Special Report

Special Report for the Board of Directors- International Business Opportunities: As Vice President of an electric vehicle company, one of your jobs is to make presentations to the company’s Board of Directors. You have a meeting coming up in several weeks wherein you are going to have to update the Board regarding the company’s plan to begin to do business internationally. While your business currently does some work with vendors overseas, this new initiative is designed to be much more robust and will represent an innovation which indeed is representative of the type of entrepreneurship the CEO had hoped you would bring to the company when you were hired as Vice President. You are indeed excited about this opportunity.

For the purpose of this essay, identify a potential international business opportunity pursuant to the VP role you have been playing all along. At the beginning of this course, I recommended that you choose a business for these exercises that you know something about. To that end, try to imagine an innovation in this fictitious company wherein you can begin to grow the business by engaging with international partners. You will not be graded necessarily on the quality of the innovation since you don’t have the advantage of market analysis, etc. I will ask, however, in this section to identify an innovation which would be important to the business in which you are working.

Component 1: Opportunity Analysis: For this first evaluated component of the assignment, you are asked to describe specifically the steps you and the team would take to evaluate the potential international business opportunity. Describe specifically what you would tell the board about the steps you are taking to evaluate the opportunity and how that analysis is likely to produce valid and reliable data points which will inform appropriate action. As always, make connections to the readings in making these decisions. Get specific then in discussing how this analysis will be conducted pursuant to the business topic area you have chosen.
Component 2: Market Conditions: In this next section, describe for the Board the steps you will take to clearly know and understand the market conditions related to this decision. What will you need to know about the national and international economy? What social and political issues will be important to likewise analyze? Be specific about your recommendations and make strategic scholarly reference to the sources that informed our decision.
Component 3: Observances & Ethical Considerations: The Board that you are working with is intensely concerned about making sure that human rights are protected in ethical considerations are observed when doing business internationally. Given the potential for the market you have identified for this study, what ethical considerations might you need to take into account? Are there child labor laws to consider? Are there pay and equity issues associated with gender that need to be observed? What about rates of pay? Should the company pay US scale or a scale appropriate to the local economy? What are the implications? By answering the questions in this section you know that your Board will be able to support this international endeavor with confidence.