and joint ventures;
• Equality, diversity and inclusion in international business
• Private equity firms and their international business strategies.

The course has the following objectives:

• familiarizing students with the key theoretical ideas about firms’ international expansion strategies;
• training students in critically evaluating these ideas;
• training students in applying these ideas to business practice through case studies of firms;
• increasing students’ ability to formulate and express their views on the theory and practicalities of strategy by class discussion and both group and individual work.

The overall end goal is to increase students’ ability to understand, develop, and implement successful internationalization strategies in firms that operate in multiple businesses and/or countries.

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References, bibliography, and recommended reading

The course is organized around regular classes of one and a half hour. The regular classes will each time be a combination of lectures and instructor-led discussions of theory and case applications in which students’ participation is expected.

To raise the quality and effectiveness of the classes, students need to prepare the lecture by reading assigned literature and/or cases in advance.

International business strategy students benefit from staying up-to-date by reading the business press on-line:

• The Economist
• Bloomberg Business Week
• Harvard Business Review
•  at least one business newspaper such as the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, L’Echo/De Tijd (B), Les Echos (F), Handelsblatt (FRG), Neue Zuercher Zeitung (CH), NRC Handelsblad (NL), etc…depending on your language proficiency, …

Campus

Solbosch

Method(s) of evaluation

• Other

Other

will follow

Language(s) of evaluation

• english