Emerging markets are changing the face of the global economy, often becoming dominant in technological innovation. In this course, you will explore emerging markets, examining both the high rates of economic growth as well as the risks involved for investors. You’ll discover how to identify the six key dimensions of risk when doing a business deal or investing in an emerging market. You’ll apply this knowledge by weighing those risks differently and balancing them all against the potential benefits of a deal.

You will apply concepts through case studies of past deals in emerging markets, preparing you to successfully complete activities using an effective risk-scoring system. You’ll also evaluate the investment risks in a prospectus for an emerging markets-focused mutual fund. By the end of this course, you will have gained in-depth knowledge of real-world scenarios, highlighting the benefits, challenges, and lessons learned from doing deals in emerging markets.

Emerging markets have caused a major shift in the global economic and geopolitical landscape. The potential for high growth generates significant investment interest in emerging markets. The benefits apply to the foreign investors who provide a much-needed influx of capital as well as the emerging markets as they transition from an agriculture-based economy to a more developed economy based on the production of goods and services.

In this course, you will explore the concept of the E20+1 (the top 20 emerging markets and China), discuss these entities, and examine the growth of emerging market multinationals. You’ll discover the competition they represent for well-established firms in other economies.

You will also delve into the particular challenges that emerging markets face as they seek investment. What makes some regions stronger than others for the rise of developing economies? You’ll consider these factors and identify which countries are moving up the list of the top 20 across the globe. In addition, you’ll examine the drivers of emerging markets, the different ways they compete in a global marketplace, and how they use innovation to gain an edge.

Developing economies in emerging markets often gain strength through new business enterprises that result from dramatic changes. These changes are examples of disruptive innovation that propel emerging market multinational firms to do business in new ways or create new products and services.

In this course, you will examine how disruptive innovation can come in many forms, such as e-commerce. Developing economies often need to find ways not only to grow business enterprises but also to reach customers who need a system of currency that gives them access to purchasing power. You’ll explore the types of currency emerging markets use and how they aim to expand the reach to new customers.

Improving the lives of a nation’s people is often a major goal of countries with emerging markets. You’ll explore how they strive to reach this goal through business development that focuses on environmental, social, and governance priorities.

Innovation is often the path to success for emerging markets. Developing economies can gain an edge over their established counterparts through new discoveries in products, services, and business processes.

In this course, you will examine different levels and types of innovation. You’ll discover the skills teams need to innovate, both incrementally as the business currently operates and disruptively as the industry evolves. What attributes help individuals be more innovative? You will explore how top innovators excel in the discovery process.

Protecting these discoveries via options like patents, copyrights, and non-disclosure agreements is critical, so you will examine the various strategies for safeguarding your organization’s intellectual property. Lessons learned from this course will help you foster innovation originating in emerging markets, protect your discoveries, and build a more innovative team at your organization.

eCornell Online Workshops are live, interactive 3-hour learning experiences led by Cornell faculty experts. These premium short-format sessions focus on AI topics and are designed for busy professionals who want to gain immediately applicable skills and strategic perspectives. Workshops include faculty presentations, breakout discussions, guided hands-on practice, and downloadable resources.

The AI Workshops All-Access Pass provides you with unlimited participation for 6 months from your date of purchase. Whether you choose to attend one workshop per month, or several per week, the All-Access Pass will allow you to customize your AI journey and stay on top of the latest AI trends.

Workshops cover a range of cutting-edge AI topics applicable across industries, hosted by Cornell faculty at the forefront of their fields. Whether you are just getting started with AI, seeking to build your AI skillset, or exploring advanced applications of AI, Workshops will provide you with an action-oriented learning experience for immediate application in your career. Sample Workshops include:

  • Work Smarter with AI Agents: Individual and Team Effectiveness
  • Leading AI Transformation: Bigger Than You Imagine, Harder Than You Expect
  • Using AI at Work: Practical Choices and Better Results
  • Search & Discoverability in the Era of AI
  • Don’t Just Prompt AI – Govern it
  • AI-Powered Product Manager
  • Leverage AI and Human Connection to Lead through Uncertainty

How It Works

Frequently Asked Questions

Fast-growing economies can offer outsized opportunities, but they also come with uncertainty that is easy to underestimate until you have to make an investment or strategy decision. Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate helps you build a clearer, more disciplined way to evaluate where the upside is real, what could derail it, and how to act with confidence in complex markets.

In this certificate program, authored by faculty from the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, you will explore emerging markets as underfunded growth opportunities while building practical skills for measuring and comparing risk across markets. You’ll also examine how innovation and entrepreneurship show up differently across regions, and how those dynamics shape competitive advantage at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

The result is a stronger point of view and a set of tools you can bring directly into your work, whether you are advising clients, allocating capital, managing a portfolio, or shaping international strategy inside a multinational organization.

If you want a practical risk framework, sharper global strategy judgment, and a more confident way to identify and communicate emerging-market opportunities, you should choose Cornell's Emerging Markets Certificate.

Many online programs teach global investing and strategy as content to consume. Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate is designed to help you practice decision making in the conditions that make emerging markets hard: incomplete information, institutional gaps, and macro volatility.

You learn with an expert facilitator who provides feedback on your work so you can test your assumptions, pressure-check your analysis, and refine how you communicate risks and opportunities. That human-centered design matters when you are building judgment, not just memorizing concepts.

The Emerging Markets Certificate’s subject matter is also distinctive. You will work with a structured, multi-dimensional approach to risk so you can rank and compare markets, and you’ll explore how innovation and entrepreneurship can be a competitive advantage in emerging economies. The emphasis stays on practical tools that translate into real investment, advisory, and market-entry decisions.

Enrolling in Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate also provides you with a 6-month All-Access Pass to eCornell's live online AI Workshops, interactive sessions led by world-class Cornell faculty that combine Ivy League insight with practical applications for busy professionals. Each 3-hour Workshop features structured instruction, guided practice, and real tools to build competitive AI capabilities, plus the opportunity to connect with a global cohort of growth-oriented peers. While AI Workshops are not required, they enhance certificate programs through:

  • Integrating AI perspectives across most curricula
  • Responding to emerging AI developments and trends
  • Offering direct engagement with Cornell faculty at the forefront of AI research

Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate is designed for professionals who make, influence, or communicate decisions about growth and risk across developing economies.

The Emerging Markets Certificate is a strong fit if you work in, or alongside, functions such as:

  • Venture capital or private equity investing
  • Investment advising, asset management, portfolio management, or investment analysis
  • Insurance roles connected to international exposure and risk
  • Corporate leadership or management in multinational organizations
  • Consulting roles that support market entry, expansion, or cross-border strategy

Because the focus is on practical evaluation and strategy tools, Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate can be valuable whether you are assessing where to allocate capital, shaping a market-entry recommendation, or explaining emerging-market risk to internal and external stakeholders.

Your work in Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate is designed to translate concepts into decisions you can use on the job. Projects typically ask you to apply the program’s frameworks to an emerging market, region, or business situation that is relevant to your role.

You can expect project work such as:

  • Scoring and comparing one or more emerging markets using a structured, multi-dimensional risk framework
  • Identifying key business and financial risks in a target market and outlining mitigations you would use as an investor, operator, or advisor
  • Building a high-level emerging-market strategy that connects opportunity sizing, competitive advantage, and local execution realities
  • Analyzing how innovation and entrepreneurship in a specific context can create or erode competitive advantage at the individual, team, or organizational level
  • Developing scenario considerations for macro volatility, such as currency or inflation shifts, and how those scenarios could change your decision

Across Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate program, the goal is to help you leave with clearer analysis, better questions to ask, and more structured recommendations you can share with stakeholders.

Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate equips you to make and defend better decisions about opportunity and risk in fast-growing, complex markets.

After completing the Emerging Markets Certificate program, you will be prepared to:

  • Examine emerging markets as underfunded growth opportunities
  • Identify and measure the business and financial risks of investing in emerging markets using a comprehensive and practical framework
  • Explore global strategy formulation and implementation in emerging markets
  • Discover different levels of innovation and entrepreneurship in emerging markets

Professionals who choose this program often look for practical decision tools they can use immediately at work, such as frameworks for evaluating country and political risk, approaches to market entry and partner selection, and techniques for navigating institutional gaps, regulation, and informal markets. They also commonly seek stronger scenario planning for currency, inflation, and macro volatility, plus a clearer way to communicate emerging market opportunities and risks to stakeholders and build resilient strategies across regions and contexts.

What truly sets eCornell apart is how our programs unlock genuine career transformation. Learners earn promotions to senior positions, enjoy meaningful salary growth, build valuable professional networks, and navigate successful career transitions.

Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate is delivered through our Mentored Learning format and consists of 4 courses requiring approximately 9 to 11 hours of study for each, or 40 hours of coursework in total. You have up to 6 months to complete all necessary components, though you may finish in fewer than 6 months depending on your schedule. The program allows you to follow an individualized structured learning agenda with a flexible approach that includes interaction and project feedback with your expert facilitator. You'll also complete graded projects that let you apply learning concepts to on-the-job situations.

Throughout the Emerging Markets Certificate program, your expert facilitator provides personalized feedback on all projects and offers opportunities for 1:1 mentoring sessions as you progress. This guided approach allows you to ask questions and receive support as you work through practical applications and real-world scenarios.

Country and political risk can change the viability of a deal or market-entry plan even when the underlying demand story looks strong. In Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate, you will use a practical framework that categorizes risk across six dimensions and applies a risk-scoring approach so you can rank and compare emerging markets in a consistent way.

You will also strengthen the supporting analysis that makes those scores useful in real decisions, including how to think about institutional gaps, regulation, and informal markets, and how to pressure-test plans against macro volatility. The goal of Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate program is not perfect prediction but a clearer, more repeatable way to ask the right questions and communicate your conclusions to stakeholders.

Innovation is often a primary growth engine in developing economies, but it can look very different than it does in mature markets. Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate helps you examine how emerging markets use innovation to build competitive advantage at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

You will explore how innovation and entrepreneurship dynamics can affect strategy formulation and implementation, including what it means for where to compete, how to win, and how to execute when ecosystems and institutions may be uneven. By tying innovation concepts to market opportunity and risk, you gain a more practical lens you can use in investing, advising, or corporate growth planning.

Making a sound recommendation is only half the job. You also need to explain it in a way that decision makers can act on. Cornell’s Emerging Markets Certificate emphasizes structured thinking so you can present emerging market opportunities and risks with more clarity and credibility.

You will build your ability to compare markets using a consistent risk-scoring approach, translate complex conditions into decision-relevant categories, and frame scenarios that show how macro changes could alter outcomes. This kind of structure makes it easier to align internal teams, support investment committee discussions, and communicate recommendations to clients or senior leaders.

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