International Entrepreneurship

Course Number 1640

Assistant Professor Mukti Khaire
Winter, 29 sessions
Exam

Career Focus

International Entrepreneurship (IE) is a course targeted towards students who plan to become involved with entrepreneurial ventures across the world either right after graduation, or at some future point in their careers. The course is meant to help students evaluate and analyze international opportunities in their capacity as:

• Founders of or early hires in, international ventures
• Investors in, or advisors to, international ventures
• Potential partners or acquirers of international ventures, i.e., as managers in large, established companies that are looking to grow internationally
• Consultants

Since the course emphasizes that differences among national contexts create specific types of entrepreneurial opportunities, and because such opportunities can be created in any country, this course is relevant to all of the above careers in any country in the world.

Educational Objectives

The objective of the course is to inspire students with the vision and opportunities inherent in international entrepreneurship, to heighten their awareness of the inherent challenges and dilemmas and to equip students with the insights, tools, concepts, and skills necessary to successfully overcome the obstacles and achieve the vision of international entrepreneurship.

The course emphasizes that differences among national contexts create specific types of entrepreneurial opportunities. IE will introduce students to new concepts and ideas associated with international opportunities, to help them identify, evaluate, and analyze these opportunities, the factors critical to their success, and their attendant challenges, and how these challenges can be overcome. The course will equip students with tools and frameworks with which to assess these issues, avoid common mistakes, and execute opportunities successfully.

We will emphasize universal issues and generalizability, i.e., rather than focus on the specifics of ventures in particular industries, in particular countries, we will examine those aspects of international ventures that are broadly applicable, regardless of the location or industry of the venture. This will help students be effective entrepreneurs, investors, managers and consultants across the world. The course is therefore relevant to students with an interest in any country or industry.

Course Content and Organization

IE examines a typology of international opportunities that are created on account of historical, economic, political, social and cultural differences among national contexts: arbitrage, missing products and services, unique products and services, and missing institutions. The course also examines global ventures, which have customers and suppliers spread across multiple countries across the globe. The key success factors and challenges of each type of opportunity will be studied. We will also understand how to execute successfully on each of these opportunities. Since international opportunities often involve the creation of a market for new products and services, the course examine how new markets can be created in various contexts and provides students with a guiding framework for market-creation.

The case analyses and classroom discussions will draw from multiple disciplines and areas of business management. The cases will cover ventures in a wide variety of industries, facing different kinds of issues, which are functions of the kind of opportunity the venture is exploiting. Although most of the classes are structured around cases, we will also use other pedagogical tools such as an exercise and mini-lectures. Additionally, there will be opportunities to interact with case protagonists who visit class.