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Strategic decision making in cooperation projects. The decision deals with the process of generating a strategy for R&D and technological innovation in developing countries, through international cooperation.

Students of programs of strategic management, business policy and management of international cooperation. Target courses include: strategic management seminars, international cooperation seminars, MBA.

The case shows the process carried out by a team led by Braulio Perez Astray, manager of the innovation department of the Foundation University of A Coruna (Spain) and Radhames Mejia, executive vice-rector of the Pontifical Catholic University Madre y Maestra (Dominican Republic) to design the strategy for R&D and Technological Innovation of the Dominican Republic. It describes the tasks and responsibilities undertaken in the INPOLTEC Project, the result of the international cooperation between Spain and the Dominican Republic. It included the involvement of the Administration of Government of both countries, the contributions of the scientific community and a significant sample of Dominican companies, as well as the advice of Spanish experts and technologists in the field of innovation and technology policy. The case arises from the position of Braulio Perez Astray, leader of the project. The objective of this case is to analyze the potential transfer of this experience to other countries in Central America and Caribbean.

The learning objective is to facilitate students to investigate the decisions in the strategic process in the field of innovation and to reinforce the focus of international cooperation as a mechanism for strategic support in stimulating the flow of knowledge in science and technology.

Teaching notes are available. Please consult the librarian for access.

This chapter addresses the current social-political challenges to providing education to the gifted in the Dominican Republic, including issues in the enforcement of educational laws and ordinances, a lack of vision and moral/ethical values in all stakeholder categories, and inefficiencies in the educational system. In this chapter, we address the challenges of designing identification instruments and processes from scratch given that existing literature on gifted education mainly addresses the US context, where valid aptitude and achievement tests and checklists are available to use.

This case study was intended for MBA/postgraduate level courses, or for high-level executive courses. It provided a complex international business context to analyse the intricacies and dependencies between emerging regions, wherein a company (Grupo M) established an entire manufacturing cluster and invested all its assets in a place that has never hosted any industrial activity – in a country whose culture and traditions differed significantly from those of the neighbouring country that provided the investment. The case included a discussion of the negotiations that a private company undertook with two governments (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) to secure access to the free-zone facilities granted by the importing countries.

The case could be seen as a stimulating international business context to examine central tenets around “shared value creation” (Porter and Kramer, 2011): the practice of creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges. As per these authors, there are three ways to create shared value: by reconceiving products and markets, by redefining productivity in the value chain and by enabling local cluster development. The latter is the one best exemplified in this case. Additionally, the case brought intriguing insights on international business that can be related to ethics, corporate social responsibility and its many facets (Banerjee, 2007), as well as concepts around “responsible lobbying” (Anastasiadis et al., 2018).

This case presented the expansion challenges of CODEVI, a Dominican company, which established and operated an industrial (free zone) park in Haiti. Grupo M decided to move its operations when The World Trade Organization eliminated the quota system for apparel imported from the Far East Countries, and its CEO, Fernando Capellán, foresaw that the Dominican Republic would soon become non-competitive. At the time, an agreement between the US and Haiti, which gave preferential access to production from this extremely poor country, was being negotiated. In 2003, there were two sleepy towns at the Haitian-Dominican border: Dajabón, with about 18,000 inhabitants in the Dominican side, and Ounaminthe in Haiti, with about 40,000 inhabitants (with 90 per cent unemployment and over 80 per cent living below the extreme poverty line) on the Haitan side. These two locations were at the heart of a case that narrated how a complex international business operation resulted in an industrial park that has enjoyed considerable economic success, while simultaneously improving dramatically the living conditions of both border towns: Dajabón now has about 35,000 inhabitants and was a booming town, with a prosperous middle class; Ounaminthe now had 170,000 inhabitants (17,000 work directly at CODEVI), and was a city that essentially remained outside the chaos that often plagues the rest of Haiti. Additionally, a major impact of CODEVI was that it stopped the area’s illegal emigration of Haitians to the Dominican Republic, one of the Dominican Republic’s most pressing problems. But as the CODEVI industrial park has no area to expand, a decision must be made to either expand next to the present park, or at one of the three sister towns along the border. Such a park would have to be built from nothing, as was the case for CODEVI almost two decades ago.

MBA, executive and postgraduate.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 5: International Business.

Literature on “gender and organisation” in developing countries is scarce. The purpose of this paper is to unveil the way in which gender construction is understood and operates within public organisational settings in the Dominican Republic.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 27 women and 13 men from three organisations in the public sector in the Dominican Republic. The research was developed using a feminist poststructuralist methodological framework and used discourse analysis.

Gender construction and dynamics in the Dominican public sector reproduce paternalistic assumptions and beliefs. Organisational culture operates as a gendered system where sexualised structures and processes perpetuate ideas about male superiority and female inferiority, which translate in expectations of men being dominant and women being submissive.

The experience of a group of employees from three public institutions cannot generalise the whole of the public sector all around the country. More importantly, it cannot be assumed to represent all feminist voices from developing countries.

The implications of this research are significant both for gender sensitive employment public policy reform and human resource management practices in the public sector.

The research focused on how gender is articulated in organisational culture, situating this problematisation in the public sector in the Dominican Republic. The paper contributes to the limited knowledge of gender and organisation in the Hispanic Caribbean, particularly the Dominican Republic.