Creation and Assessment of an Integrated Business Course: One College's Experience

Abstract

This article reports on an Integrated Business Course (IBC) at the College of Business Administration. The IBC's goal is to provide business students with an understanding of the integrated nature of organizational functions; it uses student teams for project management. Using a semester-long case representing typical issues facing a family-owned firm in today's auto replacement parts industry, we created incidents that required individual and project team activities—strategic decisionmaking, implementation challenges, and operational issues. Students were assigned to one cross-functional project team for the semester and to roles that changed for each incident. Our article describes instructional and administrative issues and multiple methods of assessing the IBC's effectiveness.