Cross-Border Program — Atlantique Business School's International Launch

A four-round, advanced higher-education strategy and international-programme-design simulation set inside Atlantique Business School (ABS), a triple-accredited French grande école in Nantes. On 14 September 2026 the board greenlights “Programme Atlantique Global” — a 14-month Executive Master in International Management, co-delivered with foreign partners, on a fixed €1.2M design-and-launch budget, breaking even at 45 paying executives (at €32,000 tuition) by cohort 2. Playing the Programs Director, you must build a credible international programme while navigating an unusual coopetition web: Lumière École de Management in Lyon is simultaneously ABS's rival for French candidates and its partner in a shared Singapore recruitment office. Round 1 (Diagnose): articulate the programme's value proposition, decide which capability — pricing, candidate pipeline, faculty IP — ABS must keep in-house, and rank three imperfect partners on a fit rubric (a prestige US school demanding €9,000/student, a strong-fit Singapore school, a high-demand Brazilian school with an accreditation gap). Round 2 (Plan): choose a partner architecture and draw the coopetition boundary with Lumière — which assets to pool and which to wall off — inside the €1.2M envelope, while pricing the Brazil accreditation risk. The cheapest path, full co-ownership, is also the one that most erodes ABS's defensible position. Round 3 (Decide): reconcile French, partner and learner calendars, embed cross-cultural pedagogy by design rather than translation, and set an enrolment target the cohort P&L breaks even on — at the conservative 45, not the optimistic 58. Round 4 (Recover): assemble the accreditation documentation package against the December 2026 deadline and present a go/no-go to the Dean. The scoring wires the concept's five common errors into sticky, run-defining penalty flags: brand chasing (prestige without modelling the €9,000/student share), ceding the coopetition boundary (full co-ownership leaks pricing and pipeline — the headline anti-pattern that gates the top verdict), export-not-design (low cultural alignment caps enrolment below break-even), ignoring accreditation timing (a Brazil rejection sinks €740K and slips the launch a year), optimistic enrolment (break-even built at the top of the demand range), and under-investment (one weak partner plus thin spend). Final KPIs track budget committed (of €1.2M), projected enrolment (vs the 45-student break-even), cultural alignment (/100), competitive-core protection (/100) and cost per student (€).