Master of Business Administration

Increases in product variety and customization in the past few years have

posed challenges to firms in terms of delivering products to customers

faster and more efficiently. With the prevalence of the usage of the

Internet for business, electronic business transformations are occurring in

every business. One of the fundamental enablers of electronic commerce

is effective supply chain management. Thus, supply chain management

has become the focus of attention of senior management in the industry

today.

This module considers management of a supply chain in a global environment from a managerial perspective. The focus is on analysis, management, and improvement of supply chain processes and their adaptation to the electronic business environment. The module focuses on six topics: Inventory and Information Management; Distribution and Transportation; Global Operations; Supplier Management; Management of Product Variety; and Electronic Supply Chains. Several new concepts including Prognostic Supply Chains, Build-to-Order, Collaborative Forecasting, Delayed Differentiation, Cross Docking, Global Outsourcing, and Efficient Consumer Response will also be discussed. At the end of the module, a student will have the necessary tools and metrics to evaluate a current supply chain and recommend design changes to supply chain processes.

This course covers core concepts in accounting, finance, and microeconomics relevant to running a business. The course begins with finance for business, including the time value of money, the trade-off between risk and return, and arbitrage. It gives managers a strengthened knowledge in finance that can be applied in their professional careers. The topics covered include how to move cash flows in time, the methods and principles of capital budgeting, valuation of bonds and stocks, how to characterize risk and return, and options pricing with applications to managerial decisions. The course then builds on the student’s knowledge of finance to introduce accounting and examines the subject from the viewpoint of users external to the organization. Topics include transaction analysis; the accounting cycle; financial-statement preparation, use, and analysis; revenue recognition and cost measurement; present value; and problems in financial-accounting disclosure. This course concludes with microeconomic theory and its application to problems faced by managers. Topics include supply and demand, consumer behaviour, pricing when a firm has market power, and contracts.

In this module students will gain the capacity to understand how firms work in a global context, incorporating a broad, future-oriented, systems- based approach that incorporates data, information and insights from diverse perspectives and sources. This module is designed to convey the key concepts of strategic thinking and how they fit into the larger context of management strategy and decisions. Students will be presented with both the practical “how” and the fundamental “why” in the light of contributions from behavioural science, economics, and statistics.

This module examines how leaders can most effectively use the resources of their team members to achieve business outcomes. The module develops managerial and leadership competencies, focussing on how key improvements in the general strategy and techniques of managing people can produce outcomes more significant than isolated improvements to employee performance. The module provides students with concepts to support them across their careers as they continue to develop effective delegation, management strategy, and engagement with people inside of an organisation.

In this module students will deepen and extend their ability to create and

maintain high-quality relationships with people who come from a wide

range of backgrounds and possess different points of view in order to

create and execute processes that produce successful outcomes and

results.

This module teaches business managers and leaders to reflect critically on

concepts from the behavioural sciences that can be applied to a fast

changing business environment to improve their abilities to lead and

manage in organisations.

Behavioural frameworks for individuals, teams, and organisations are

evaluated critically and discussed in the context of real-world cases.

tutorial groups provide practice in problem-based teamwork,

communicating in specialist and non-specialist registers, and in applying

the frameworks in practice.

In this module, students will develop specialised and multidisciplinary capacities to generate creative solutions and alternatives to existing business issues by refining their ability to lead processes that stimulate and manage creativity in a business. Students will reflect critically on templates and methods for designing, implementing, and assessing processes that introduce creativity to real work situations. The module will engage with both the theoretical frameworks and practical methods or tools for cultivating practices of creativity in response to real business challenges. Ultimately, the module cultivates skills for autonomous managers to lead creative projects, people, and ventures, and to oversee the processes that keep them on track.

This module enables students to develop the skills and concepts needed to ensure the ongoing contribution of a firm's operations to its competitive position. It helps them to understand the complex processes underlying the development and manufacture of products as well as the creation and delivery of services. Throughout the module, students will receive a comprehensive overview of technology utilisation to drive a competitive

advantage for company operations. Students explore various technology

solutions for business process automation, including value proposition

analysis across organisation functions.

Specific topics addressed include process analysis; cross-functional and

cross-firm integration; product development; information technology;

and technology and operations strategy.

Additionally, students will analyse how technology can be leveraged to

improve product development during the four lifecycle phases. The

module provides a detailed overview of the impact of technology on

various operating models such as manufacturing, supply chain

management, customer-facing, product development, and support

functions.

This module will approach leadership by identifying practices that researchers and practitioners have shown to be the most effective. Through these processes, students will gain a broad range of skills. This module examines how leaders can most effectively use the resources of their team members to achieve business outcomes. The module develops managerial and leadership competencies, focusing on how key improvements in the general strategy and techniques of managing people can produce outcomes more significant than isolated improvements to employee performance. The module provides students with concepts to

support them across their careers as they continue to develop effective

delegation, management strategy, and engagement with people inside of

an organisation.

Specific topics covered include managing a diverse workforce; self-

leadership; perception pitfalls; decision making; conflict resolution;

emotional intelligence; improving performance; team structure.

Managers require a broad array of negotiating skills to implement business solutions – this requires advanced knowledge of negotiation models, the competence to select the right strategy, and the tactical skills to achieve desired outcomes through negotiation In addition to studying key negotiation theories, the module develops skills in negotiation, providing students with the opportunity to test and improve their abilities through discussions that model negotiation scenarios, through the use of case studies, and through reflection and feedback.

Students will review and test various approaches to negotiated conflictresolution (at small personal scales and large organisational scales). Themodule builds competencies in developing an effective professional andpersonal style of negotiation.

The role of marketing management in organisations is to identify and measure the needs and wants of consumers, to determine which targets the business can serve, to decide on the appropriate offerings to serve these markets, and to determine the optimal methods of pricing, promoting, and distributing the firm’s offerings. Successful organisations are those that integrate the objectives and resources of the organisation with the needs and opportunities of the marketplace. The goal of this module is to facilitate student achievement of these goals regardless of career path. This module addresses how to design and implement the best combination of marketing efforts to carry out a firm's strategy in its target markets. Specifically, this module helps to develop the student's understanding of how the firm can benefit by creating and delivering value to its customers, and stakeholders, and develop skills in applying the analytical concepts and tools of marketing to such decisions as segmentation and targeting, branding, pricing, distribution, and promotion.

This module is designed to provide students with the skills and

knowledge to influence and lead social impact in business and impact

contexts. By the conclusion of this module, students should have a strong

foundation in social impact and social change, including approaches to funding impact, scaling programmes, and interventions, public-private partnerships, corporate engagement, impact investment decision-making, blended capital, and approaches to intentional impact. The module will pivot around multiple case studies addressing social issues through which students learn and test social impact frameworks and concepts. Once students have gained a mastery of perspectives and methodologies necessary to consider and address a social issue from the ground up, they will next learn to identify and utilise effective measures of outputs and progress and explore the core levers and potentials to change outcomes for people, communities and market systems.

This module provides students with advanced methods and frameworks for understanding customer needs, and for translating those needs into a program of research and product development that can be used to create a successful new product or service. It equips students with skills to generate new product hypotheses, to research the potential of a new product or entrepreneurial venture, and to adjust the product offering to fit the needs of customers. This module instills the all-important distinction between a ‘bright idea’ and a ‘business opportunity’ in new product creation. Using disciplined methods of customer and market analysis, students will gain advanced abilities in defining the core customers for a new product or entrepreneurial venture. Students will study the complex combination of factors that influence customers to adopt a new product or service. They will gain a comprehensive understanding of what makes entrepreneurial selling

unique, and why it is valuable to integrate key aspects of selling andmarketing activities in a new venture. Students will learn how to selectpotential customers through data collection, including customerinterviews, and students will learn how to analyse that data to refine aproduct offering.

The objective of this module is to provide students the basic data analysis and modelling concepts and methodologies using probability theory. Basic statistics concepts and probability concepts will be covered. Fundamental data analysis and hypothesis techniques will be covered. Further data modelling methodologies such as Hidden Markov Models and Bayesian networks will be introduced. Students successfully completing this module will have gained a solid understanding of probabilistic data modelling, interpretation, and analysis and thus have formed an important basis to solve practical statistics and data analysis-related problems arising in real-world business situations. The techniques discussed are applied in all functional areas within business organisations including accounting, finance, human resource management, marketing, operations, and strategic planning.

The Digital Action Programme for Business Administration provides a capstone course in which students deepen and apply their learning through a 'Digital Action Programme' (DAP). In the DAP, students are grouped into cohorts (typically five students) and must work both individually and together on a specific, real, contemporary business consultancy problem related to their specialisation (Data Analytics; Marketing; Finance; International Business; DEI), normally proposed by a cooperating organisation (corporation or non-profit), which results in a comprehensive solution proposal.

The Final Report consists of the following components:

1. Title, abstract, and table of contents

2. Industry and competition report

3. Report on the cooperating organisation

4. Report on the business problem

5. Report on the potential solutions analysing their merits and weakness

6. Recommended solution with an implementation plan

7. Full financial model

8. Bibliography

Items 2-7 (which may be adjusted in coordination with the cohort

teacher), each have a Directly Responsible Individual (the DRI), who

undertakes all the research for the section of the Final Report. Each DRI

must elicit feedback and review from other members of the cohort, who

must contribute feedback to every other section of the report.

The Final Presentation is typically a slide deck between 20 and 40 slides,

and it is a fully collaborative project.

The Final Reflection is a reflective analysis on the DAP experience, and it

must contain an individual report from each member and a joint

concluding statement.

The course concludes with each member providing a peer review of their

cohort peers, including strengths and areas of improvement.

The timeline of the course assignments is set by the cohort at the start,

and adjusted in consultation with the teacher as the DAP progresses. The

outline of assignment submissions is as follows:

Unit 1

● Standard cohort charter discussed, revised, and agreed

● Project timeline with designated areas of responsibility

Unit 2-3

● Draft title and abstract for the final report

● Industry information gathering

● Draft report on the cooperating organisation

● Draft report on the industry landscape

Unit 4-5

● Problem and opportunity diagnose

● Creative generation of varied potential solutions

Unit 6

● Evaluation of potential solutions

● Preliminary financial models of potential solutions

Unit 7-8

● Recommended solution

● Implementation plan

Unit 9-10

● Final Report

● Final Presentation

● Final Reflection and cohort debrief

● Peer evaluation