Topics will include:
- corporate decision-making in an international context
- Prahalad’s insights into the bottom of the pyramid, and
- the increasingly central role of IT, and more generally of new technologies, in shaping future international business.
The regional focus will be on the currently dominant economies – the ‘triad’ of the EU, the US and Japan – as well as the rapidly emerging BRIC markets in world trade such as Brazil, India and China.
The seminar will draw on and reinforce a conceptual framework established in earlier prerequisite courses, and will in particular make use of Michael Porter’s Diamond Theory of international trade, and subsequent double-diamond elaborations. The primary emphasis will be on the application of this conceptual framework to topical cases, providing students with detailed practical insights into real-life issues in international trade, acquired through active learning.