UNC Kenan-Flagler undergraduate students have been working on global projects for nine North Carolina-based businesses this semester through the course, “Business Between the Americas and the Pacific Rim.”

The course is required for undergraduate students enrolled in the Global Scholars Program, and additional undergraduate business students also take the course.

The course:

• Creates awareness of commerce and policy interactions among nations
• Enhances understanding of the commercial challenges of working across cultures
• Helps students learn to develop strategies for overcoming such challenges.

Clay Whybark, professor of operations, technology and innovation management, is teaching the course, what he likes to call the “Global Scholars seminar,” this semester. As a new feature of the course, he wanted students to gain insights from practicing managers and to conduct meaningful research on projects for firms doing or supporting business in the Pacific Rim.

Whybark intentionally structured the teams to be diverse in both gender and international perspectives.

“I’m really proud of the teams. They’ve risen to the challenge incredibly well,” he says. “We also brought in representatives from the N.C. Department of Commerce to share their resources with students. A representative from IBM talked about supply-chain issues post-Sept. 11. We took a class trip to a Korean lawn tractor company based in Wendell and a spring break trip to Atlanta-based businesses.”

“Our group is like a real multinational team, which is fascinating,” confirms Ukrit Archapairoj, a Global Scholars student from Thailand who worked on a project for International IT Services. “We have had to integrate our individual ideas and develop them to be better group ideas. Group meeting and brainstorming are two essential things that our group has never ignored. Working with a multinational group has been an invaluable experience for us to remember as it makes us think outside the box. Sometimes, it has not been easy, but we have become really close friends.”

Peter Dolina (MBA ’03), vice president of business development for IIT Services, says the students are very creative. He says he hopes this gives students an opportunity to see that their creativity has a real impact.

“The students gave me ideas of applications that would be popular among college students in the U.S., Thailand, Korea and Japan,” he says. “We eliminated many ideas because of technology issues, channel distribution problems, branding costs. However, we did come up with a few products that looked very appealing. As a result of this class, I have drawn up a preliminary product pipeline, organized a product development team and we have started on the first product that will leverage our expertise in Web services and a global brand.”

Richard Chen, an undergraduate student, is also on the IITS team. He says the experience was “very dynamic,” unlike anything he has ever done before.

“I felt like our contributions really made a difference in the company. In wireless technology, everything is so fast-paced. We were able to generate a lot of ideas for the company. This will give me a fundamental idea from a small business perspective of international business.”

Susan Acker-Walsh (EMBA ’97), chief executive for corporate development at Constella Group, decided to become involved with the project partly because of the opportunity to work with students who could bring a global perspective to the company.

“I asked them to look at one of our business units that is involved in biopharmaceutical-related services and to look at a market expansion strategy,” she says. “They really started from zero, in terms of their knowledge of the industry and the company. But in an interim update, I was really blown away by the amount of information they had gathered on the industry and the creative way they went about doing that.”

Lindsey Keiter, an undergraduate student on the Constella Group team, says she’s been involved with group projects before, but this project was more of “working project,” because of its evolving and changing nature.

“It’s been very enriching,” she says. “It’s been enlightening to research the medical field. I knew nothing about clinical trials, for instance. … I’m going into consulting with Deloitte & Touche after graduation, and I think this experience will help me a lot.”