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BRIDGING BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND CROSS-CULTURAL SENSITIVITY: A KEY TO TEACHING INNOVATION THROUGH INTERNATIONALISATION
Ural Federal University (RUSSIAN FEDERATION)
About this paper:
Appears in: EDULEARN14 Proceedings
Publication year: 2014
Pages: 6396-6405
ISBN: 978-84-617-0557-3
ISSN: 2340-1117
Conference name: 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 7-9 July, 2014
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Abstract:
The concept of corporate social responsibility as a key to future sustainable strategy is widely used in the most innovative corporations, advanced economies countries and Universities. Starting from 50s of the last century the corporate world have tried to tailor or to neglect different models of economic, social, legal and philanthropic vectors to reschedule their strategy to be responsible, sustainable and paying the investments back. Although social investments and social entrepreneurship topics are becoming a hot topic, we found that there is a literature gap in finding, what are the key competences to prepare and form successful entrepreneur in regards to global education internationalization and socializing imperative in international business.

We assume that the portrait of the innovative entrepreneur corresponds to a model combining leadership skills, social responsibility and cross-cultural awareness, which would be based on international peculiarities of legal, social and economic systems. On the other hand the realities of today incorporate IT competences and creative/innovating thinking, which all together contribute to business sustainable development because it potentially has positive effect on both personal and/or corporate financial and social outcomes.

One of the most important challenges calls for a specifically tailored learning programmes at Universities, while the growing number of CSR related schools, sustainable management for industry courses obviously retreats the urgency. This type of innovation also contributes to business sustainability. However the specific effect on these outcomes can be highly influenced by the national context in which the “cohort” of participants develop their activities. Using an institutional approach and employing a sample of 200 participants, we study whether national institutional conditions impose a moderating effect on the relationship between different layers of education system and thus surplus knowledge driven strategy ambitions for the future top-managers. We also have examined the effect of short programmes on the internationalization of Universities as a side-effect.
We attempted to assess the effectiveness of programs in the development of the internationalization of education at the university (first unit), and susceptibility to social responsibility (second unit), and cross- cultural tolerance (third unit). We have studied the following types of sample: participants of the summer school (Russian and foreign, both technical and economic education profile) – 36%, foreign university students who have not participated in the thematic school – 10%, Russian university students who have not been involved in summer school, – 54 %.
Although the sample is not highly representative for complex statistical analysis so far, we have rather interesting preliminary results. Our results show that regulatory and normative dimensions do not have the same influence on that relationship, creating implications for academia, managers, and policy makers.

The research opens perspectives to systematize the evaluation system of internationalization of education programs, and also the development of statistical and marketing tools to develop a comprehensive strategy to enter the international education and labour market.
Keywords:
Corporate Social Responsibility, Information Technology, Cross-Cultural Sensitivity, Summer School, Multidiscipling learning, Sustainability.