It is 22.00 in Hong Kong, 17.00 in Copenhagen, and 11.00 in Chapel Hill, USA, and a project team logs online to discuss their project status. The only difference is that this project team does not work for a large multinational corporate - it is a handful of students from the GLOBE programme.

As part of the autumn semester at CBS, GLOBE students studied International Business. This course was different from the International Business Environment course that is part of the IB syllabus, though, as students had to work together with their colleagues from the University of North Carolina and the Chinese University of Hong Kong on a trans-institutional group project.

Frustration, then co-operation
Students were forced to think creatively, working with people they had never met - a great learning experience. Spencer Liu, a GLOBE student from the Chinese University of Hong Kong agrees: “I appreciated the project, because you tend not to form groups with people you do not know, but here you were forced to. Of course, in the beginning there was a period of frustration, because we did not understand each other, but after a while as people explained themselves, there was more cooperation.”

Even small things such as meeting times were a challenge in this project. Andrew Chapman, one of the students from UNC says: “I thought it was a good project. The main difficulties at the start were finding times to discuss the ideas, before you have to write everything, just picking a time was a hassle, but eventually you understand when works best for people and you can start writing. I remember waking up early in the morning and getting on Skype.”

After writing the project together for one month, group mates were finally able to meet each other in Copenhagen for the official start of the GLOBE programme in January. The virtual groups then had to present their papers to a jury of faculty members from all three universities. To many GLOBE students, the first meeting was quite an interesting situation. Ka Yan Leung, a GLOBE student from the Chinese University of Hong Kong says: “It was really interesting to see the difference between the one we imagined we were chatting with and the real person. All in all, I think it was good to have this opportunity and it really helped us get to know each other a bit even before we met.”