Porter Course Goes Abroad

Professor Porter leads an interactive session on the HBS campus with students in McCollum Hall and at INCAE in Costa Rica. Photo Courtesy HBS Multimedia

When it was first taught in early 2002, the classroom for the course led by University Professor Michael E. Porter reached thousands of miles beyond Boston. The Microeconomics of Competitiveness: Firms, Clusters, and Economic Development used Internet technology and digitalized video to make teaching materials, guest speakers, and class lectures available via the Web to faculty and students at Costa Rica's INCAE and a satellite campus of the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) located in Riga, Latvia. For 2003, the list of potential partner universities has expanded to include more than fifteen schools in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. “There is a tremendous need around the world to understand the latest thinking on competitiveness and economic development,” states Porter, “yet many universities lack the size and resources to develop teaching materials and mount courses in this area.”

While participants concur that this hightech, long-distance collaboration among universities and faculty is still in its early stages, reviews at INCAE and SSE-Riga have been overwhelmingly favorable. “There is intense student interest in taking a course that covers the fundamentals of competitiveness,” says Arturo Condo (DBA '00), a professor and associate dean at INCAE. Condo reports that teaching the course in Costa Rica was stimulating for him personally as well. “We're a relatively small school and tend to teach courses individually,” he notes. “The supporting material available for faculty and the interaction with the Harvard team was extremely rich and useful.”

Örjan Sölvell (VIS '82), an SSE professor, cotaught with Porter at HBS while his colleague, Marina Pavlova, led the class in Riga. The course, Sölvell explains, addresses the competitiveness of firms, clusters, regions, nations, and groups of neighboring countries such as Central America. Most materials originate at HBS, but partner universities are encouraged to add local sessions, and the course also involves locally focused student group projects. Teaching the course was different, says Sölvell, because all pre-class faculty meetings, classroom case discussions, lectures, and guests were videotaped to provide preparatory teaching materials for faculty at partner universities. (Partner universities typically followed a schedule that ran several days after Boston's to allow time for the digitized material to be posted on the Web.) In-class guests included Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolaños, Connecticut Governor John G. Rowland, and Singapore Trade and Industry Minister George Yeo (MBA '85), among others.

A two-day workshop to provide training for faculty at partner universities in teaching the course will be held at Porter's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness on the HBS campus in December. “This course is highly scalable,” Sölvell remarks. “It is a powerful tool to catalyze a global shift in how societies view the concept of competitiveness.”

Porter says that he's encouraged by the strong interest in the course and agrees that it could be spread to dozens, if not hundreds, of universities over the next several years. “Our hope is to stimulate professors and students from around the world to become positive forces for change,” he says. “This venture is central to the Institute's strategy of redefining the way countries think about and practice economic development. It's an experiment in multiplying the impact of HBS and Harvard well beyond our own campus.”