International Strategic Management

Course goals

Learning objectives
At the end of the course, students will understand

• the incentives for firms to internationalize their activities,
• why and how internationalization strategies are different across firms and countries,
• how managers effectively target the locations for their investments.

Content

Firms move across borders for many reasons including getting hold of physical resources, acquiring valuable and rare skills embodied in people, developing technological capabilities, and accessing fast-growing markets. Although crossing the national boundaries has become a priority, growing internationally is no easy feat.  In trying to move abroad managers need to both overcome important barriers and invest large amounts of money and attention to find out how to adapt to and succeed in the host environment.

This course has a threefold purpose: (1) to show how firms identify opportunities lying across borders; (2) describe the barriers managers must deal with when moving abroad; (3) illustrate effective strategies to overcome the most significant of such barriers.

In doing so, during the course we attempt to answer the following questions:

• What are the incentives for firms to move abroad?
• How could heterogeneity in firms’ internationalization paths be explained?
• What are cross-country cultural and institutional differences and what is their effect on internationalization strategies?
• Given a firm’s goals, what locations should managers target and how are they supposed to get there?
• What is the function of a firm’s headquarters (HQ) and what can be the advantage of moving it abroad?
• How do firms behave when venturing into unknown international scenarios? 

Format
The course is taught with lectures and tutorials. The tutorials make intensive use of case studies in order to apply the theoretical concepts in the lectures.
The instructional mode is structured using a three-pronged approach. First, the main content is communicated via online video lectures (taking the place of the traditional lecture). Second, the traditional lecture is used for flipped classroom exercises. And third, tutorials are structured as ‘normal’ tutorials. Meaning that students get approx. 6 hours of instruction per week, 4 of which is in person.  


In case online access is required for this course and you are not in the position to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not re-usable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN. Separate or spare codes are usually not available.