International Business Fundamentals

Explore how international business moves goods, services, knowledge, capital and technology across borders, and why firms benefit from exports, licensing, and global markets.

Identify political, foreign exchange, cross-cultural, and commercial risks in international business. Explore how currency fluctuations, trade barriers, and cultural differences impact strategy and risk management.

Explore how international business enables cross-border trade and investment, distinguish globalization from internationalization, and explain localization and market entry strategies using IKEA and McDonald's as examples.

Explore globalization and its impact on cross-border trade, technology, and culture, highlighting financial, economic, cultural, political, and ecological dimensions, plus global markets and production.

Explore globalization of markets and production, where trade barriers shrink and tastes align, driving global brands like Coca-Cola and Apple via dispersed, cost-saving production networks.

Global organizations reduce trade barriers and support international business, from GATT and WTO to the World Bank, IMF, and UN, promoting development, cooperation, and sustainable economic growth.

Discover how culture shapes international business through six determinants—language, religion, education, social structure, economic and political philosophy—plus home and host country dynamics and cross-cultural literacy.

Explore the EPRG framework for international business decisions, detailing ethnocentric, polycentric, regiocentric, and geocentric orientations for headquarters and host country operations.

Understand culture in international business through research, observation, and diplomacy, applying Hofstede’s dimensions to tailor products, build rapport, and nurture lasting cross-border customer relationships.

Explore market, mixed, and planned economic systems, and how government roles, private ownership, and supply-demand dynamics shape international business, entrepreneurship, and profitability.

Explore how governments use tariffs, subsidies, quotas, voluntary export restraints, local content requirements, administrative policies, and anti-dumping measures to intervene in markets and protect local producers.

Discover how regional economic integration reduces tariff and non-tariff barriers to boost intra-regional trade. Learn the five levels—from free trade area to political union—and their impact on opportunities and competition.

Explore six international entry modes—exporting, turnkey projects, licensing, franchising, joint ventures, and wholly owned subsidiaries—and learn how political and economic stability, costs, timing, and strategy shape expansion decisions.

Balance cost reduction and local responsiveness by exploring four international strategies: global standardization, localization, international, and transnational, with examples like Pfizer, Nestlé, Unilever, and Starbucks.

Assess expansion readiness, shortlist target countries with potential customers and stability, and apply a four-factor matrix—socio-cultural, economic, political-legal, technological—to evaluate market attractiveness.

Compare liberal and coordinated market economies, and see how government, governance, and labor relations shape national business systems, as shown by USA and Germany in funding, unions, M&A, and innovations.

Learn how international business negotiation, driven by globalization and cross-cultural communication, resolves scarce resources and interdependent goals, contrasting bargaining with negotiation and applying BATNA, distributive and integrative outcomes.

Understand emotional and substantive conflict across intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup levels, and assess constructive versus destructive effects on organizational dynamics.

Explore distributive negotiation as a zero-sum, win-lose approach, contrast it with integrative gains, and learn initial offer, target price, resistance point, BATNA, and bargaining mix.

Engage in integrative negotiation to achieve win-win outcomes by open information exchange, understanding each party’s needs, and generating mutually beneficial solutions.