Volume 13, Number 3, 2005
The Sarajevo Graduate School of Business, a partnership with the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics that now is in its second year of operation, is more than a successful educational program, faculty members say.
They call it a necessity for the continued growth of Bosnia and the Eastern European region.
“The best way to help a country like Bosnia is to invest in education,” Mugdim Pasic, assistant professor of management in the Sarajevo school, says. “Only educated people can create a vibrant economy.”
Michael Ginzberg, dean of the Lerner College, says he sees the program as a way to introduce people in the region, who until recently have lived in a controlled economy and society, not only to today’s marketing methods but also to modern teaching techniques.
“In the past, their courses emphasized production, and students did not participate in class,” Ginzberg says. “The Bosnian MBA [master of business administration] program focuses on how to market a product, and in the classroom, it encourages interaction between students and faculty.”
The partnership between the Lerner College and Sarajevo’s Faculty of Economics is funded through a five-year grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“In the first two years, we will have produced 50 people who can run a business successfully,” Aziz Sunje, associate professor of industrial organization in Sarajevo, says.
As a component of the partnership, Sunje and Pasic spent a portion of 2005 in the United States, conducting research with UD business college faculty as part of the faculty development provision of the agreement with USAID. Each University of Sarajevo faculty member who teaches at the graduate school will spend four or five weeks during the academic year on campus working with Lerner College faculty.
In Bosnia, Pasic, Sunje and other members of the Sarajevo and Lerner faculties teach custom-tailored short courses and professional certification training programs aimed at the challenges faced by firms operating in local, regional and global markets.
The first 26 students who enrolled in the program’s inaugural semester last year came from Bosnia, Croatia, Lebanon, Estonia and Germany and represented a cross-section of society. They were lawyers, dentists, entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, managers and accountants. They all spoke English, the language in which the classes are taught, and attended two classes a week for five weeks, with a three-week break between the fall and spring semesters. There are no winter or summer sessions, Ann Wolfer, MBA Bosnia program coordinator in the Lerner College, says.
“Summer vacation is sacrosanct” in Bosnia, she says. “No one works then, and winters are too harsh.”
Wolfer, AS ’93, CHEP ’98M, spends part of each year in Sarajevo. She says the graduate school classrooms in the Faculty of Economics building have undergone dramatic renovation. Classrooms initially were riddled with bullet holes and damaged by the four-year Bosnian-Croation-Serbian war, Wolfer says. USAID funding helped to repair war damage, furnish the classrooms and build and equip computer and standard lecture rooms with interactive technology.
The first year, UD faculty members Bill Gehrlein, professor of business administration; Jeff Miller, professor of economics; John Stocker, assistant professor of business and economics; and Tom Ilvento, chairperson of the Department of Food and Resource Economics in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, taught in Bosnia.
Wolfer says the greatest challenges were in transporting bulky materials, especially books, but that the first year went well. The students were receptive and successful, she says.
Adnan Ovinca, a first-year student who now is project coordinator for USAID’s Cluster Competitiveness Activity project in Bosnia/Herzegovina, agrees.
She says her coursework taught her “the importance of teamwork, a vital skill in today’s business environment,” adding that the team concept was “emphasized in almost all the courses through group projects and exercises.” She says the program also helped her strengthen universal business skills, such as proper communication, and improved her knowledge of generally accepted marketing, accounting, finance and business management principles.
As a bonus, the students in Ovinca’s class began to network, she says, notifying one another when there were job openings within their organizations. That is how Ovinca got the job she now holds.
“That was another great thing we got from the MBA program—networking and meeting influential business people,” she says.
When Pasic and Sunje spent much of March, April and June on the UD campus, Pasic and Gehrlein made a presentation to the College. Their focus was on dispelling the widely accepted concept that the centroid method of facility location, or the need to locate close to customers and appropriate labor sources, optimizes costs.
John Kmetz, faculty director of the Lerner College’s international programs, lauded the work.
“This paper is the first research effort to come from our USAID program in Bosnia, and it yielded a groundbreaking finding, which will necessitate rewriting coverage of the centroid method in textbooks in the field,” Kmetz says. “It is a direct result of the interaction between the authors through the course they jointly taught in Sarajevo.”
Sunje is working with Richard Weiss, associate professor, and Yasemin Kor, assistant professor, both of business administration at UD. Weiss and Kor specialize in organizational management and are collaborating with Sunje on research examining the lumber industry and the relationship between strategic management and performance.
Ginzberg says that the exchange of ideas among professors from both nations can only enhance the education of their students.
—Barbara Garrison