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.

Combining academic research,  consulting-practice frameworks with the classic strategy and international business literature, the course covers the economic and geopolitical context in which international firms operate, why and how firms expand abroad, the sources of sustainable competitive advantage, the role of the corporate centre in multi-business groups, organizational design choices for multinationals, and the cultural dynamics that shape cross-border success and failure.

 

Topics discussed include:

• The global economic context: international trade, foreign direct investment, and global value chains; waves of globalization and the current "slowbalization"; reshoring, friendshoring, and the geopolitics of investment and trade flows
• Why companies expand internationally
• The critical role of firm-specific advantages; the nature of home-country location advantages and the problem with host-country location advantages
• How companies expand internationally: partnerships, strategic alliances, joint ventures, equity investments, and acquisitions
• Private equity firms and their international business strategies
• Sources of competitive advantage: Porter's generic strategies, Brandenburger and Stuart's value networks, activity-system fit, and the view of strategy as a causal theory
• The role of the corporate headquarters in multi-business groups: parenting advantage, HQ archetypes, and value creation (or destruction) by the corporate centre
• Organizational design in international business: functional, divisional, matrix, and agile structures; shared service center design
• Cultural distance and cross-cultural management: national, organizational, and industry culture

The course has the following objectives:

• understanding what an international business strategy is;
• training students in formulating and critically evaluating international business strategies;
• training students in applying these ideas to business practice through real-world case studies of firms;
• increasing students' ability to formulate and express their views on the theory and practicalities of strategy through class discussion.

 

will follow

References, bibliography, and recommended reading

International business strategy students benefit from staying up-to-date by reading the business press online: The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, Harvard Business Review, and 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 Zürcher Zeitung (CH), NRC Handelsblad (NL), etc., depending on your language proficiency

Campus

Solbosch

Method(s) of evaluation

• written examination

written examination

Language(s) of evaluation

• english