Using X-Culture in International Business Courses: Challenges and Best Practices

Structured as an interactive discussion session, this session is led by internationally experienced professors representing a number of universities from across Europe, Asia, and North America. The panel is designed to provide insights and reflections on how the X-Culture project is utilized across a variety of business courses spanning 7 universities across 8 countries, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Portugal, and the USA. The session will contain prepared prompts for conversation organized across several thematic categories, with most of the session offering interaction and discussion with the audience. This session aims to bring together academics with X-Culture experience and those considering adding this project to their course to provide an opportunity to share insights focused on developing ways to optimize X-Culture use in IB courses. X-Culture (www.X-Culture.org), launched in 2010, provides the opportunity for students from different countries to work in global virtual teams (GVTs) and complete a business project, learning the challenges and best practices of global cross-cultural collaboration. X-Culture is a large-scale international experiential learning project. About 6,000 students from 140 universities in over 50 countries on six continents participate every semester. X-Culture has reached the milestone of 100,000 student participants with over 103,000 alumni as of mid-2023. Students are placed in GVTs with approximately five to seven members. Multinational corporations team up with X-Culture annually and present their challenges. Working in GVTs, students develop solutions to the challenges presented by corporate partners. Students experience first-hand the difficulties and learn best practices of international collaboration and business plan development skills. Combined, the group of panelists has many years of project experience and developed unique implementation strategies. This is more of a ‘community-of-scholars-facilitateddiscussion’ session rather than a typical panel-presentation session to provide ample opportunity for the exchange of ideas and interaction with the audience. This panel has been very well attended throughout the past 10+ years at the annual Academy of Management and Academy of International Business conferences and, more recently, at the annual EIBA conferences.