Five-Diamond International Conference Cycle
The Conference Cycle

The purpose of the Five Diamond conference cycle is to address the principal issues that emerging market firms face when transnationalizing. The conferences are organized by Fundação Dom Cabral (Brazil), Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment (Columbia University – USA), Indian School of Business (India), Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO (Russia), and Fudan University School of Management (China).

The first conference in the cycle was held in April, 2008 at Columbia University in New York. There, participants from companies, academics, and home/host country institutions discussed a range of issues related to the OFDI process. The second conference will be held in August, 2009 at Fundação Dom Cabral in Nova Lima, Brazil. This conference will focus on the challenges emerging market MNEs face in the current economic context. The third conference will pay special attention to the policy positions of home country institutions. A focus will be on what emerging market home institutions can do to help their firms with the problems they face when transnationalizing. The fourth conference will focus on the challenges emerging market MNEs face in their host countries, both developing and developed. The final conference will review the entire range of issues related to the key players in the OFDI process. The aim will be to synthesize what has been learned in the preceding conferences, as well as, map the way forward.

In each conference, particular emphasis will be placed on a dialogue between corporate executives, government officials, and academics. In other words, the conferences look at the rise of emerging market MNEs in an integrated manner, addressing both corporate strategy and public policy-oriented issues.

This website refers to the second conference to be held at Fundação Dom Cabral (Brazil). The conference focuses on the company perspective. The title is: The Future of Transnationalization for Emerging Market Companies. The title specifies that the conference is primarily future oriented. While a historical background of emerging market MNCs will be discussed, the principal objective is to learn from the past in order to make better decisions in the future. Furthermore, the title specifies that we will focus on the transnationalization process for a certain group of companies; those from the emerging markets.