Ten second-year USC Marshall School of Business MBA students presented the findings of a yearlong research project directly the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) at an annual summit in Beijing. The event took place Nov. 6, 2014.
The APEC is a confederation of 21 Pacific Rim economies that encourages economic cooperation and promotes free trade among its members, which include China, Canada, Japan and the United States. It is made up of 63 business executives. Since 2003, USC Marshall has been the only business school with students who conduct research for the business arm of this group, ABAC.
This year, the team was given the task of investigating impediments and incentives to foreign direct investments in seven service areas. These service areas included telecom and information and communication technology, retail and restaurants, transportation/distribution/logistics, accounting services and life insurance.
To tackle that wide-ranging topic, the ABAC team spent about 4,000 hours interviewing business owners across these industries in each of the 21 APEC economies, collecting and analyzing their data, and preparing a final report for presentation.
Some of the team’s findings included, services remain overly restrictive with no evidence of change, that technology is changing services and human capital frustrations. The team’s full report breaks its research findings out in to industry categories and offers detailed recommendations in each area to ABAC.
The ABAC and USC Marshall partnership began in 2002. ABAC, which does not have its own research capabilities, decided to invite business schools to be involved with the idea of partnering with students for research.
The students involved in ABAC research do this in addition to their typical MBA studies at Marshall. This year, students conducted a total of 368 hours of interviews leading up the APEC seminar.