Accelerating Growth Beyond Borders

Personal Benefits

• Learn how to make informed decisions about growing into new foreign markets
• Develop a familiarity with the frameworks and tools that can be used to start working through the questions that your company needs to answer to grow globally
• Gain an appreciation for how companies that are growing into new foreign markets approach strategic decision-making
• Consider the benefits and risks of embarking upon collaborative corporate relationships in an international context

Organizational Benefits

• Reduce the company’s reliance on conducting business with or within any single market
• Get started charting a path for the firm’s global growth or global expansion
• Broaden the scope of the company’s customer base and supply chain beyond the confines of North America

Program content

This program will introduce participants to the opportunities and challenges associated with building upon their domestic operations to grow and compete in new national markets. It will address the following key questions and include the following discussions: 

• Why go and grow globally?
• What does it mean to be a global company?
• Where to locate (which countries)? 
• When should the company enter a new national market?
• How do you execute after making the decision to grow into new national markets?

Day 1

Participants will learn to:

• Identify opportunities to create and capture value in foreign countries
• Evaluate and execute strategies for global value creation including: adaptation, aggregation and arbitrage
• Assess the differences (cultural, institutional, social, economic, geographic) that contribute to the liability of foreignness that organizations will experience in the countries targeted for foreign growth
• Weigh the various competing factors that impact the optimal time to enter into a foreign country

Day 2

Participants will explore:

• The different strategies for foreign market entry, including exporting, franchising, licensing, foreign investment, and joint ventures
• The implications for the firm’s organizational structure, its processes and the people it needs to manage foreign operations
• The key criteria to use when making decisions between offshoring and outsourcing the firm’s activities

In-Person Learning

Learn alongside fellow participants from across the country, discovering best practices that span industries and sectors.

Our in-person programs include classroom learning sessions led by award-winning Smith School of Business professors and industry experts. Practice new skills in breakout sessions, projects and simulations, and apply your learning toward real-world case studies.

SmithToronto

SmithToronto is located on the 30th floor, 200 Front Street West in the heart of Canada's financial centre and is easily accessible by GO, subway and the PATH system.

Smith School of Business delivers many programs and classes at SmithToronto and it is home to the Master of Finance, Master of Management Analytics, and Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence programs. The site includes classrooms, meeting rooms, staff offices, special events spaces, and a variety of multi-media presentation systems.

As well, it includes three Boardroom Learning Centres with fully interactive videoconference capabilities. These rooms are used to deliver classes for Smith’s Executive and Accelerated MBA programs.

Session Leaders

Session leaders include senior professors from Smith School of Business and knowledgeable experts from industry. These outstanding teachers are constantly in touch with today's business world through real-world business experience, Board memberships and their own consulting practices.

Michael Sartor

Global Strategy
Smith School of Business

Michael is an Associate Professor at Smith School of Business. His research focuses on the strategies and performance of firms that expand into foreign markets, and he teaches courses in Global Business Strategy and Strategic International Entrepreneurship. He has been working in the classroom with business executives for more than a decade in Smith’s dual Executive MBA (EMBA) Programs. Michael has taught executive audiences in diverse overseas markets from Cuba to China. He is a multi-time recipient of the Executive MBA Americas Professor of the Year Award and has been recognized internationally by Poets and Quants for Executives as one of the Favourite Professors of Executive MBAs.

Michael received PhD and MBA degrees from the Ivey Business School in London, Canada, and a JD (Juris Doctor) degree from Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, Canada. He has ten years of experience working variously in executive and corporate legal counsel capacities for publicly-traded and privately-held enterprises in the telecom and consumer packaged goods industries. Having been employed as an executive in the foreign subsidiary operations of a NASDAQ-listed company, he is intimately familiar with the opportunities and challenges that firms encounter in foreign markets. Michael consults and advises owners, executives and managers in firms that range in scale from new ventures to multinational corporations.