Global business

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Project #1: Locational Decision Making

Assume that you are a general manager of a U.S. global company in a particular industry. You

are going to expand your business in a foreign country. This is a fictitious business, but can be

modeled after/based on an existing business.

Choose two countries from List A and an industry from List B (see the attachment). From the

perspective of the general manager, identify and analyze the similarities and differences in the

cultural (40 points), political and legal (30 points), and economic (30 points) environments

between two countries, which may have an impact upon your future business activities/practices

(e.g., marketing, accounting, finance, operations management, human resource management).

Based on your analysis, choose the country in which you would expand your business. Make

sure that your locational decision must be supported by sound reasoning. The deadline for

submitting your report is October 14. Each group should submit only one form of performance evaluation signed by all the members in the group.

Your research questions should be briefly stated in the section of “Introduction.” Discussions

should be presented in the sections following “Introduction” and corroborated by relevant facts and

reasoning. The results of your study must be highlighted in the section of “Summary and

Conclusions” at the end of the manuscript (see Zhang and Rauch, 2010).

Format Instructions

(i) The length of your report should be limited between 10 and 12 double-spaced pages.

(ii) Each page of your report should be numbered in the bottom center as: "- # -".

(iii) Use parenthesis around the last names of the referenced author along with the published year of the referred publication separated by commas, e.g. (Davenport & Harris, 2007;

Hopkins et al, 2010).

(iv) Since the bibliography should include only those references cited in the text of the paper, it should be referred to as "references." References should be listed at the end of

the paper. Entries should appear in alphabetical order. Here are the examples:

Davenport, T. H., & Harris, J. G. (2007). Competing on analytics. Boston: Harvard

Business School Press, 46.

Elliott, T. (2012). 2012: The year analytics means business. Retrieved from

smartdatacollective.com, February 10.

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Liberatore, M. J., & Luo, W. (2010). The analytics movement: Implications for

operations research. Interfaces, 40(4), July-August, 313-324.

Hopkins, M. S., LaValle, S., Balboni, F., Kruschwitz, N., & Shockley, R. (2010). 10

data points: Information and analytics at work. MIT Sloan Management Review, 52(1),

Fall, 27-31.

Attachment

List A List B

Brazil Agriculture

China Automobiles

Greece Clothing

India Music

Kyrgyzstan Technology

Malaysia

Nigeria

Ukraine

Venezuela

Australia

Canada

France

Germany

Japan

Singapore