Global Business
Through research in the global business arena, SBA’s CIBRE is exploring areas such as IT, international marketing and branding, strategy, governance and reporting integration, virtual communication and more. The following summaries highlight projects in the global business area:

Patterns of Influence and Innovation
Through his work extending research related to business innovation his German colleagues at the Center for European Economic Research (ZEW) began to discover patterns and influences of innovation to encourage innovation through national funding and incentives, Marketing Professor Mukesh Bhargava worked to incorporate a similar survey in the U.S. Although the U.S. team could not duplicate similar results in the U.S., because U.S. companies feel proprietary regarding sharing information, the collaborative data analysis continues and Bhargava remains optimistic. Bhargava and his team continue to analyze the data to build a case for cooperation and government funding for continued research in this area.

For more information, contact Bhargava at (248) 370-4093 or bhargava@oakland.edu

A Focus on Foreign Expansion
Together, Research Scholar Ding Yuan, of Hohai University, Nanjing, China, and OU SBA professors, Joy Jiang, assistant professor of management, and Ravi Parameswaran, chair, management and marketing, are analyzing data on multinational corporations within China. The analysis moves beyond prior studies in foreign investment which focus on why and where companies establish themselves to determine if different paths lead to differences in performance. This study looks at the motivations, paths of expansion and performance of foreign companies.

For more information, contact Parameswaran at (248) 370-3299 or paramesw@oakland.edu or Jiang at (248) 370-2831 or jiang@oakland.edu.

Virtual Community
Virtual communities offer researchers the chance to study social and political interaction patterns, economic transaction processes, organizational behaviors, management aspects, and business models and design concepts.

For Balaji Rajagopalan, associate professor, MIS, and his international colleagues, virtual worlds represent an opportunity to analyze social interactions and lifestyle choices of individuals who interact within virtual worlds, such as “Second Life,” the three-dimensional world where cyber visitors create their own virtual world and characters, called Avatars. Along with Ye Qiang, professor, Harbin Institute of Technology in China, Rajagopalan is gathering common underlying attributes of virtual world visitors and categorizing them into clusters based on lifestyle choices. He is also researching "Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Communities" with T.P. Liang, dean and MIS professor, National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU), in Taiwan. In addition, he is organizing a mini-track on Virtual Communities and Virtual Worlds at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) with two German professors: Sebastian Richter, Universität der Bundeswehr München; and Jan Marco Leimeister, Universität Kassel.

For more information, contact Rajagopalan at (248) 370-4958 or rajagopa@oakland.edu.