Innovative Global Marketing
Theme Leader: Andy Rohm, Ph.D.
Los Angeles and the surrounding Silicon Beach business community is fast becoming a center for marketing and advertising creativity and innovation. Given LMU's strong reputation in marketing (currently ranked #13 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report), LMU is well-positioned both academically and geographically to capitalize on creating educational partnerships within the greater Los Angeles marketing and advertising community. Los Angeles is home to hundreds of leading marketing and advertising agencies, media and technology firms including Electronic Arts, Google, YouTube, Facebook, TBWA \ Chiat \ Day, Dollar Shave Club, TOMS Shoes, Radical Media, Red Bull, Universal McCann, among many others. Many of these firms have extensive global operations and international impact.
Global Talent Development and Foreign Business Language Education
Theme Leader: Ellen Ensher, Ph.D.
LMU CIBE aims to expand international employment opportunities by educating LMU students so that they become globally talented leaders who can help American companies compete in the global marketplace. A number of Silicon Beach firms, such as Electronic Arts, Netflix and IMAX are involved in global businesses, and LMU CIBE can help them recruit and develop managers who have potential to become global leaders. American MNCs recognize that cross-border collaboration has increasingly become a critical factor in the improvement of their performance. This goal is to be met through two new initiatives that will fulfill both the competitive and invitational priorities of the CIBE grants: international internship programs at professional business organizations and foreign business languages education. LMU CIBE will collaborate with American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) and partner universities to offer international internship programs, which will provide our students with the required skills and knowledge expected of global talent to be recruited by MNCs. In addition, LMU CIBE will offer foreign business languages to increase the benefits of the existing international business programs.
International Entrepreneurship
Theme Leader: David Choi, Ph.D.
A focus of LMU CIBE is the development of Southern California's small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as viable global traders. We will contribute to this prowess by (1) creating special programs for SMEs that build knowledge and skills relative to international trade and (2) establishing student business development teams that will work with SMEs to identify and analyze global market opportunities. The LMU's entrepreneurship curriculum provides students with the skills to identify opportunities and bring resources together to launch and grow their companies. LMU was one of the first schools in the U.S. to offer an Entrepreneurship Program in 1972. Today, it remains one of the most recognized and respected programs and consistently ranks among the top 20 in the country. It would be highly valuable to the entrepreneurial community for LMU CIBE to provide a mechanism for sharing experiences and knowledge to ensure that ventures maximize their international opportunities and contribute to an overall more competitive entrepreneurial economy.
Global Sustainability and Business Ethics
Theme Leader: Jeff Thies, D.Min.
We believe that no other institution is better positioned than LMU in educating students to learn and practice the notion of sustainability and business ethics, as these themes are embedded in LMU's Jesuit foundation that promotes the education of the whole person based on its mission of faith and justice. As a signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative, LMU College of Business Administration submits a report every two years, capturing activities on how the college is supporting the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). Check out the 2018-2020 PRME Report. In accordance with LMU's mission statement, a main goal of the LMU CIBE is to introduce curricula and programs that expose students to issues related to sustainability and business ethics. Educating students about sustainability and corporate social responsibility will help them understand the long-term survival of a society as well as an organization. Sustainability is especially important for science and engineering as a method for pursuing and preserving the safety, health, and welfare of the public as well as the stability of the environment. Ever-growing cross-border trade and investment have made these issues more significant for MNCs and raised complex and complicated implications for their stakeholders.
Cybersecurity
Theme Leader: Kala Seal, Ph.D.
To address the challenges of cybersecurity in this new era, research, training, and education are needed to develop public policies and technological governance to avoid or minimize unintended consequences of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) and to mitigate security risks for U.S. businesses in this hyper-connected network of data, information, and automation. LMU CIBE will closely work with the Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics (ISBA) in LMU CBA and California Governor’s Cybersecurity Taskforce to obtain and share a deeper understanding of the cybersecurity issues and implications brought by the 4IR technologies through research and curriculum development for various stakeholders. LMU CIBE will support research aimed to develop frameworks to systematically categorize various types of cybersecurity risks at individual, organizational, and national levels and to create a hierarchical structure that would allow us to find the differences, as well as commonalities of the threats across these levels.