Global Business Horizons

Global Business Horizons

This course is part of the Global Challenges in Business Specialization.

Course Description

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 subsistence marketplaces, we use exercises to enable participants 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.

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 sustainable product design, sustainable value chains and communications will be covered.

InstructorProf Viswanathan

Professor Madhu Viswanathan
Department of Business Administration
College of Business
Instructor’s Profile

Course Goals and Objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:
  • Understand the global challenges of poverty and the environment and their implications for business.
  • Use a bottom-up approach to understanding and designing solutions for these challenges.

Topics of this course

  • Module 1: Introduction to Subsistence Marketplaces and Bottom-Up Immersion
  • Module 2: Bottom-Up Immersion and Emersion
  • Module 3: Bottom-Up Design
  • Module 4: Bottom-Up Enterprise
  • Module 5: Sustainability and Consumption
  • Module 6: Sustainable product development
  • Module 7: Sustainable Enterprise
  • Module 8: Bottom-Up Enterprise

Course Materials
Links to reading materials and videos are provided in every module. As an option, participants may want to acquire the Subsistence Marketplaces book and the Bottom-Up Enterprise: Insights from Subsistence Marketplaces book.
Purchase information at:

Live Session Schedule (Tentative)

March 29th, 2017 – May 22nd, 2017

Saturdays 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM US Central Time


Course Elements

IN COURSERA

  • Lecture Videos.
  • Readings.
  • Practice Quizzes.
  • Module Quizzes
  • Forum Assignments.
  • Peer-graded Assignment.
  • Project Milestones (Optional). Your project will focus on designing a solution for a (local) subsistencemarketplace that you will research when completing the project assignments every week.The proposal will involve presenting in a visual display (i.e., as a poster) your proposedsolution, and this proposal will be developed incrementally as the course progresses.

IN COMPASS 2G

  • Individual Assignments.
  • Group Assignments.
  • Live Interviews
  • Peer Evaluation.
  • Live Sessions. with the instructors occur every week, on Thur 7PM or Fri 9AM.