Day 1

Assessing Country Business Environments

As your organization looks to do business with other countries, what are alternative frameworks for assessing the opportunities and risks in those business environments? How do you assess the competitive advantages of each nation and the major corporations and entities operating in those nations?

The Promise and Perils of Globalization

What are the roles and responsibilities of a corporation in today’s global business world? With each country having its own institutions, customs, laws, regulations, and standards, what should you consider before you engage in new markets?

Leveraging Your Technology and Market Position to Develop New Products and New Business Lines

How can you take advantage of your existing technology and current market position to move your organization into new, expanded, and more profitable markets We describe overall corporate venturing frameworks and strategies to help achieve these growth and diversification objectives. Specifically, we consider internal venturing, strategic alliances, and corporate venture capital as tools for moving forward.

Reception & Dinner

Day 2

Strategic Financial Issues Affecting Organizational Performance

How do you control internal financial management to ensure effective organizational performance and to manage rapid growth?

The Role of Financial Markets in Facilitating Innovation and Global Competitiveness

How can governments, corporations, and alternative funding sources enhance innovation and increase the global competitiveness of local firms?

Marketing Strategy: Deciding Which Markets to Target

How do you evaluate the attractiveness of different markets and select which markets to target? What are the trade-offs between market size and competition? How will lack of competition amongst suppliers and distributors affect your profits?

Product Development: Managing the Trade-Off Between Risk and Reward

Around 5% of new product development projects are successful. Why engage in product development? The answers are different for small firms and large firms. In either case you must learn how to manage your risk. In this session we will describe how to design your product development process so that you learn whether you will succeed before you risk too much capital. The focus will be on practical insights.

Day 3

Optimal Product Line Design: The Role of Measurement and
Optimization

We present a realistic product development problem: what products to offer in a new product line? There are two parts to the problem: measurement of customer preferences and optimization of product design. You will work in small teams using actual data collected from product users. The session highlights what is possible when firms use a rigorous approach to solve marketing problems. The optimization and measurement methods that we illustrate represent leading edge research developed at MIT. The potential profit improvement illustrates why marketing is a science rather than simply a set of loose principles.

Leading the Organization for Rapid Change and Profitable Growth

As three simultaneous revolutions are radically changing many of the existing traditional business models, what are the new business models that work? How can corporations extract wealth from knowledge in order to succeed in this rapidly changing global economy?