Learning Across Cultures: Finnish and Portuguese Students Negotiate in Practice

This article describes how the skills needed in business negotiations can be developed through experiential simulation-based learning. While technical knowledge and analytical skills remain fundamental, they are often insufficient on their own to ensure successful outcomes in complex business negotiation situations. In an era of global supply chains, digital transformation, and international collaboration, professionals must also possess strong interpersonal skills, including communication, teamwork, adaptability, and intercultural competence. (Nasir & Butt, 2025.)

As a simulation-based learning activity, the negotiation exercise reflected an authentic international business context and supported the development of future skills. The exercise progressed through multiple pedagogically structured phases and was organised in collaboration with E³UDRES² Jamk University of Applied Sciences (Jamk) and Polytechnic University of Setúbal (IPS).

University alliances enable international collaboration

As the world around us is constantly changing, the competencies required in future working life are also evolving. To keep pace with these changes, higher education institutions (HEIs) must rethink their approaches to educating future talent. Bilderback and Thompson (2025) suggest that HEIs should adopt interdisciplinary approaches, promote the use of experiential learning, and build global partnerships.

This shift in competence requirements has also been recognised at the policy level across Europe. One key milestone in this development occurred in 2017, when French President Emmanuel Macron first suggested that European Universities alliances should be established (European University Association, n.d.), exactly for the reason of fostering and strengthening transnational collaboration. Since that initial proposal, 65 alliances in 35 countries have been formed (European Parliamentary Research Service, 2025). These alliances aim to build long-term joint strategies and collaboration that enable seamless mobility opportunities for students and staff, as well as support research initiatives (European Commission, n.d.). From a practical point of view for the alliance members, this can include for example sharing best practices, closer teaching collaboration, and a shared application for research funding.

Within this broader European framework, Jamk represents a concrete example of such collaboration. Jamk became part of one of these university alliances called E³UDRES² in 2022. The shared vision between the nine partners highlights that the alliance is a pioneering engaged and entrepreneurial university that integrates education, research, innovation, and social engagement (E³UDRES², n.d.; E³UDRES², 2022; Escola Superior de Ciências Empresariais, Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal, 2022).

Supporting university students’ skills in changing operating environment

Digitalization and artificial intelligence are changing operating methods extensively. While organizations previously focused on operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness, the emphasis has now shifted to how technologies such as artificial intelligence can be utilized as tools for sustainability, innovation, and strategic collaboration. (Saihi et al., 2026.)

As a result of technological development, attention is being drawn back to traditional collaboration skills. Nasir & Butt (2025) state that human factors are still needed in collaboration between companies. Interaction between people is an important part of business relationships. Business relationships are difficult to replicate, and the resources that create long-term competitive advantage are hard to imitate. Business meetings and negotiations make good interaction skills important, and even crucial to the long-term success of organizations (Nasir & Butt, 2025). These emerging competence demands raise the question of how they can be effectively developed in higher education.

Being an entrepreneurial university does not mean educating only future entrepreneurs but rather equips students with an entrepreneurial mindset (EM). Based on a systematic literature review, Daspit et al. (2023) suggest that EM is a cognitive perspective through which individuals create value by identifying and exploiting opportunities, making decisions in situations with limited information, and demonstrating adaptability and resilience in uncertain and complex environments. There are numerous ways to foster an entrepreneurial mindset but as Rodrigues (2023) argues the learning cycle includes learning by doing, reflecting on it, building ideas and testing them in practice. These competence goals align closely with the changes currently reshaping business practices.

Experiential learning emphasizes learning as a continuous process in which individuals construct knowledge through experience, reflection, and active experimentation, providing a strong theoretical foundation for simulation-based pedagogy (Kolb, 2014). Simulations can be used to practice both technical skills and non‑technical “soft” skills (Silvennoinen & Aksovaara, 2025). Experiential learning activities have been associated with the development of key working-life skills, particularly communication, teamwork, problem-solving, and confidence (Duchatelet et al., 2024). Importantly, the effectiveness of these activities is closely linked to the level of authenticity in the learning context. Learning outcomes appear to be strengthened when tasks and interactions resemble real-world professional situations, highlighting the importance of designing authentic learning experiences in higher education (Duchatelet et al., 2024).

From this perspective, simulation-based pedagogy can be understood as implementing experiential learning by situating it within an authentic working-life context. Building on this pedagogical framework, simulation-based activities can be designed to replicate authentic business processes and to provide students with opportunities to apply knowledge in realistic interactional settings. The following negotiation exercise process illustrates how these pedagogical principles can be implemented in practice.

Negotiation exercise process

In line with experiential learning principles derived from Kolb (2014), the exercise engaged students in a process that combined written communication, preparation, and a live negotiation session. In the exercise, students took on the roles of buyers and sellers and were assigned to negotiation pairs, where they conducted a simulated business negotiation process mirroring real-world procurement and sales interactions.

The simulation exercise was conducted in collaboration between Jamk University of Applied Sciences (Jamk) and the Polytechnic University of Setúbal (IPS). Business Simulation has been running at IPS for more than twenty years, but this was the first time that an international counterparty had been involved in the negotiation training. It is a 21ECTS compulsory unit in the final year of the bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Finance. The Jamk participants were students from the Bachelor’s Degree Programme in Logistics Engineering. The exercise was conducted as part of the Procurement and Business Networks courses. A total of 150 students participated in the negotiation exercise, 81 students from Jamk and 69 students from Setubal.

The exercise began with a launch event and the formation of negotiation pairs, after which students initiated communication via email. IPS students acted as sellers and Jamk students as buyers. In this phase, the buyers prepared and sent a request for quotation (RFQ), while the sellers responded by drafting a quotation. The process continued with iterative email communication, during which students developed pre-contract documents, defined negotiation targets, and jointly prepared an agenda for the meeting. Students were also responsible for arranging the negotiation meeting and coordinating communication through digital platforms. The core of the exercise consisted of a live negotiation session conducted online, where students engaged in role-based interaction to negotiate terms and reach an agreement within a limited time frame. This was followed by a final phase, in which students completed and submitted the negotiated documents, further reinforcing the connection between the negotiation process and its outcomes. 

Through this structured, multi-phase process, exercise enabled students to practice realistic, work-related communication, thus putting experiential learning into practice. It provided opportunities to practice both technical and business skills related to documentation and decision making as well as soft skills such as communication, collaboration, and negotiation in an authentic international context. This supports the development of key workplace skills identified in experiential learning research.

Conclusions after the negotiation exercise

The insights gained from this simulation highlight broader implications for competence development and pedagogical design in higher education. Skills acquired were oral performance in English, preparations and the quality of the presentation, coverage of the required content, and the negotiation itself. What it had no column for was that the students were enjoying it. The exercise gave students opportunities to practice professional communication, respond to unexpected situations, and engage in intercultural interaction.

The competence at issue sits outside the technical content of either module. Communicating in a foreign language, reading an unfamiliar counterpart, holding a position under uncertainty and repairing a misunderstanding in real time are not accounting, and they are not acquired by being mentioned. Research with management students in Portugal has shown that constructs of this kind – psychological capital, emotional intelligence – can be deliberately developed through experiential intervention rather than left to chance (Gomes da Costa et al., 2021, Godinho & Moreira, in press.); that study used a controlled design this operation did not, and is cited here for the construct, not for equivalence. Every company enrolled in Business Simulation that semester was assigned a Finnish counterpart, so taking part did not depend on being mobile, being available, being confident in English, or being the kind of student who volunteers for extras. Take-up then had to be earned rather than assumed (and, as reported above, 86 % of the teams turned up).

The exercise also highlighted several practical considerations for the design of international simulation-based learning activities in the next round. One of the clearest lessons concerned the need for greater transparency regarding participants’ roles, responsibilities, and timelines. The remedy is straightforward and requires minimal resources: a single shared document distributed at the launch session that specifies what each group is expected to deliver, by when, and which tasks depend on the actions of the other party. Importantly, such an approach does not require harmonisation of curricula or assessment practices across institutions. Indeed, the asymmetry between the courses is worth preserving. The exercise was effective precisely because it served different pedagogical purposes for each cohort, functioning as a procurement negotiation for one group and as a business transaction with accounting implications for the other. Consequently, students did not need to undertake identical tasks; rather, they benefited from understanding the objectives, constraints, and expectations of their counterparts.

The exercise brought together two partner universities in a shared spirit of enthusiasm and collaboration. Through joint planning meetings, lecturers from both universities worked together to find a common topic that would resonate with students on both sides.

The result was more than a classroom exercise – it became an important collaborative project for lecturers and students alike. Beyond building negotiation and communication skills, the exercise supported students’ broader professional growth and helped prepare them for the collaborative, cross-cultural demands of future working life.