Business culture in Latin America: interactive learning for UK SMEs

In 2000, Academic Enterprise in the University of Salford, UK began working with TradePartnersUK to investigate how higher education could support the development of international trade, particularly in the small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector. The UK business community has traditionally suffered from a lack of foreign language and business culture skills and little understanding of the cultures within which they operate. SMEs in particular, with more limited financial resources, find it difficult to free staff to attend even short-term courses. This suggested that e-learning might provide a partial solution, enabling courses to be accessed at a time and place convenient to the learner, and at a fraction of the cost associated with more traditional methods of delivery. From this background the BUCLA (Business Culture in Latin America) project emerged, initially focused on Mexico. In view of the success achieved, the project was subsequently extended to cover other Latin American countries