The course is designed for those who are interested in working in frontier and emerging market nations for either 1) market opportunity analysis, creating and starting small, emerging social impact or business venture enterprises and NGOs (social impact marketing), or 2) in scaling them up for growth, regional expansion and internationalization.

The course is essentially a marketing course, and specific functional areas of analysis as they apply to frontier and emerging market nations are:

(1) Appraising institutional voids and opportunities for creating and developing social impact and business development enterprises in frontier and emerging international markets

(2) Creating frameworks and enterprise models for frontier market opportunities and defining enterprise potential,

(3) Decisions and plans to move ahead with the enterprise creation; planning and creating social impact or business enterprises involved at the micro-enterprise/ start-up level in emerging/frontier markets,

(4) Managing the scale-up of enterprises for domestic frontier market and international market expansion and franchising

(5) Managing competition domestically, regionally and internationally

(6) Developing and writing enterprise international development plans for creating, scaling/expanding and internationalization of frontier and emerging market enterprises

It is a practical, discussion-driven, case-studies-based, hands-on, class focusing on managerial decisions for enterprise plans and programs in a variety of types of enterprises, products, services, and social/environmental causes in frontier and emerging nations and regions. The course is relevant to a variety of management or international development specializations (such as marketing or entrepreneurship) and business certificates or international business plans, and is suitable for those desiring to work in international development, corporate social responsibility, to be frontier market scouts or entrepreneurs as well as those planning to work for international business, NGO or social enterprises that are operating in frontier or emerging nations.

This is a course that operates at the crossroads of six concurrent issues of opportunity:

(A) the trends of growth and development of frontier and emerging market nations,

(B) outreach of philanthropic, corporate and national agency initiatives for international development within frontier markets

(C) the past two-plus decades of increasing concern and action for specific achievements in international social impact and economic initiatives, projects and programs aimed at alleviating poverty,

(D) effective international entrepreneurship in enterprise creation, scale-up and regional expansion,

(E) international applications of technologies

(F) academic study and knowledge creation and distribution pertaining to “bottom of the pyramid” enterprise creation and development, and international

entrepreneurship curriculum

(G) specifically, the development of social impact marketing theory and cases

Topics include several areas managerial skill-building characteristic of management education, as well as functional content in enterprise creation and development. Specific managerial areas of skill development include:

1) Problem definition and clear focus of analysis

2) Determining the key decisions to be made and questions to be asked

3) Persuasive and insightful advocacy, debate and argumentation of the pros and cons of decision options

4) Gaining a sense of priority, risk and criteria to be used

5) Working in cross-cultural teams and challenging one’s cultural comfort zone for the processes of team decision-making

6) Extensive oral debate and written presentation of managerial analysis

7) Requirement to focus on specific recommendations and their implementation

Prerequisites: Enrollment in a GSIPM program or business certificate program