Two new Global Network Courses will be introduced in 2014-15: Inclusive Business Models, offered by the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB), which will begin in September 2014, and Handling Disruption: Humanitarian Emergencies Management and Development, from the London School of Economics and Political Science, which is scheduled to begin in January 2015. Global Network Courses, which are taught online and are open to students at all of the 27 Global Network schools around the globe, examine topics across a variety of sectors, including mobile banking, natural resource usage, and antitrust law. 

Sourav Mukherji, an associate professor of organization and strategy at IIMB, will teach Inclusive Business Models. In the course, students will study multiple business models that can address the needs of the poor in a financially sustainable manner.

“There is now pressure on the development sector to be less reliant on donor money, to treat donor money as investment and gradually become financially sustainable,” Mukherji says. “This requires enterprises in the social sector to become more efficient in their resource utilization by imbibing many of the lessons from the for-profit sector.”

Mukherji, who has taught the class previously to a combination of Indian and European students, says that the course is well suited to the Global Network. “This class will provide students with a rich understanding of India and the context of emerging nations,” he says.

Handling Disruption will be taught by Chrisanthi Avgerou, a professor of information systems at LSE. Nonprofit and nongovernmental aid organizations increasingly need leaders who understand complex socio-political contexts during humanitarian relief in order to be effective, she says. The course provides students the opportunity to gain the cross-cultural understanding that makes leaders more effective in times of crisis.

“Digital infrastructures open up unprecedented opportunities for effective relief interventions, but the management challenges are huge,” Avgerou says. “The course will endeavor to harness the enthusiasm and talent of students to create in-depth understanding of the complex managerial, political and ethical nature of such humanitarian emergencies, and develop capabilities needed for effective action.”

Global Network Courses connect a select group of MBA students from throughout the network, who attend class sessions online and work on projects in teams distributed around the world. The first Global Network Courses, piloted by Yale in September 2013, were Analysis of Competition Law and Enforcement across Countries and Mobile Banking Opportunities across Countries. Those two courses, as well as Yale’s Natural Capital and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s New Product Development, which were first offered in the first half of 2014, will again be available to students in the 2014-15 academic year. Additional new courses for 2014-15 may be added later this year.

Electives open to all Global Network students, Global Network courses expand the reach of expertise available to member schools, says Camino de Paz, director of global initiatives at Yale SOM. The courses also help students develop important skills in working in global teams. “They will work with people across cultures and across time zones, and they’ll have to develop together teamwork dynamics that might be different from group to group,” de Paz says.