Students address business issues on a global scale through X-Culture
Logan Butts |
Many students come to college to study international business. Lipscomb students come to the College of Business to do international business.
In the 2020-21 school year, 52 students in Associate Professor of Management Jeff Cohu’s fall international business course, found themselves working with teams of students from countries around the globe, all working to help real-world companies with real-world problems such as a potential expansion into another country or supply-chain management issues.
The students formed their online, global teams through X-Culture, an online crowd platform designed to match international business students with their counterparts in other nations to collaborate on a business project proposed by a real-world company.
X-Culture allows students to gain the sort of practical knowledge of global business matters that is essential to anyone hoping to enter the field, said Cohu.
“It was the unique opportunity to work with individuals from four different countries that really put the idea of international business into perspective for me,” said Madison Staed, a junior dual major in marketing and management. “I was able to learn about things in the classroom and then further learn about them firsthand, which implanted the knowledge about these subjects in my mind.”
X-Culture is an association of business professors across the globe whose main goal is to set up experiential educational programs for international business students around the world.
“Ultimately, the goal is to teach international business concepts, but probably even more importantly, to develop global collaboration skills,” said Cohu. “And when companies are dramatically emphasizing the need to work in virtual teams that are cross-cultural, our students that go through this program will be able to say ‘I did that while I was in college.’”
Jeff Cohu
Each semester, a set of companies are selected to present to thousands of students from a number of countries their various problems related to expanding an international business. In their final recommendations, students must address the cultural, economic, legal, and political implications of their plans, as well as functional business questions of marketing, human resources, and supply chain, Cohu said.
The students are then split up into small groups of 4 to 6 people, given access to resources and coaching and assigned to produce a set of deliverables, such as an industry and new market analysis, an entry strategy, a promotional strategy, product design, and sample advertisements as well as their final recommendation.
With so many students involved, each participating student can be placed in a 4- to 6-person group with no more than two U.S. and no students from the same school in each group, Cohu said.
“That's a little scary for them,” he said. “Their whole team is going to be made up of foreign students, or maybe somebody from another university in the States. And that brings some challenges.”
Time differences, for example, can stack up to be a major logistical issue when students from drastically different time zones must gather together in the same group.
“You may have to coordinate with somebody from China and somebody from Estonia and somebody from Honduras,” Cohu said. “Pulling your team together, when they're all over the globe, can be kind of tricky. So they learn what I call cultural intelligence skills that we try to teach in the class, but you can teach it a lot better when you have to work with somebody from another culture on producing actual deliverables that are going to be externally analyzed.”
Staed echoed Cohu’s sentiments on the time zone struggles.
“Each team member was in a different time zone, which put us in five varying points in the day,” Staed said. “Oftentimes it was difficult to schedule a meeting, but this is the reality of working internationally when parts of a team are displaced throughout the world. This showed the difficulty of working for an international company, but also the fact that it is indeed possible.”
In non-pandemic years, the best team reports are presented in person at an international symposium and many students get the chance to interact with the leaders of the companies who presented their specific problem.
Cohu, who himself has been an X-Culture judge at the symposium, believes that the practical, real-world experience of the X-Culture Project, combined with its summary of many international business concepts, is a perfect fit for students and professors alike.
“We're trying to teach students so that they can now experience making real judgments,” Cohu said. “It's a good cultural, immersive experience that shows the value of experiential work beyond the classroom to strengthen Lipscomb graduates’ skill sets.”