The Palgrave Handbook of Experiential Learning in International Business

All learning is experiential. Nothing that we know comes from any source other than our own experiences. Think about it. Think of something you know. How did you learn about it? Did you listen to a lecture? You experienced someone telling you about it. Did you learn it through a book? You experienced reading about it. Did you learn it by watching a movie or television programme? You experienced watching it. Did you build something? You experienced doing it. Maybe what you learned came to you in a dream? You experienced that dream. We learn — or at least we have the opportunity to learn — through our experiences. Indeed, it is the only way we do learn.

Experience as a foundation of learning has been recognized for millennia. Although environmental and individual differences — such as personality, geographical location, culture, occupation, age, time availability, educational background, personal history, gender, genetic information, social status, and expectations — may influence different learning abilities, almost universally, experience is a necessary and often sufficient condition for learning.

International business (IB) is mostly presented to the students either directly through teacher-centred concepts or sometimes through student-centred concepts that convey experiences in IB cases or specific projects (e.g. Clark & Gibb, 2006; Nadkarni, 2003; Paul & Mukhopadhyay, 2005; Weimer, 2013). The first option is known for its ineffective and inefficient learning progress (e.g. Smart et al., 2012; Weimer, 2013). The second option — to let the students experience IB contents — is much more effective and efficient (e.g. Blasco, 2009; Daly et al., 2012; Mintzberg & Gosling, 2002; Taras et al., 2013). In the case of teaching IB, the challenge for instructors is the fact that international coherences in management are not easily made perceivable. They are not easily accessible. Furthermore, the number of students that can participate in experimental and student-centred teaching is very small. This raises the question of how more students can experience IB contents if only limited resources for a specific learning offer at an academic institution are available.

Deb Gilbertson,1 a visionary educator in New Zealand, has a mission to use the classroom and beyond to create a better world. With this in mind, the Global Enterprise Experience competition has been organized for 11 consecutive years with the goal of enabling students to learn through experiencing what it means to be part of a global team. The basic idea is simple. If students work together across cultures, time zones, worldviews and levels of wealth and poverty, they will develop management skills and a mindset for making a difference in the future. Over the years, the Global Enterprise Experience competition has achieved this by bringing together more than 5,000 students from 360 universities in 72 countries. Participants are grouped into globally dispersed teams and during three weeks they together develop a business proposal on a topic chosen by Deb Gilbertson. This topic varies from year to year, but it always addresses a social concern or need, for example ‘The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ or ‘proposal for a profitable product or service to foster women’s social and/or economic development’. The team members are encouraged to contribute by drawing on their own capabilities and cultural contexts (for more info, see http://geebiz.org/). For many of the students worldwide, participating in the Global Enterprise Experience competition is a part of a course in international management, cross-cultural management and global leadership or similar. For the students in New Zealand, the competition is part of the course ‘Managing across Cultures’, where we as teachers worked at developing an enquiry-based experiential learning model for the course to enrich and deepen students’ learning.

This chapter adopts Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle (ELC) model to illustrate how students from the developed world might learn international business (IB) in a way that incorporates the developing world. Typical IB curriculum says little if anything about certain developing regions of the world. Yet, the developing world has the bulk of the global population, the largest reservoir of the world’s untapped resources and the most growth potential and opportunities (Mahajan, 2006; Prahalad & Hart, 2002; World Bank, 2005). Exposing and teaching IB that is contextualized in the developing world is necessary for the nurture of global competency that can enable productive collaborative engagement between the developed and the developing worlds. Particularly suited for such an approach is the ELC model that suggests that learning occurs through concrete experience (CE), reflective observation (RO), abstract conceptualization (AC), and active experimentation (AE). Consequently, this chapter adapts the model to provide IB lessons through a content–context integration of the theory and student experiences and involvement with the subject matter. It also provides a basis for such learning that is illustrated in a pilot case of a study-abroad programme for American students in Africa. Experiential learning here refers to the understanding students gain through instruction that is embedded in their experiences and context. Business schools often use internship and job shadowing for such learning while service learning has become popular proxy in other fields, particularly among millennial (Bilimoria, 1998; Smith, 2010).

In this theoretical chapter, I develop a model of the firm’s sources of experiential knowledge in the internationalization process based on knowledge-based theory (KBT). In order to do so, I begin by briefly reviewing the KBT literature (Eisenhardt & Santos, 2002; Grant, 1996a, 1996b), explaining how it applies to the internationalization literature (Barkema & Drogendijk, 2007; Johanson & Vahlne, 1977, 1990) and finally bringing these ideas together to examine the mechanisms and sources of knowledge transfer in the internationalization process.

In the age of globalization, there is no doubt that the process by which people working in international contexts learn is a critical issue in the area of international management. Among learning theories, the experiential learning theory proposed by Kolb (1984) has greatly contributed to the debates regarding cultural differences in learning styles (see Auyeung & Sands, 1996; Barmeyer, 2004; Holtbrugge & Mohr, 2010; Joy & Kolb, 2009; Yamazaki, 2005; Yamazaki & Kayes, 2007; Yuen & Lee, 1994), expatriate skills and adaptation (Yamazaki, 2010), cross-cultural learning of expatriates (Yamazaki & Kayes, 2004, 2010) and cultural intelligence (Erez et al., 2013). Although many studies of learning style differences across countries and cultures have been conducted, most of them have operated in an academic context. As a result, few studies have concentrated on the business context, and fewer still have focused on MNCs, which are major business players due to globalization. Because learning styles are determined in accordance with a contextual situation (Kolb, 1984), more learning style research needs to be done on international business contexts that include MNCs. In this study, therefore, by focusing on the global workforces of Japanese MNCs, we aim to explore the learning style similarities and differences between Japan and Thailand in a comprehensive manner.

In a world which is increasingly becoming more interconnected, more and more organizations are expanding their reach into markets that 20 years ago would have been off of the strategic horizon. This trend is not likely to level off any time soon, despite the economic downturn of 2008. Indeed, much of a business’s success depends on being able to penetrate overseas markets and capture significant market share. It is therefore incumbent on business schools to prepare future business leaders with the right knowledge and skills to be able to contribute to corporate strategy and continue the drive for business success.

College lecturers who teach international business (IB) have probably noticed that the contents list in most of the IB textbooks is virtually identical: they cover almost an identical list of issues. Most IB textbooks contain chapters on globalization, economic, political and cultural environment, international trade, market entry modes, international finance and monetary systems, international strategy, international marketing, and international HR.

The Global Enterprise Experience (GEE) is an international business competition that develops tertiary student skills in managing across cultures, time zones, worldviews and levels of wealth and poverty. It builds a mindset for creating successful business ventures that tackle social and environmental issues. Participants are placed in teams of eight, with members drawn from around the world. Teams compete, not countries. They have three weeks to develop a six-page business concept proposal on a profitable product or service that addresses a social or environmental challenge — the challenge changes each year with topics like fostering women’s development, addressing the United Nations Millennium Goals and enabling environmental sustainability (see www.geebiz.org).

The rise of technology and ease of travel have led to a significant increase in the use of experiential methods in international business education. Current approaches stretch from the direct experience of study-abroad and travel programmes down to the indirect experience provided by coursework, experiential exercises and simulations. Historically, Northeastern University has addressed this challenge through its International Business major. In 1994, the D’Amore-McKim School of Business established the Bachelor of Science in International Business (BSIB) programme that offered students opportunities to study and work overseas in the language of the host country (http://www.damore-mckim.neu.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate-programs/bsib/).

Preparing potential entrepreneurs for business entries has been for several decades a traditional aim of entrepreneurship education (Gartner & Vesper, 1994), which differentiates it from management education. Some of the existing firms support intrapreneurship in order to increase performance through strategic renewal and the creation of new venture opportunities (Lumpkin & Lichtenstein, 2005), and this links corporate entrepreneurship in large organizations with searching new business opportunities. Entrepreneurship education has also the potential to prepare students to act as independent professionals in the knowledge-based economy. Developing business opportunity identification skills has a crucial role in entrepreneurship education (De Tienne & Chandler, 2004; Heinonen & Poikkijoki, 2006). Shane and Venkataraman (2000) defined entrepreneurial opportunity as a situation where new goods or services could be introduced for greater revenue than their cost of production. Entrepreneurial opportunity recognition can initiate learning processes on the level of an individual but also on the level of groups or organizations. Lindsay and Craig (2002) specify three stages of opportunity identification: opportunity search, opportunity recognition and opportunity evaluation. Later stages of business opportunity exploitation include business concept development, business planning and business creation (Ardichvili et al., 2003). Business planning has been often treated in academic entrepreneurship education as the process that integrates all essential steps for launching an entrepreneurial business.

Experiential learning (EL) involves a

direct encounter with the phenomena being studied rather than merely thinking about the encounter, or only considering the possibility of doing something about it. Experiential learning can be defined in terms of an instructional model, which begins with the learner engaging in direct ‘experience’ followed by reflection, discussion, analysis and evaluation of the experience.

(Borzak, 1981: 9 quoted in Brookfield, 1983)

‘Experiential learning takes place when: (a) a person is involved in an activity, (b) he looks back and evaluates it, (c) he determines what was useful or important to remember, and (d) he uses this information to perform another activity’ (Kolb, 1984). Experiential learning can also be defined as a process by which the learner creates meaning from direct experience (Dewey, 1938).

The number of MBA programmes worldwide has expanded rapidly in the past 50 years. Once the preserve of elite universities in the developed world, graduate schools of business offering the MBA qualification are now found throughout the world and are increasingly competing on a global basis for MBA candidates. However, there has recently been criticism, widely reported in the media, of the role of business schools in training managers. Some commentators (e.g. Pfeffer & Fong, 2002) have questioned whether business schools do in fact prepare students to be effective managers, while others (e.g. Mintzberg, 2004) have suggested that the concept of business school training should change, to focus more on building upon the experience that MBA students have gained as managers before entering an MBA programme. A common theme in these criticisms is that MBA programmes currently lack the kind of practical training that allows students to apply the skills and knowledge that they learn, and that conventional MBA programmes do a poor job of evaluating whether they are providing students with the right tools to help them become effective managers:

Although business school enrollments have soared and business education has become big business, surprisingly little evaluation of the impact of business schools on either their graduates or the profession of management exists.

(Pfeffer & Fong, 2002: 78)

There is wide agreement among business school faculty and administrators about the necessity to provide a global view and perspective to all management students, particularly those in Executive MBA (EMBA) programmes. All business today is global by definition: competitors from new and emerging markets are laying claim to an increasing global market share in a broad set of industries; consumer requirements are more diverse and exacting across different markets, imposing harsh demands of variations in product or service attributes and value propositions; supply chains are considerably more complex and extensive, including many more countries and requiring strict observance to cost, quality, and ethical issues; the source of innovation can reside in organizations far from those one knows best or normally interacts with; and the role of governments and other institutions is ever more prevalent wherever we operate or seek customers.

The effectiveness of experiential learning has been widely researched and applied. Its application has also been linked to service learning to help learners to acquire specific knowledge and skills, as well as to develop ethical sense and responsibility in society. This aspect recently gained attention in a leading management education journal (Steiner & Watson, 2006). In response to this research, this chapter explores the effectiveness of a study adopting an experiential learning approach to enhance civic awareness and social responsibility in international business management courses, with a focus on hospitality and tourism management (HTM). According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO, 2014), tourism is one of the fastest growing international service industries in the contemporary era. In 2013, international tourism arrivals reached a record of 1,087 million. This was accompanied by the substantial growth in tourism receipts, when more than 30% of the top 50 international tourism earners reached a two-digit record. This influential change has triggered rising concerns about the skills and knowledge that need to be acquired by business students to prepare for this trend in international business management. The chapter therefore aims to explore (a) the overall satisfaction of engaging in an experiential learning project; (b) the perceived value of experiential learning, and particularly service learning, among HTM students; (c) the effectiveness of experiential learning in developing generic skills, civic awareness and social responsibility; and (d) the future intention of students to become involved in and contribute to social-related matters. This chapter is divided into five sections.

Collaboration across distance (considered a multidimensional concept, including space, culture, institutions) is the key challenge in international business (IB) (Taras et al., 2012). In developing practical assignments for IB courses, instructors should account for these dimensions. The increased need for truly global managers has led many business schools to include in their curricula courses on cross-culture management and to devise tools which may efficiently prepare students to work in a multicultural environment (Taras et al., 2013). However, in order to develop global competences, cross-cultural training should be complemented with actual cultural immersion (MacNab & Worthley, 2012). In the real-life business world, cultural immersion is provided by international assignments, and there are less opportunities for cultural immersion within the classroom. There are, however, some solutions to provide students with these opportunities.

‘Go big or go home’ is an American expression meant to encourage people to give it their all or stop trying. When used in America it underscores a cultural identity rooted in a competitive landscape. When used by an American in a foreign country, one might decry this statement as lacking sensitivity to the surrounding environment. Even when used by an American in America, the statement may be considered insensitive. Whether a poorly chosen phrase or cultural disconnect, it underscores the importance of being not only culturally intelligent (Earley & Mosakowski, 2004) but geo-culturally intelligent as well. In today’s changing landscape, where within country borders diverse groups live and work together, where organizations are increasing becoming more transnational with multinational workforces and new hires from business colleges are assumed to have studied international business, it is incumbent upon educational institutions to expose students to the broadest curriculum possible. For universities that do not yet have international business programmes the University of Hartford ‘global awareness menu’ example could serve as a model and utilize business school resources. While different options are available in the menu developed at Hartford to build on general and perceptual elements of global awareness, in this chapter we share three options that we have developed: a student consultative project for international companies entering the American market; an international online business plan competition; and a short-term study-abroad course that includes a collaborative social responsibility project with a local youth organization.

In this chapter we show how international management work placements, particularly in social enterprises, can be structured to support management and leadership competencies in students across disciplines. First, we explore the current drivers for change in management education towards social benefit, and how universities are capitalizing on this trend by offering students from multiple disciplines opportunities for work placement abroad. Then, through examples from a successful programme, we discuss implications for course design, assess, indicate general issues and challenges, and provide a range of areas for further development. After that, we connect the programme to current international management competency literature — specifically Responsible Global Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship competencies. Further, we introduce three context-defined competencies that are university ‘mission-specific’— action research, vocational discernment, and failure analysis. These are mapped with existing competencies on a global framework adapted from the management literature. The result is a global competency structuring tool which programme planners and students can use to build, justify, adapt, and/or accredit their international management field experience, particularly in relation to problem solving for sustainability and social change.

The Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) is a collaborative effort between several institutions, including universities, companies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from around the world. Students and faculty from each of the participating universities meet for ten days in the host country, where they work in multidisciplinary teams to solve a case and present their solutions to a panel of judges. The pedagogy for GSVC relies on an intensive residential period, which includes a daily combination of faculty-led mentoring sessions, application exercises, breakout sessions, discussion, site visits, project-based learning, service learning and professional presentations. Students are expected to commit 10–12 hours per day in a highly competitive and demanding environment. It promotes organic learning through an immersion experience. In order to solve a local (foreign) social problem, students must understand different political, economic, legal and cultural issues that frame social problems; how to identify them separately; and develop a business solution. GSVC is an excellent example of experiential learning in international business (IB) and/or social entrepreneurship based on the community enquiry model that this chapter develops and proposes. Community enquiry addresses the limitations of the typical service learning model. The traditional service learning model brings students and civil organizations together, but it has rigid boundaries that define who is serving and who is served.

This chapter attempts to address one of the most important challenges faced by international business faculty, that is, how to bring the real world into the classroom or training environment by providing the needed platform and systematic step-by-step process to support students in their roles as managers and decision-makers in a global setting. Business students have an affinity for learning practical business skills.

In this, the second decade of the 21st century, we are witnessing the convergence of two powerful forces, globalization and information technology, both of which demand a thorough re-examination and possible integration of International Business (IB) education and distance learning methodologies. The generation of millennials pursuing higher education and graduate degrees is not only more open to greater and better technology in education but is driven and motivated by it (Rosenberg, 2013). An increasing number of millennials will work in diversified and multicultural environments as the global sourcing of resources and talent becomes the norm for many firms (Meister, 2013). This convergence provides a unique challenge and an immense opportunity in how institutions and specifically professors meld technology and IB education.

Across the globe, universities, national governments, businesses and even students advocate that professionals need to develop global competencies. Global competencies, such as cultural intelligence, are significant in achieving higher global performances. According to Nevadomski (2014), global education is needed to develop global workers, who can be capable of making a positive difference in the world and handling the challenges that globalization poses. With better global education, individuals can identify needs and opportunities, conciliating the local and global imperatives (Fletcher, 2000), and clearly understanding the cultural differences and national values. Furthermore, in numerous industries and geographic locations, global competencies are becoming a major job requirement (Taras et al., 2013).

Individuals often operate under the misguided assumption that ‘different’ is synonymous with ‘wrong’. This is particularly true when students in International Business (IB) classrooms are introduced to values and norms outside their own cultures. At the core of cross-cultural competency is the necessity for students to see through the myth of ethnocentrism — my cultural perspective is right, and your cultural view is wrong. Indeed, as Wade Davis (2014) states: ’The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.’

Today, the business world is facing higher competitive pressure, due to the accelerating process of globalization (Sbordone, 2008) and shorter product life cycles caused by ever-quicker technology changes, for example as shown in Moore’s law (Aizcorbe, 2005). This development also poses growing requirements on management graduates and prospective employees. Hence experiential learning and innovative thinking are crucial for the future career of today’s students.

This conceptual and practitioner-oriented chapter draws from the reflexivity, critical reflection, and mindfulness literature to suggest opportunities to heighten the benefits from experiential learning activities in international business. This occurs at two levels with (1) instructors critically reflecting on their own teaching practice and (2) students critically reflecting on their own experiential learning, assumptions, and interactions with other students. This focus is presented in Figure 27.1. The chapter outlines why soft skills should be a vital part of international business education and how this can be developed through experiential activities which, combined with critical reflection, can lead to mindfulness. As well as explaining the value of reflexivity, critical reflection, and mindfulness for management education broadly, we focus specifically on the additional challenges when managing across cultures.

In today’s competitive business world, young adults strive to be employed by well-known corporations. However, having a degree does not guarantee an employment opportunity, just like a high grade point average does not guarantee a better position, as employers prefer candidates not only with a diploma, but also with professional competencies such as teamwork, relationship management, and creative problem solving. Therefore, higher education institutions develop various courses and certificate programs that buttress the development of competencies. Universities develop such diverse and innovative courses beyond their traditional curriculum, and they are also challenged to use various methodologies in these courses.

In this chapter, the maintenance of high-quality teaching in mega classes using active learning will be explored. A number of steps in the process are thoroughly analysed, so that interested parties can learn how to take advantage of active learning methods. Such teaching practices are dynamic and require continuous improvement. Moreover, more than 30 years of relevant experience have led to the teaching style described below, which contains demanding team-projects, in connection with one another, and the sections ‘Best practices’ and ‘Historical aspects’ show the way they have evolved. This chapter promotes both innovation and smart solutions to make lectures more efficient. A brief chart of the contribution of the experiential learning methods implemented in the following case study can be found in Appendix A, Figure 29.1.

International travel programmes in MBA degrees vary widely in length, location, and focus. They may involve a term of study abroad, an international project or internship, or a business trek abroad. For example, looking at the 2014 Financial Times Top 10 MBA Programmes for International Business ranking (Financial Times, 2014), six of the ten have a required travel component in the curriculum, while the other four provide optional travel opportunities (Table 30.1). The required travel programmes vary from one to three weeks, with most being ten days long. Locations often include cities in Europe, Asia, or Latin America. The focus of programmes vary as well, largely depending on the course they are attached to.

International study tours have been gaining popularity and relevance across disciplines (Dorey, 1991; Kouba, 2009; Oksal et al., 2012; Rushforth, 2008), and not only in business schools. These are commonly seen as supporting mechanisms to enhance classroom education by exposing to different environments and having an academic agenda with specific learning objectives. Furthermore, educational tours abroad have been associated with possibilities for challenging international and intercultural competences. These are especially important, since there is an increase world demand by the market and employers for individuals willing and able to work collaboratively in challenging and diverse environments (Mubambi & Swift, 2011). This has been in some cases reflected by introducing courses, projects and experiential learning activities aimed to develop intercultural and international competences and values for the future professionals (Doh, 2005; Elmuti et al., 2005; Jarmon et al., 2009; Taras & Rowney, 2007).

Deakin University’s Masters of Business Administration (MBA) programme has been consecutively ranked by the Graduate Management Association of Australia as the five-star programme for the past five years (Australia Business Review, 2011; Australian Education Network, 2014). It is believed that the achievement of such ranking could largely be due to our innovation in course design and delivery, flexible and experiential learning approach that enables students to develop skills required addressing practical workplace needs.

Study-abroad programmes have long functioned as important tools for promoting experiential learning in international business, and participation in study abroad by US students has more than tripled in the past 20 years (Institute for International Education, 2013). International business education programmes exist to prepare students for conducting business across international borders, so enabling students to obtain educational experience in multiple countries serves as an obvious and potentially valuable way to advance the main learning objectives of international business education. Study-abroad options for students include exchange programmes between universities (typically of a semester or academic year in duration), completion of degree programmes at a foreign school, and participation in short-term study-abroad programmes including programmes led by faculty from the student’s home institution. Short-term faculty-led study programmes account for the much of the recent growth in study-abroad activity among US institutions. According to the IIE Open Doors report (Institute for International Education, 2013), short-term programmes (i.e. programmes lasting up to eight weeks) now account for 59% of study-abroad activity, and most of these are programmes led by faculty from the students’ home institutions. While the IIE data do not distinguish between programmes led by faculty from the home institution versus programmes led by foreign institutions or third party providers, it is evident that faculty-led programmes account for a large and growing share of the total.

This chapter is based on the principles of experiential learning and describes the design and implementation of the study tour ‘Living the Factory’, which aims to offer international experiences to Colombian undergraduate students in order to both complement the learning objectives at the classroom and develop the international competences which are in demand in the labour market of the future international operation managers.

Study-abroad programmes are an important component in the array of experiential learning practices provided to college students. In the United States, over 90% of all colleges and universities offered study-abroad (Hoffa & DePaul, 2010) opportunities. Researchers and academic programme leaders have found interesting evidence that demonstrates the benefits of such programmes of study (Hallows et al., 2011). Most of the previous findings support the idea that in order to prepare today’s business students for the real world after graduation, and to meet the needs of the modern global society, exposure to an international context is a necessity.

Globalization has opened new business opportunities but has imposed new challenges as well. The US economy in the 21st century is more intertwined with the global economy than ever before. The proportion of exports and imports in US gross domestic product (GDP) reached almost 30% in 2013, while US foreign direct investment (FDI) (outflow and inflow) was around 3% of GDP (BEA, 2014). Therefore, one-third of US GDP is linked to the global economy.

Recently, experiential learning has gained popularity due to its potential to engage students directly with phenomena that they are studying (Cantor, 1995). Examples of experiential learning include a discrete learning experience such as field study, internship and service learning programmes (Parkhouse, 2001) which are popular in most developing countries. Although not all universities in Indonesia require their students to join an internship programme, for many such a program is mandatory for obtaining a degree.

Professional schools for business, medicine, engineering, and law are established in order to produce research and teaching that are relevant for practice. Despite concerns that practitioners often fail to adopt the findings of research (Van de Ven, 2007), there is very little doubt that a training in medicine, engineering, or law is essential in order to be a physician, an engineer, or a lawyer. The same, however, cannot be said for business. In fact, not only has the gap between management science and practice been widening more than in other professional schools, making academic research less useful for solving practical managerial problems (Bartunek et al., 2001), but even the teaching in business schools seems to be of little use for managerial practice (Rubin & Dierdorff, 2009), leading some to claim that ‘the only business that could seem to benefit would be the business school business!’ (Murray, 1988: 71). Another convincing argument is that teaching in business schools can even be very harmful for managerial practice (Mintzberg, 2004). The most enlightening proposals for innovative teaching that is relevant for practice are enlisting co-teaching courses where one of the instructors is an executive or former executive, hiring colleagues with professional experience, encouraging clinical, qualitative research and case studies (Pfeffer, 2007), and creating development activities to improve the practice of management (Mintzberg, 2004). These latter activities have been qualified as the ‘experiential learning’ approach in education, and the effectiveness of the approach has been proved empirically (Nadkarni, 2003).

This chapter describes a team project which requires students to analyse the prospects for a fast-moving consumer good (FMCG) in Africa, an area often overlooked when we speak about emerging markets. This project was created to serve three learning goals. First, to give students experience in analysing less-understood markets through secondary research; second, for them to learn specifically about African markets; and third, for them to learn more about working in teams. Although I have developed it and described it as used in an undergraduate International Marketing course, the structure could be used in any International Business course where team projects are used to research and analyse management practices, economics, logistics, and the like in a given geographic area.

Thirty years ago, Klein (1984) claimed the virtues of simulations for international business (IB) teaching in the Journal of International Business Studies. More recently, IB teaching has become increasingly innovative, for the benefit of students’ learning as well as for their exposure to applicable, or at least transposable, experiences that better prepare them with business-related competences for their future careers. Over a quarter of all business schools and 97.5% of Association Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) -accredited schools have integrated simulations into their curricula (Faria, 1998). Yet most of these curricula use business simulations only, rather than multidisciplinary ones.

INCONGRUA is a simulation built around the relationship between Western multinational enterprises (MNEs) and resource-rich developing countries, often referred to as MNE-host country relationship. MNEs are under pressure to develop strategies that demonstrate not only their ability to maximize profits (to secure commercial licenses) (Lessard & Miller, 2001; Inkpen & Moffett, 2011) but also their ability to ensure effective environmental management and wider social responsibilities (to secure ‘social license to operate’) (O’Neil, 2008; Hackenbruch & Pluess, 2011). These commercial and social dimensions are crucial to ensure that the realization of major natural resource production projects contribute to the realization of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals through taxes on revenues, job creation, income growth, and environmental management (O’Neil, 2008).

The international business environment is changing at an unprecedented pace. As a result, business managers need to be better prepared for the challenges they can face when doing business across political and cultural boundaries. Businesses recruiting university graduates expect them to be creative, communicative, capable of working in intercultural teams, and up to date with modern information and communications technologies. They also expect international business graduates to be able to assess opportunities in foreign markets and devise entry strategies, taking account of both the unique features of the markets themselves and regulatory considerations. Experiential learning methods, especially course-based export/import projects, can help students to acquire all these skills.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the foreign exchange market (FOREX) are inextricably linked in the global marketplace. This chapter explains how these two institutions are connected and how they affect governments’ monetary and fiscal policies. The IMF aims to promote monetary cooperation, stabilize foreign exchange rates, facilitate international business, and, most importantly, reduce poverty and extend assistance to members having balance of payments difficulties. However, the lacking ability of IMF to successfully assist a nation in coming out of the red zone has been heavily scrutinized by critics, as the IMF has on numerous occasions lacked the flexibility required to fix the situation. A related concept to the IMF is the FOREX, which aims to manage and oversee the trading of foreign exchange of major currencies. Under FOREX, monetary policy of a country is no longer dependant on the value of other countries’ currencies; it is based on demand and supply of the currency that enables the country to create its own policies to govern domestic interest rates. But the exchange rate flexibility provides no protection from foreign interest rate fluctuations when the governments reduce their interest rates to zero or even set a negative interest rate as is the case of European Central Bank. These facts lead to the debate as to the effectiveness of IMF and FOREX, particularly in the context of developing countries and emerging markets. Therefore, the chapter is designed to turn the debate into experiential learning by undertaking a series of activities in the following nine areas: IMF voting quota, the quota and governance reform, the proposed new quota formula, currency devaluation, reluctance of countries to free float their currencies, removal of pegged currencies, the role of central banks in setting interest rates, arbitrage creation, and foreign exchange speculations using Fisher effects theory.

International business students face major competition when entering the workforce after graduation. Graduates need cross-cultural, ethical, and global skills to lead and develop partnerships across country borders. Internships and study-abroad experiences can prepare them with the salient knowledge and deeper understanding needed for successful careers in the international business environment (Commission on the Abraham Lincoln Study Abroad Fellowship Program, 2005; Trooboff et al., 2007–2008; Orahood et al., 2004; Jackson, 2013; Randolph & Nielsen, 2008).

Business students are taught that a global mindset is critical in the global economy (Business Week, 1997; Govindarajan & Gupta, 2001). Managers with a global mindset operate on the assumption of multiple countries, cultures, and contexts (Begley & Boyd, 2003). It is also noted that firms populated by such people have a ‘key source of long-term competitive advantage in the global marketplace’ (Levy et al., 2007). That is why firms give equal weight to cross-cultural adaptability as to technical ability and expertise when selecting expatriates (Dowling & Welch, 2005). In other words, for competitive firms, global mindset is important in employee assessment. One business school’s mission to ‘transform students into leaders in the global market place’ indicates that some schools have picked the cue. So how do business educators cultivate a global mindset among students? Some innovators are experimenting with models such as the World Bachelor in Business (WBB) programme, a product the University of Southern California, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Italy’s Bocconi University launched in 2013. It is aimed at fostering global mindset among undergraduate students who will live and study on three continents while earning degrees from all the three universities (BizEd, 2013). Such momentous programmes may be out of reach of most business schools. However, the experiential learning cycle (ELC) model introduced in chapter 5 of the Experiential Learning Theories and Concepts section of this handbook provides an alternative modest approach to global awareness and mindset enhancement among students.

In the last decades, globalization pressures have pushed business schools to internationalize the body of students and professors. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) has emphasized that graduates should be prepared to pursue a business or management career in a global context. That is, ‘students should be exposed to cultural practices different than their own’ (AACSB, 2014). Besides offering courses in International Business and Cultural Management, business schools have also launched experiential learning courses to better prepare their students to excel in this global business environment. Experiential learning presents the advantage of generating knowledge through a transformation experience (Kolb, 1984).

Business textbooks as ‘highly institutionalized artifact(s)’ (Stambaugh & Quinn Trank, 2010: 673) are alone by their nature as printed objects subject to a certain stasis. Where in the 1990s, students considered up to 55% of their university-based knowledge to come from textbooks (Lichtenberg, 1992: 11), new media and the Web 2.0 are in the process of challenging this paradigm. Online encyclopaedias like Wikipedia have become a reliable source for information, replacing printed works of reference (Ferris & Wilder, 2006) and even a couple of textbooks have been written using online collaboration, or crowd-sourcing, such as ‘Business Model Generation’ by Osterwalder & Pigneur (2010) (Evans, 2006; Walter & Back, 2010). The classic textbook with new, updated editions every few years may therefore soon be a model of the past (Carreiro, 2010).

The project describes a marketing research method course conducted during the Spring II bimester, 2008, at a private university in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The case illustrates the difference between experiential learning (EL) and traditional approaches for teaching international marketing, particularly marketing research methods, and provides suggestions for implementing EL projects in international business curricula.

Our approach to teaching is to have a student centred learning environment where students take primary responsibility for learning and the instructor provides the environment in which such learning can take place (Paris & Combs, 2000). This replaces the traditional concept of education occurring through the transfer of knowledge from the instructor to the student. To this end, we have developed three student assignments that address major topic areas in a typical international management class (environmental analysis, specifically political and economic risk; globalization versus localization strategies; and international human resource management practices, specifically expatriate compensation). These assignments are a sample of the learning activities we use in our undergraduate international management course. There is no one ‘right answer’ to any of the three assignments and typically no two student papers look alike. However, each assignment requires considerable outside research with students developing answers and providing support for their answers.

The main contribution of this chapter is towards introducing a functioning system of learning experiences to foster creativity. In addition, it gives some important practical information for managing a complex course programme for a multicultural mega-class.

Courses in international business focus on abstract concepts and theories on phenomena that normally are very distant to the personal experiences of students. This chapter discusses this problem related to a specific course in international business, a course aiming to develop student learning in areas related to international competitive advantages and strategies, organization and control systems in multinational enterprises (MNEs).

Recognizing the effectiveness and necessity of experiential learning in international business, more and more hands-on projects are being developed and successfully used by our colleagues all around the world. A one-stop source of information on the existing experiential learning projects, such as the present Handbook, would be a tremendously valuable resource — one that would allow the future generations of educators to ‘stand on the shoulders of the giants’, learn from the experiences of educators who tried this approach before and use the knowledge to improve and develop new teaching tools.