Management students of the FSES have participated in the 2018 X-Culture program led by Professor Vas Taras, University of North Carolina. The X-Culture project is a large-scale experiential learning exercise designed to provide students with an opportunity to gain first-hand experience in international virtual collaboration. Professor Davoine and Professor Furrer have received an X-Culture Best educator award, which is closely linked with our student average performance.

Professor Davoine and Professor Furrer were among 150 professors whose students took part in the 2018-2 round of the X-Culture competition. A total of 4,743 students from 148 universities in 37 countries on six continents participated in the project this semester. They worked in 1,113 global virtual teams, each comprised of about 6 team members, each team member coming from a different country. Working in global virtual teams, the students developed a business proposal for one of half a dozen companies that partnered with X-Culture this semester and provided a detailed plan for implementing the idea.

This year’s corporate partners included companies such as the Nashville Chamber of Commerce from the U.S.A.; Vertical Journey, an extreme tourism provider from Peru; Finnish Schools International, a private school network from Finland; UniCheck, a company from Ukraine that makes plagiarism detection software; or Ultraspecialist, a medical services company from Italy, to name a few.

X-Culture has received numerous awards from the Academy of Management and Academy of International Business for the work in fostering international inter-institutional collaboration, developing new experiential learning techniques, and research in International Business and Experiential Learning areas.