Dear Participants!

Starting with the talks concerning to the cooperation of OHIO and SZE univer-sities a year ago we did not even expect that a common project could be real-ized already this summer. It is delightful to give a chance to our students from both sides to work together in solving a problem in CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) business environment and in proving their knowledge and skills. Working in the projects the students are able to meet managers and expertise from different business fields, they face real business problems, so they have possibility to practice and prove their gained theoretical knowledge.As there is a deep gap between the real business procedures and the theoreti-cal approach of describing the economic processes and situations on aca-demic level, it is very important to take part in as many programs as possible.

The metaproject is therefore useful from one side to the American students because they get experiences in Hungarian Business Culture and from the other side it is instructive for the Hungarian students because they learn what kind of knowledge capability and moreover way of thinking the American students have. And there are additional benefits as well! The third parties are the companies, who can once benefit from these projects fulfilling and realizing the results of the problem solutions, second learn what the educated students are capable.

Although the main target of the common OHIO-SZE joint program is to give learning and skill experiences it is also a good opportunity to meet people with different educational and even cultural background. And last but not least to enjoy time spending together and have fun among to-be friends.

I wish every team successful work together; let this first CIBED-SZE Joint Project be a strong basis for the profitable future cooperation of our universities!

Gyõr, 3rd of July 2004.

Maria Raffai Ph.D._________
Professor of Széchenyi István University

Preliminaries

This document is based on the preliminary negotiations at the Szechenyi Istvan University with

· Czinege, Imre Rector of the Széchenyi István University (see as SZE in following text)
· Keifer, John
.		 Director of Center for International Business Education and Development, College of Business (CIBED), OHIO University, Atehns (USA),
· Cutright, Ken  Professor of the CIBED OHIO University, Atehns (USA),
· Scharle, Péter Vice Rector responsible for education and scientific research (SZE) and
· Raffai, Mária Professor responsible for BIS Course (SZE)

On these meetings, held in October 2003 in Gyor, the attendants agreed in future cooperation between the universities that concerns mainly on the common students' miniprojects.

As the county town Gyor is dedicated the most industrialized and innovating region of Hungary, the companies and their business programs can be effective playground for practicing business problem solving, analyzing and finding solutions . The other reason why the cooperation is useful is the wide education spectrum of the SZIU, as there are different faculties (see the web sites: http://rs1.sze.hu/~raffai/chair/ or www.sze.hu ), such as

- Faculty for Business and Law,
- Faculty for Engineering in which the education of business information systems plays a great role.

At our university there are altogether 6 000 regular and more than 3 500 open university students in different courses.

The two weeks program for settling the mini business projects will be held at the first half of July 2004, namely between 03.07.2004.-17.07.2004. Discussing the leaders of the enterprises they give a chance to the students to learn how the Hungarian companies and even the enterprises of a new European Union Member (Hungary) try to survive, how important is to fit into the highly developed cultures, and what kind of problems are needed to solve.