Dr Tatiana Zalan

Tatiana Zalan graduated with first-class honours in foreign language teaching and spent over ten years working in Bulgaria in state-owned enterprises and a private start-up. After migrating to Adelaide (Australia) with her family in 1993, Tatiana worked with the National Australia Bank (International Department) and, on completion of her MBA (Adelaide Graduate School of Business), with Welding Industries of Australia in a marketing role. In 2003, Tatiana finished her PhD in international strategy and joined the faculty of the Department of Management, University of Melbourne, where she taught international business, strategy and management at undergraduate and post-graduate levels. In 2005 she was awarded the Dean’s Certificate for Excellence in Post-Graduate Teaching.

In addition to teaching at the University of Melbourne, Tatiana has also undertaken consultancy work and has taught strategy and international business on short programs for post-graduates and executives. During 2006, she was a visiting scholar at the Melbourne Business School (the leading business school in Australia) and the International Institute for Management Development (IMD – Lausanne), the world leader in executive education, where she worked on joint research projects and attended numerous classroom sessions. In June 2007, Tatiana returned to Adelaide to join the IGSB.

Tatiana’s research is focussed on understanding what explains the success and failure of international firms and what drives a firm’s performance. She has published in national and international journals, and contributed book chapters, monographs and articles in the media in this area. Tatiana is a major contributor to the book ‘The Internationalisation Strategies of Small-Country Firms: The Australian Experience of Globalisation” (Edward Elgar, 2007). More recently, Tatiana has become interested in internationalisation strategies of firms from emerging economies. She reviews regularly for national and international journals and is on the book review board of the Journal of International Business Studies.

Tatiana’s major interest outside work is family and friends. Having worked and lived in three countries, Tatiana is fluent in English, Russian and Bulgarian.

• Strategic Management of Global Firms
• Entrepreneurship & Innovation
• Global Entrepreneurship
• Qualitative Research Methods

Academy of Management

Academy of International Business

Australia New Zealand Academy of International Business

Associate Fellow, Australian Institute of Management (AFAIM)

PhD (Flinders University of South Australia)

MBA (Adelaide Graduate School of Business)

BEd (Moscow)

Cert. in International Business (Aust. Institute of Exports)

• Strategic management of complex global firms
• Internationalisation strategies of firms from peripheral economies and emerging markets
• International entrepreneurship, part. born global firms

• Topics for potential supervision

• The unifying theme of the topics listed below is what has been recently identified as THE big question in international strategy (Peng, 2003): What explains the success and failure of international firms?
• Strategies of internationalising firms from emerging markets. Research on strategies / business models of firms from emerging markets (particularly from BRIC - Brazil, Russia, India and China) seeking to expand internationally is in its infancy. Yet companies like Haier (China), CVRD (Brazil), Tata Steel (India) and Evraz (Russia) have become or quickly becoming world leaders in their industries. Some of the most critical issues here are - What enables the emerging giants to defy the traditional obstacles posed by their emerging market location and successfully become globally competitive? What aspects of their countriesÍ business heritage can be leveraged as a source of advantage in the next round of competition? What aspects will need to be abandoned? This topic would suit a potential PhD candidate located or having connections in one of those emerging markets.
• International entrepreneurship / born global firms. Although the past decade has produced a significant volume of research on early and rapidly internationalising firms, it has been fragmented and lacking a cohesive theoretical framework (Liesch et al., 2007). As the most comprehensive review of the literature to date suggests (Rialp et al., 2005: 162), ńthe greatest problem facing scholars in the emergent field of international entrepreneurship and of early internationalising firms is the sheer paucity of research conducted to dateî. A research project which aims at filling some of the theoretical and empirical gaps in the existing literature is a welcome opportunity.
• Origins of competitive advantage in young entrepreneurial firms. The influential resource-based view of the firm (e.g., Barney, 1991) suggests that a firmÍs sustainable competitive advantage is due to firm resources that are valuable, rare, and hard to imitate and substitute. But how do firms, particularly young entrepreneurial firms venturing abroad, develop these resources? What are the origins of the firmsÍ competitive advantages?
• Control and coordination in complex global firms. Any proposal that deals with how complex global firms (i.e., firms diversified across product and geographical markets) manage transformational change and / or coordination and control issues is most welcome.

I am able to provide media comment in the following areas of expertise:

Discipline:

• International Strategies of Australian Firms
• Internationalisation of the wine industry
• Global entrepreneurship