Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62913
offering an executive MBA pro- gram together since 2002. USC Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles and Shanghai Jiao Tong University offer an EMBA degree. When we restart our program in 2012, we will again employ the partnership model. PROS: There are many poten- tial advantages to this model at both the pedagogical and financial level. No matter how well you think you know a market—and how much global knowledge your institution possesses—your chances of running a success- ful program in another country will be markedly improved if you join forces with a local university entrenched in business education. Furthermore, your students will gain greater knowledge about the region and the country if you employ some faculty from the partner insti- tution to teach in your program. During Smith's first EMBA program in China, one of the criticisms we heard was that very little of our content and case analysis focused on China and Asia. Our faculty could not deliver this, and we should have gotten the professors from our part- ners more involved. There are other benefits to incor- porating faculty from the partner school. Those professors will be more accessible to local students than teachers who reside in another country and only visit the school periodically. In fact, local faculty make a global program more cost- effective precisely because your school will not need to pay for their travel and accommodations. CONS: True partnerships are always challenging because every decision has to be made jointly and everything needs to go through partner institution, where the pay often is comparatively low. The partner school might object to the salaries you pay your professors, or might insist on raising the pay for its own instructors just to be equi- table, and this can increase the cost of the entire program. Strategy 2: The Colony Model shared governance. Decision mak- ing is slow in most educational institutions, even in the United States, and if you factor in the pace of decision making in most emerging-market universities today, things can move at a snail's pace. It also can be difficult to ensure that the quality of the program is always up to your standards when a partner institution is involved with admissions and instruction. It's your brand at stake, and stu- dents will expect the level of teach- ing you promise. It is always challenging to have a dialogue with a partner on "qual- ity" without getting into conflict or appearing to be condescend- ing. One way to avoid conflict at the outset is to jointly benchmark programs at top-tier universities. The benchmarking, which should consider key course content as well as the structure of the overall cur- riculum, ensures that both partners are equally committed to quality from the get-go. Even if partner schools agree on quality, they might have different approaches to finances and finan- cial decision making. Most Western universities have to pay their fac- ulty a premium to encourage them to teach in global locations, espe- cially emerging markets. This could cause a lot of heartburn for the A university also can choose to operate its own program and facili- ties in a new market, a model that requires significant investment on the part of the school. France's INSEAD has used this strategy to create a thriving operation in Singapore. Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, based in Durham, North Carolina, has expanded to outposts in China and Russia; it also has aggressive plans to replicate these programs in places like India, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. PROS: The biggest advantage of this model is full control over all dimensions of the program: admis- sions, quality of instruction, metrics for student performance, gover- nance, and finances. When you have full control, you can more easily decide whether to enter or leave a market, and your decisions won't be affected by the political and institu- tional realities of another party. In addition, you will be better able to safeguard your school's brand by ensuring quality programming. In this model, you can certainly take advantage of local resources and engage regional experts to improve your understanding of the market. You also can hire faculty from domestic universities to teach some of your classes and impart their local and regional knowledge. BizEd May/June 2012 25 CORBIS/GLOW IMAGES