Strategic Market Entry Project

ABSTRACT Successful risk management is critical to top level decision makers in any organization, involving fundamental strategic policy and planning to identify and allocate scarce resources to projects or activities that generate sustainable competitive advantage and maximize available long-term growth opportunities, or even survival. This article describes a flexible group project wherein students of risk management and insurance (RMI) may gain additional exposure and experience with applications of fundamental strategic management theory in the context of their particular RMI major coursework. The Project may be a useful tool in helping RMI students further develop their research and presentation skills, as well as enhance critical strategic decision making; exposure to cultural, regional or globalization issues; application of fundamental strategic management concepts; and knowledge of current events. While this Project was developed primarily for RMI students, students across business disciplines also may benefit from participation. INTRODUCTION The Strategic Market Entry Project applies fundamental business policy, strategic management (BPS), and globalization concepts to risk management and insurance (RMI) markets. This can help students majoring in RMI develop or reinforce key theoretical and pedagogical concepts with potentially greater and more practical expositional value to those students by inherently allowing them to focus effort on their implicit primary academic area of interest (i.e., seeing how strategic management concepts are applied within the framework of their own major coursework as opposed to just in a traditional business strategy/policy or international type of course that tends to offer few, if any, RMI applications). RMI students have opportunities to learn to make better business decisions by factoring in real world examples, issues, and current events in risk management, insurance, and reinsurance (as such factors are easily incorporated into the Project), thereby helping to make the learning experience of individual students more relevant. Differences in cultural, social, moral, and ethical perspectives regarding risk and insurance are easily explored, especially where the Project is conducted in its original multinational setting. The (entirely optional) "class activity" requirement offers students further opportunities for creativity, fun, and shared experiences to enhance examples of cultural /regional diversity. PROJECT HISTORY The Project was originally developed during the spring of 2003 for use by the first author while serving in Austria as a visiting Fulbright lecturer at the Institut fur Versicherungswirtschaft, Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien (Institute for Risk Management and Insurance, Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, hereinafter the "WU").1 The Project was employed at the WU as the primary pedagogical tool in two separate seminar (semester-equivalent) courses, consisting of 24 students each per university-imposed maximum class seating. Participants were in their first-year graduate/senior undergraduate (U.S.-equivalent) level coursework in international risk management and insurance, and all participants had taken at least one other risk/insurance course (i.e., a pro-seminar) at the WU prior to their enrollment in these seminars. Though a portion of the seminar participants were "local" Austrian students, the majority were themselves study-abroad students at the WU hailing from various countries around the world, including: Russia, France, Germany, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Italy, China, Vietnam - even two from the United States. While the original seminar courses were conducted in English at the request of the WU, and other courses students took were offered only in German, it is noteworthy that there is no direct foreign language requirement necessary in the Project - although one could be exploited where student and instructor skills were appropriate. …