"Interactions between Academia and Business on Internationalization: Teaching Cases on Multinational Enterprises in U.S. Business Schools, 1955-1964"

In the 1950s and 60s, US firms became more international. Parallel to this process, the academic community started to develop educational programs and research that aimed at supporting the internationalization process (Wilkins, 1974). Raymond Vernon’s research project on the multinational enterprise at Harvard Business School from 1965, and the new journal (Columbia) Journal of World Business from the same year, are some of the initiatives in the US that contributed to the creation of the new discipline International Business (IB) (Shenkar, 2004).
This paper asks: How did US business schools interact with American business in their internationalization process? The paper is based on a source of data that has remained untapped. In 1964, the Ford Foundation financed a project to gather information about all teaching cases written from 1955 to 1964 that were relevant for developing educational programs on multinationals in US business schools. We have created a database based on information from the 483 cases that the project collected. Faculty members at US business schools authored 176 cases, and 307 were written at foreign business schools in 17 different countries.
The cases are highly germane expressions of what the academics perceived as being relevant for the internationalization of US business in a formative period of IB. The cases reflect how business schools collected information from cooperating business schools internationally to support the internationalization process. The cases supported to a high degree the geographical direction of the internationalization process. Further, we show that access to information from corporations’ internationalization experiences either directly or via cooperating business schools abroad was crucial for the development of IB. Content wise, the cases were heterogeneous but give indications on the construction of the new discipline. Academia’s impact on firms’ internationalization practice is more complex and nuanced.