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Keywords
International trade, Small-to medium-sized enterprises, Business support services, Learning methods, Mexico, United Kingdom
Abstract
In 2000, Academic Enterprise in the University of Salford, UK began working with TradePartnersUK to investigate how higher education could support the development of international trade, particularly in the small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector. The UK business community has traditionally suffered from a lack of foreign language and business culture skills and little understanding of the cultures within which they operate. SMEs in particular, with more limited financial resources, find it difficult to free staff to attend even shortterm courses. This suggested that e-learning might provide a partial solution, enabling courses to be accessed at a time and place convenient to the learner, and at a fraction of the cost associated with more traditional methods of delivery. From this background the BUCLA (Business Culture in Latin America) project emerged, initially focused on Mexico. In view of the success achieved, the project was subsequently extended to cover other Latin American countries.
Introduction
In the late 1990s the UK Government decided to broaden the formal remit of the higher education (HE) sector beyond teaching/learning and research, to encompass support for economic and social regeneration and growth. The University of Salford had, for a long time, seen itself as being externally facing and this change in government policy had already been anticipated through the creation of a specialist department within the university - Academic Enterprise (AE). The role of AE is to act as the interface between the knowledge base of the university and the outside world.
In 2000, AE began working with TradePartnersUK (TPUK)[1] to investigate the ways in which the HE sector could support the development of international trade. TPUK had considerable hands-on experience of working with companies in the development of their international trading relationships. As a consequence of this extensive involvement, two major factors had emerged:
1 Foreign language skills. The UK business community suffers greatly from a lack of foreign language skills. This is not a new observation, and had been the subject of academic and practitioner comment for a number of years (BETRO Trust Committee, 1979; Holden, 1987; Swift, 1990, 1991, 2000; Embleton and Hagen, 1992; Wright and Wright, 1993, p. 11; Bloch,...