• Critically appraise the opportunities and barriers to entrepreneurs’ global expansion path, profitability and sustainability.
• Demonstrate a critical understanding of the key concepts, theories and issues in international entrepreneurship and apply them to real-world cases.
• Discuss core concepts of competitive strategy and apply them to global entrepreneurial ventures.
• Present recent scholarly debates, including competing arguments, identify emerging research fields and formulate research questions in those fields.

The course is part of the series Advanced StudiesOnline Electives. It addresses advanced students who are looking for inspiration for their master theses. The course will be taught entirely online; presence in Copenhagen is not required and students study the material at their own schedule. The course will introduce the newest research in the field of international entrepreneurship, including state-of-the-art research debates and questions for potential master theses.

“[T]he world is flat, and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray,” declared Thomas Friedman in 2005. Undoubtedly, entrepreneurs confront an increasing array of choices regarding global markets. They select locations for their activities across the globe, make choices on outsourcing and ownership modes and manage organizations and processes across borders.

At the same time, a completely borderless world remains an illusion. Entrepreneurs, who want to internationalize successfully, need to pay serious attention to the sustained differences between countries when developing and evaluating strategies. Realistic global strategies will have to deal with the reality of semiglobalization, understanding both global integration and local adaptations, and adjust strategy and leadership accordingly.

The course provides frameworks for identifying and taking advantage of the opportunities presented in a dynamic global environment. It defines international entrepreneurship as “the discovery, enactment, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities – across national borders – to create future goods and services" (Oviatt and McDougall 2005: 540). The course targets students who plan to become involved with entrepreneurial ventures across the world in the role of

• Founders of international ventures;
• Partners of international ventures, e.g. managers in large established companies seeking to expand;
• Investors in cross-border entrepreneurial activities;
• Consultants analyzing the differences among national contexts and understanding the entrepreneurial opportunities that result from them.

The course highlights that differences among national contexts create specific types of entrepreneurial opportunities and introduces concepts to help identify, evaluate and analyze these opportunities. It equips students with tools and frameworks to assess these opportunities, avoid common mistakes and execute an international strategy successfully. Based on real-world business cases the course discusses entrepreneurial choices and processes for the state of semiglobalization.

Throughout the course, open research debates in this fairly young and still emerging research field will be highlighted to show opportunities for master thesis research.

• Drori, Israel, Benson Honig, and Mike Wright. "Transnational Entrepreneurship: An Emergent Field of Study."  Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice  33, no. 5 (2009): 1001-22.
• Fernhaber, Stephanie A., and Shameen Prashantham.  The Routledge Companion to International Entrepreneurship . Routledge Companions in Business, Management and Accounting. New York: Routledge, 2015.
• Ghemawat, Pankaj.  Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter . Boston, Mass .: Harvard Business School Press, 2007.
• Hisrich, Robert D.  International Entrepreneurship: Starting, Developing, and Managing a Global Venture . Los Angeles: SAGE, 2010.
• Oviatt, Benjamin M. and Patricia P. McDougall. "Defining International Entrepreneurship and Modeling the Speed ​​of Internationalization."  Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice  29, no. 5 (2005): 537-54.