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International Summer Institute

ISIB Three-Week Summer Program

The three-week summer program focuses on the key prevailing business trends and issues: emerging global trends for business and society; the increasing role of social networking technologies in transforming the enterprise; the critical role of global marketing activities, and the role of creativity and innovation in personal and business growth and development.

The academic component consists of at least 60 hours of classroom instructions, or eight ECTS credits, including advance preparation, company visits, and classroom instructions in workshop/seminar format in the state-of-the-art technology labs at Bentley, including the Center for Marketing Technology (http://www.bentley.edu/centers/cmt) and the Computer Information Systems Sandbox (http://cis.bentley.edu/sandbox/)

For more details see ISIB Workshop/Seminar Topics.

Workshop/Seminar Topics

Creativity and Innovation

This seminar examines the nature of creativity and the creative process and how theories of creativity can enhance personal and organizational creativity.  It covers several techniques that are known to recognize and remove barriers to creative thinking as well as the application of these techniques to develop creative approaches to business cases.  While the focus of the seminar is on individual creativity, understanding what leads to individual creativity can help managers create an environment in which groupteam and organizational creativity can flourish. 

Global Marketing Simulation

Global marketing’s main job is to create customer value in the global marketplace. This workshop focuses on how managers evaluate global market opportunities and develop market entry and expansion strategies in order to create customer value internationally.  The primary challenge is to decide if the marketing strategies will be strictly local, global, or adapted from other markets. Through a highly challenging computer simulation, students learn how to assess global marketing opportunities and how to develop and manage marketing strategies in a global setting.

Emerging Global Trends for Business and Society  

The seminar will examine three critical global trends: The growth of the emerging market multinationals, the sustainability challenge, and global poverty.

Emerging market economies are countries that have established a moderate degree of market-based commercial infrastructure such as labor markets, legal transparency, capital markets, and external supply chains.   This seminr focuses on how successful multinational corporations (MNCs) from emrging markets adapt the traditional business strategies to the distinct conditions of their home countries in competition with developed countries MNCs in their local market as well as global markets. 

While sustainability can be defined from many perspectives, in this seminar it is approached from a simple principle:  For survival and growth human beings depend on the natural environment.  The seminar addresses the challenge human societies face in sustaining the critical resources needed for a healthy living environment.

Poverty is a major global challenge. We will look at its major causes and attempts by international institutions and businesses to address this global menace.

Transforming the Enterprise through Social Media and Technology Trends

This workshop looks at how technology developments and social media enable new business opportunities.  Using recent white papers, blog posts, and journal articles to provide theoretical background, along with several hands-on exercises to gain practical experience, participants will explore online social networks, cloud computing services, big data techniques, and mobile devices to better evaluate their impact on consumers and the enterprise.

This seminar presents, particularly from the North American perspective, how innovative organizations are using these technologies to transform the way they do business, and how they discover new opportunities enabled by new technologies.  The goal is to empower participants to encourage similar technology-based innovation processes in their own work environments. The seminar emphasizes the importance of understanding both business and technology considerations in making IT-based business innovation a reality.

This seminar is held in Bentley’s state-of-the-art CIS Studio classroom, a social learning space designed to promote collaborative learning.

Cultural Activities

Organized cultural activities and excursions will be an integral part of the ISIB. These activities are designed to enhance participants’ understanding of American culture. Furthermore, students will have ample time to learn about each other’s culture and explore the historic city of Boston. Cultural activities include:

  • A guided sightseeing tour of Boston
  • Day trip to the Atlantic coast in the beautiful state of Massachusetts or Rhode Island, including an opportunity to relax on the beach 
  • A weekend excursions into the New York City, including a guided sightseeing tour of the NYC
  • A Broadway musical in the Times Square in New York City;
  • Opportunity to interact with Bentley students who will accompany participants on all cultural activities and excursions

Institute Faculty

Andy Aylesworth, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Marketing and Chair
Marketing Department
aayleworth@bentley.edu
+1 781.891.3149

Abdolreza Eshghi, Ph.D.
Professor of Marketing and Director
International Summer Institute
aeshghi@bentley.edu 
+1 781.891.2288

Golpira Eshghi, Ph.D.
Professor of Management
geshghi@bentley.edu 
+1 781.891.2181

Mark Frydenberg, MS
Senior Lecturer in Computer Information Systems
mfrydenberg@bentley.edu 
+1 781.891.2689