Theorist sees Economic Development distance learning going a long way

The foreign translations of his books fill four bookshelves just outside Michael E. Porter’s office at the Harvard Business School: You can easily glean the word for ”competitive” in 17 languages just from reading the spines.

Porter is not doing so badly in English either. His ”Competitive Strategy,” which was published in 1980 and which has become a must-read for MBA students, is in its 58th printing; ”Competitive Advantage,” published five years later, is in its 34th printing. During the three years that Accenture has been tracking the most influential business thinkers worldwide, Porter has ranked number one every year.

By D.C. Denison, Boston Globe Staff

Porter, 55, is hardly resting on his laurels. When I visited him at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, which was jointly created by Harvard University and the Harvard Business School in 2001 to further Porter’s work, he was a bundle of restless energy as he described his latest project.

What has Porter so excited is ”The Microeconomics of Competitiveness: Firms, Clusters and Economic Development,” a class that serves as a platform for a new kind of course taught simultaneously at universities around the world. Porter is just completing his second year teaching the course and he clearly relishes the challenge of eventually cranking it up to a global reach.

As it exists now, ”The Microeconomics of Competitiveness” is taught at 17 universities in addition to Harvard. Internet technology is the enabler, allowing students and professors at business schools around the world to download case studies and view a wide variety of digital content, including lectures of Porter teaching the cases. There are also online discussion boards, workshop videos of professors discussing their experience teaching the classes, and videos of world leaders commenting on the issues under discussion.

The class is about more than technology. In fact, old-fashioned networking, the preelectronic kind, is much more central to the process. From the time he began planning the course, Porter has focused on teachers not students, building a network of business school professors who can teach the course using the Internet-delivered tools he provides. Every December, Porter strengthens the network by inviting the professors who teach the course to a three-day workshop at Harvard.

The content for the course is drawn from some long-standing themes that have informed Porter’s work over the past 20 years, such as the importance of geography and the fostering of ”clusters” of companies and industries. Central to Porter’s view is the idea that wealth is created at the microeconomic level. Nations can establish favorable conditions for companies to grow, but productive, competitive firms, not governmental policy, ultimately determine a nation’s or region’s economic health.

These ideas are closely related to the approach Porter uses when he consults with countries and regions about improving competitiveness (Great Britain and Thailand are two recent clients). In fact his new course grows directly out of his frustration with what happens after a consultation, when countries prove to be unwilling or unable to implement his recommendations. One reason for the disconnect: Porter’s strategies often focus on the ”bottom-up” activity of regional businesses. By contrast, many of his clients, he said, are ”older business leaders who have grown up in a world of heavy government intervention. . . . It’s very hard for them to grasp a different way. They are accustomed to spending half their time dealing with ministers, negotiating special deals.”

So in a sense, Porter’s course is an end run, a way to engage professors around the world in a new way of thinking about economic development.

”I could go directly to the students,” he said, ”but with the professors you get the multiplier effect: They can teach generations of students.”

The Internet-based course allows Porter to extend his international influence beyond case studies and classroom teaching and translated editions of his books.

During the dot-com era, Porter was sometimes painted as an old-school strategist stuck on the importance of geography and regional economies at a time when the Internet was hastening ”the death of distance.”

But such Porterian concepts as ”regional clusters” have endured, and ironically, because of his stature and because an Internet-based teaching platform suits his ambitions, Porter might be able to drive the distance-learning concept further than many cyber-utopian theorists.

”I would guess that we’ll have at least 30 universities participating next year,” Porter said, thinking out loud, ”and it may be 50. I don’t see any reason why we can’t have 100 or 150 within a few years. . . . We may end up with 10,000 students a year.

”The whole idea is that this will propagate, because it scales up,” Porter said. ”I’m confident that eventually we can reach every part of the globe.”

D.C. Denison can be reached at [email protected].

This story ran on page D2 of the Boston Globe on 5/18/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/138/business/Theorist_sees_distance_learning_going_a_long_way+.shtml