Overview

Launching Global Ventures explores how founders and leaders turn global complexity into strategic advantage. The present era of heightened geopolitical tensions, breakthrough technological innovations, and significant demographic change presents not just complexity but immense opportunity. This course provides frameworks for recognizing patterns across markets to design ventures that thrive on, not just survive, global uncertainty.

Global ventures, or “born globals”, are enterprises that become distributed across multiple countries very early in their life cycle. For these businesses, globalization is a core component of their business model rather than a by-product of growth. While early internationalization may offer advantages, it also exposes the venture to substantial risk. How do founders and managers overcome the “difficult middle zone of globalization” to fully realize the advantages of an international-first business model?

Through cases on ventures whose operations span multiple continents, we will examine ventures that are leveraging Africa's growing workforce, responding to the demand for automation in East Asia’s aging economies, and coordinating global climate action in South America, all while balancing scale with local adaptation.

Career Focus

Launching Global Ventures is for students who aim to be unconstrained by geographic boundaries in their pursuit of opportunity. It is designed for those who aim to:

• Build globally minded ventures from day one
• Lead innovation within multinational organizations
• Identify cross-border investment opportunities
• Design policies to foster entrepreneurial resilience in countries with limited domestic markets

Educational Objectives

The course equips students to adopt a global-first perspective when analyzing entrepreneurial opportunities, harnessing globalization across four dimensions: products/services, talent, technologies, and capital.

Students will acquire frameworks to enable them:

• Analyze strategic gains and tradeoffs from globalization
• Balance scale and location-specificity
• Evaluate and maximize the value of strategic international partnerships
• Cultivate powerful cross-border networks.

Course Content

The course has two modules:

• Designing the Right Global Business Model: Analyze how entrepreneurs design and refine models for cross-border viability, to understand what makes business models thrive where others struggle. Examine how macroeconomic forces, government policies, cultural norms, and digital infrastructure shape entrepreneurial success.
• Funding, Growth and Exits: Investigate how global ventures attract capital, manage investor relationships across cultural divides, and execute successful exit strategies. Topics include accelerator models for international startups, expansion dilemmas, valuation frameworks for emerging markets, and exit timing. Students will explore cross-border negotiations, investor alignment strategies, and decision-making amid competing incentives.

Each module combines written and live cases, practical exercises and conversations with founders and investors.

Students will leave the course with a sharper intuition for assessing international opportunities, able to draw parallels between different countries, industries, and funding environments and develop a toolkit for navigating entrepreneurial uncertainty across borders.

Grading / Course Administration:

The grading for the course will be based on class participation (50%) and a final paper or project (50%).

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