No prior experience required.
Global Challenges in Business Specialization
Business Challenges of the 21st Century. Equip yourself with frameworks to pursue business opportunities in the current global environment.
Offered By
About this Specialization
Applied Learning Project
This specialization prepares students for the global challenges that businesses face in the 21st century. The global marketplace now and in the future spans emerging markets, a world connected by social media, and rapid technological advancements, hand in hand with huge challenges relating to environment and poverty. This specialization covers how business strategy is formulated and implemented in the global arena in all its complexities. It also covers the role of ethics and corporate responsibility in a connected world as well as the role of business in addressing global challenges such as poverty and the environment. The specialization enables understanding of global business and how to pursue opportunities and confront challenges in this arena responsibly. This Specialization is part of the University of Illinois iMBA Program.
Each course in the Specialization also fulfills a portion of the requirements for a University of Illinois course that can earn you college credit!
No prior experience required.
How the Specialization Works
Take Courses
A Coursera Specialization is a series of courses that helps you master a skill. To begin, enroll in the Specialization directly, or review its courses and choose the one you'd like to start with. When you subscribe to a course that is part of a Specialization, you’re automatically subscribed to the full Specialization. It’s okay to complete just one course — you can pause your learning or end your subscription at any time. Visit your learner dashboard to track your course enrollments and your progress.
Hands-on Project
Every Specialization includes a hands-on project. You'll need to successfully finish the project(s) to complete the Specialization and earn your certificate. If the Specialization includes a separate course for the hands-on project, you'll need to finish each of the other courses before you can start it.
Earn a Certificate
When you finish every course and complete the hands-on project, you'll earn a Certificate that you can share with prospective employers and your professional network.
There are 7 Courses in this Specialization
Sustainable Innovation for Subsistence Marketplaces
This course focuses on understanding subsistence marketplaces and designing business solutions for the billions of people living in poverty in the global marketplace. To develop understanding of these markets, we use exercises to that enable learners to view the world from the eyes of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs, facilitate bottom‐up understanding generated by participants, and provide insights from extensive research. More broadly, the course uses the context of extreme resource constraints to learn about the bottom-up approach pioneered through the Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative and apply it in broadly. A parallel project will focus on understanding a specific need in a subsistence marketplace, and designing a solution and an enterprise plan for implementation.
Sustainable Business Enterprises
This course will explore current challenges and opportunities facing firms in the area of environmental sustainability. It will begin with an introduction to sustainability, with a particular focus on how environmental sustainability is relevant to business. Topics such as unsustainable consumption/consumer behavior, market research on sustainable product design , and sustainable value chains and communications will be covered. We will also cover the bottom-up approach in terms of immersion, emersion, and design as applied to sustainable business enterprise. The course concludes with a summary of insights on global challenges in business, with particular focus on poverty and the environment.
Global Strategy I: How The Global Economy Works
Starting in the late 1990s, “globalization” became a buzzword to describe the apparent integration of markets in the world economy. Many authors and pundits claimed that the world was converging towards a market-friendly democratic place, while gurus and consulting firms were rapidly producing formulae and advice on how to make profits out of the global economy. Decades later, new realities show that globalization does not necessarily mean political, cultural, and economic convergence and that, in fact, forces against it are strong.
Global Strategy II: Doing Business in The Global Economy
This course explores the ways firms overcome challenges when operating globally – a process characterized for its complexity and uncertainty. Corporations trying to succeed in the global economy need to develop different types of strategies depending on where they are conducting business or industry they are in.
Offered by
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a world leader in research, teaching and public engagement, distinguished by the breadth of its programs, broad academic excellence, and internationally renowned faculty and alumni. Illinois serves the world by creating knowledge, preparing students for lives of impact, and finding solutions to critical societal needs.
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