Entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia: Singapore and Thailand 2027
Course Description
The sustainability movement is creating opportunities and challenges for entrepreneurs. Key opportunities, driven by green growth, resource scarcity, and regulatory shifts, include rising consumer demand for eco-friendly goods and access to green funding. Singapore and Thailand are both experiencing these incentives, but in different ways. The Singaporean government has been making a strong policy push for sustainable practices due to their extreme geographical vulnerabilities while Thailand’s European trading partners have been demanding more compliance with their deforestation and limited carbon policies throughout their global supply chains. Consumers in both countries have been demanding more sustainable products but with different degrees of price sensitivity.
A hands-on comparison of these two countries will allow students to see how the specific structural forces established by policy makers, culture, and economic conditions generate unique incentives for businesses and individuals. Entrepreneurial opportunities in each country can be assessed by the degrees to which they will be constrained or enhanced by these structural forces.
Recent plenary sessions included the Economic Development Board of Singapore, The CSO of the Singapore Trade Federation, The Green Finance Division of the Bank of Thailand, and Moreloop, a Thai start-up creating a market for upcycled textiles.
Who should take this class?
Students who want to live and work in the region would obviously benefit from the local contacts and the understanding of the entrepreneurial possibilities created by current and evolving policies.
Others who are seeking opportunities to enact effective changes elsewhere in the world or looking to identify potential new business ventures will benefit from the course by identifying policies that can have a high impact in specific environments abroad.
Lastly, students who simply enjoy applying economic reasoning to practical real-world entrepreneurial problems will love this course as the goal is to connect (1) structural forces created by sustainability policies to (2) firm and individual conduct to (3) outcomes in a way that parallels the framework taught in Kellogg’s competitive strategy and industrial organization courses.
Faculty Bio
Brett Saraniti received his PhD in Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 1997. His dissertation chair was Roger Myerson, Nobel Laureate 2007. He is currently a Clinical Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at Kellogg.
Brett has taught MBA and executive courses at Kellogg every summer since 1995 where he has been honored with four teaching awards for three different courses. He has also taught in the Kellogg-Recanati program in Tel Aviv, the Kellogg-Schulich program in Toronto, The Kellogg-Guanghua program in Beijing, and the Kellogg-HKUST program in Hong Kong. Brett was a visiting professor at INSEAD every year from 2008-17 winning the Best Teacher Award for the Core Classes in September 2008. He has been a visitor at the Sasin Graduate Institute in Bangkok, Thailand; IESE in Barcelona; the Brisbane Graduate School of Business in Queensland, Australia; the Thunderbird School of Global Management; TECNUN in San Sebastian, Spain; The Bloch School at UMKC; Stanford; UC Davis; and the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration in Finland. He has also delivered executive management seminars at Seminarium International in both Chile & Costa Rica and Seminarium Mexico.
He has also worked, taught, and/or consulted for McKinsey & Company, Xerox Corporation, Hiscox Insurance, Allianz, Chevron Oil Field Research, LG Electronics, Cantor Fitzgerald/Hollywood Stock Exchange, Inigo Insurance, Alstom, Swire, FEMSA, EVRAZ N.A., HP, UNext, Love & Kirschenbaum LLC (expert witness), Maclean-Fogg, Trunk Club, MRJ Technologies, Suncloud Health, Chipin.com, Carddomains.com, Lee Ceramics, and Surflight Hawaii. He is on the corporate advisory board of Sprint Milestone, a data analytics consultancy based in Hong Kong.
Brett spends most of his time with his wife Samantha and their three children Francesca, Carlo & Enzo who enjoy beating him at pretty much everything.