course descriptions

Frameworks, concepts and tools for management and career effectiveness. Assessment of managerial strengths, weaknesses, and potential. Team building, public speaking, networking, decision making, creativity and problem solving. Career development techniques including data mining, job search, behavior based interviewing, and negotiation skills with practical application of those concepts. Restricted to MBA Students.

Accelerated survey of basic concepts underlying accounting in profit-oriented firms; concepts for decision making in manufacturing; content and interpretation of published financial statements; data measurement; product costing; budgeting.

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Formulation and estimation of statistical models consistent with a managerial objective. Decision making and forecast generation based on data derived from models.

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Survey of microeconomic concepts applied to managerial decisions. Competition. Market power. The firm, production, and cost. Pricing practices. Economics of information and innovation.

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Intellectual property law, including patent, copyright, trade secrets and trademark law. Impact on management decision making. International differences in intellectual property law and moves toward harmonization. Relationship to torts, contracts and antitrust.

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Content includes market and evolution of ERP systems, business process reengineering, process mapping, the ERP life cycle, ERP functionality, ERP bolt-ons, and ERP security and risk issues. Hands on experience with SAP, the ERP market leader. SAP modules taught include SD, PP, MM, HCM, FI/CO and WM.

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Investment and financing decisions by businesses with emphasis on technology-driven organizations in rapidly changing environments. Cash as the basis of asset valuation. Time value of money. Capital budgeting decisions under certainty and uncertainty. Capital market theory. Cost of capital. Capital structure theory and dividend policy. Cash management. Options and managerial implications. Derivatives and risk management.
Prerequisites: MBA 503, MBA 505

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This course continues and extends the discussion of the basic corporate financial management decision-making process begun in MBA 520. This course covers: an overview of financial management; valuing real assets and real options; risk management and derivatives; the role of financial leverage; optimal capital structure; conflicts between security holders and management; stockholder-bondholder conflicts; financial distress, bankruptcy and reorganization; corporate control and restructuring: mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, spinoffs and divestitures; corporate governance issues. This course fits in the Finance concentration.
Prerequisite: MBA 520

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Students in this course will continue to evaluate new and existing stocks for consideration for the class portfolio, but the overall course focus will be on the theory and empirical evidence that surrounds active portfolio management strategies, asset pricing, risk, return and performance evaluation.
Prerequisite: MBA 520

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This course is an advanced, research-based finance course and is designed to introduce students to cutting edge, state of the art concepts in finance. It is intended for students who have strong interest in understanding and applying the concepts underlying stock valuation.  Students will learn SAS programming and will conduct big data analytics.   Students will learn skills applicable for business analytics, consulting, corporate finance/valuation, mutual funds/hedge funds/pension funds, investment banking, forensic accounting, and securities litigation consulting.

Students will develop will learn SAS programming and statistical analysis, quantitative stock selection methods used in industry,  the trading mechanism in US equity markets, and basics of creating  diversified portfolio for a mutual fund.

Prerequisite: MBA 520

This course focuses on the importance of tax considerations in making business decisions. Accounting, finance, and strategy courses often ignore taxes, while traditional tax courses generally ignore the richness of the decision context in which tax factors operate. Through this course, you will develop a framework for understanding how taxes affect business strategy and financing decisions in a wide variety of settings. Three key themes are introduced: in any decision, one needs to consider all parties, all taxes, and all costs. The three themes are applied to such decision contexts as investments, compensation and pensions, organizational form, multinational ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and family tax planning. The ultimate goal is to provide you with a new approach to thinking about taxes (and all forms of government intervention) that will be valuable even as laws and governments change. This course fits in the Finance concentration.

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Theory and practice of financial management in the international arena, including spot and forward markets for foreign exchange, currency futures and options contracts, international arbitrage conditions, foreign exchange exposure, foreign trade financing instruments, direct and portfolio investment abroad, and the role of country risk in determining investments.

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This course is designed to teach managers how to use derivatives to maximize firm value through risk management. It introduces students to tools necessary for managers to effectively hedge with derivatives and protect firms from losses. Topics covered include the identification, management, evaluation, and monitoring of the financial price risks facing a corporation. These risks arise from unexpected changes in interest rates, foreign exchange rates, commodity prices and security prices. Rather than focusing on the details of pricing a variety of derivatives, the course is more concerned about how to use existing derivatives as well as financial innovation to manage risks in order to add value to the firm.

Survey of financial management problems at firms from initial formation to initial public offering. Financial components of business plan, design of financial information and control systems, sources of funds for small firms, financing rapid growth, firm valuation for initial public offerings, going public transactions.
Prerequisite: MBA 520

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Management of people in organizations. Processes of staffing, motivating, and managing within the cultures of technology-intensive organizations. Leadership. Diagnosis of organizational culture. Conflict management and negotiations. Innovation and change management.

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“Creativity” was recently cited as the most important leadership quality by over 1500 global CEOs in a recent IBM study.  As companies try to foster innovation, creativity in management – or a “design thinking” perspective – is receiving greater attention among managers.  The need for “creativity in management” has never been greater, as firms try to innovate and create value in their markets.

This course, offered in cooperation with faculty from the College of Design, will cover critical skills that can enhance creativity in a firm’s innovation activities, products, services, and business models.  Graduate students from the College of Design will participate in the course, offering a unique multidisciplinary perspective.  Course activities will include “design thinking” exercises, cases, mini-projects, guest speakers, and seminars.  Effective creativity and management perspectives in a variety of companies and industries will be highlighted.

For more information, contact Prof. Jon Bohlmann. The course counts as a concentration elective for both Innovation Management and Marketing.   

This class in the sequence develops major themes and strategies of Supply Chain Management relationships. The focus is on performance measurement, relationship assessment, negotiation, contracting, and managing conflict in business relationships in a globally integrated supply chain. In this context, relationships may exist between internal functional groups, as well as with suppliers and/or customers. The focus of the course is on collaboration and strategy execution. Emphasis is on for assessing, establishing metrics/expectations, contracting, and managing external business relationships in sourcing, logistics and operations. However, many of the concepts will be explored primarily from the perspective of the purchasing/sourcing perspective, and less emphasis will be placed on the marketing/sales perspective.

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In this course, a variety of tools and frameworks are presented in order to help students understand the basis behind effective logistics decision making and how it relates to broader issues in managing the entire supply chain and fulfilling the strategic objectives of a firm. The methods used to convey and develop these ideas include a mix of traditional lecture, interactive class discussion, case study analysis, spreadsheet exercises, and independent research. The course material is drawn from a number of sources, including a recently published textbook, recent articles from the popular business press, and articles from academic journals.

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Design and management of operations planning and control systems for manufacturing firms. Capacity management, master production scheduling, production activity control. Just-in-time and time-based competition concepts. Multi-week simulation of decision making in manufacturing environment.
Prerequisite: MBA 540

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This is a required capstone course for OM/SCM majors. The course is comprised of a team-based project working on a Supply Chain Resource Consortium (SCRC) partner company’s SCM issues. These projects will be as varied in scope as are company’s SC issues and improvement initiatives, but they will contain a specific, somewhat narrowly-focused set of deliverables. We anticipate a mix of projects that will generally center, or focus, on SC Relationships, SC Physical Flows and/or SC Information Flows, yet remain integrated across the supply chain issue that faces the company. The scope of the projects will be defined prior to, or early in, the semester of the class. Background and objectives, as well as key deliverables and milestones, along with deadlines will be established for the student teams. Students should expect to learn at two levels in the Practicum: first, they will study technical supply chain issues particular to each project; and second, they will learn the team-based, deadline-driven nature of supply chain initiatives in a real company setting. This course fits in the SCM concentration.

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Development of technology policy and strategy. Management and implementation of new technologies. Technology sourcing, technology forecasting and life cycles, economic and financial analysis of technology. Innovation process and impact on organizations.

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The first part of this course will provide an overview of service management from an integrated viewpoint with a focus on customer satisfaction. The material will integrate operations, marketing, strategy, information technology and organizational issues. Objectives include understanding the “state of the art” in service management strategies, mastering the tools for analyzing and optimizing the service experience, and analyzing the operational processes for managing the service encounter to achieve internal and external customer satisfaction. The second part of this course will examine organizational culture; it will provide an overview of aspects, artifacts, rituals and languages of organizational culture. Participants will learn tools and techniques for mapping an organization’s culture for the purpose of identifying opportunities for developing service innovations.

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Services depend on a successful co-production relationship of individuals from different organizations, with different organizational cultures. This course will focus on skills development to engage in that co-production relationship successfully, "read and speak" the culture of an organization using solid research tools, and use those skills in the practice of a service development within a particular organizational culture context.

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This course examines the major aspects of developing, analyzing, improving, and managing business processes. The focus is on processes, as opposed to functions. Virtually all businesses are made up of a series of sequential and/or parallel business processes, many of which cut across functional and organizational boundaries. The ability to understand, design, and manage these complex processes is a critical skill, and competent business process analysts, managers, and architects are in high demand in the job market. In this course we will examine business processes from a variety of perspectives. We will consider both strategic and executional issues critical to high-performance processes. We will also examine processes in a number of different industries and functional areas within firms, to identify similarities and differences of well run processes. While we will cover some key IT aspects of processes, the ultimate focus of our analysis is on business performance and business impact. The course will be practice-oriented. We will use cases, exercises, and discussions in order to learn and apply BPM skills and concepts.

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Life cycle view of organizing and managing technical projects, including project selection, planning, and execution. Methods for managing and controlling project costs, schedules, and scope. Techniques for assessing project risk. Use of popular project management software tools. Application of project management tools and methods to product development, software, and process reengineering projects.

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This course presents and utilizes an integrated approach to new product design, development, and launch with corporate-sponsored projects. Cross-disciplinary teams of students from management, engineering, and design apply the skills they learned in the foundation courses to develop a new product and prototype. The course provides a team experience of formulating, evaluating, and developing a new product concept.

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An overview of the field of consulting with primary emphasis on the application of consulting methods to address performance issues within organizations. Articulation of the key performance issues faced by organizations across a number of industries today. Overview of the generic issue-based consulting process: identifying and prioritizing issues, identifying root-causes of priority issues, developing interventions to address root-causes and measuring impact of interventions on peformance issues. Explanation of how the concepts, procedures and methods of issue-based consulting can be leveraged to address these performance issues. Application of Issue-Based Consulting concepts and procedures to organization issues via Case Analysis. Secondary emphasis will be placed on the management and operation of the Professional Services Firm. Overview of a generic consulting firm’s Management System (MS) including: Mission, Organization Structure, Roles and Responsibilities, Processes, Measurements, Policies, and Content/Resource Management. Overview of opportunities and challenges associated with working within the Professional Services field. This course fits in the Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship and Techology Commercialization concentrations.

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Market segmentation, targeting, and positioning. Channels of distribution, promotion strategy, product development strategy, and pricing strategy. Relationship marketing and marketing strategy. Applications in high-tech environments.

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Marketing Analytics is the art and science of developing and utilizing interactive marketing decision models to plan, implement, and analyze marketing strategies and tactics. Ever-changing marketplaces and the related computing environment are making an impact on the structure and content of the marketing manager’s job. Concurrently, marketing, as a profession, is so rapidly evolving that it is no longer based on its conceptual content alone. The new and emerging marketing increasingly looks like engineering by combining art and science effectively to solve marketing problems. Marketers need more than concepts to fully exploit various and rich data available to them. This course is designed to help students move from conceptual marketing to analytical marketing. The course is primarily designed for MBA students who have an understanding of marketing principles and exposure to EXCEL. The course may also be useful for graduate students in econometrics who are interested in marketing applications of econometric models.

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A systematic approach to structure, implementation and analysis of marketing research for decision making. This course will focus analysis of information about the customer as well as information about the customer’s wants and needs for the purposes of developing marketing promotional campaigns, developing new products and refining current product offerings and for improving customer service efforts. Appropriate models of consumer behavior and frim behavior will be analyzed in a marketing context.

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Established, mature products and brands are critical to an organization�s profitability, financial stability and strategic posture. This course focuses on creating and managing product and brand portfolios for long-term profitability. Students will apply strategic and implementation frameworks for managing mature products for profitability, transferring existing competencies to new products, exploiting evolving market opportunities, and strategic management of a product portfolio. The course will also focus on building and managing brand equity, examining the impact of brand equity on product line and firm performance, evaluating opportunities for extending brands, and repositioning existing brands. These topics are explored in a variety of product contexts including consumer packaged goods, industrial, and high-technology product markets. The course uses a combination of case analyses, projects, lectures and guest speakers, allowing students to develop their repertoire of quantitative and qualitative marketing decision skills.

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This course focuses on strategically and successfully managing the multitude of business relationships that contemporary marketing managers (as well as general managers) face. The conceptual framework of this course is an integrated perspective of marketing communications as a process of successfully interacting with each constituency with the goal of fostering long-term satisfaction and loyalty. Topics broached in this course include market orientation, customer relationship management, managing a sales force, supply chain partnerships, buyer behavior, managing internally as well as other relationship marketing topics. Each module in the course is designed to provide managers with the skill set to effectively and efficiently approach their multifaceted business climate. This course is research and theory based but is strongly grounded in marketing practice. This course fits in the Marketing concentration.

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Elements and application of the entrepreneurial process. entrepreneurship, business and strategies, structuring and financing a venture, managing growth and risk, plan.

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Commercialization potential of new technologies, products and processes. Marketing, organizational, financial, operational and manufacturing issues. Strategic assessment and planning. Innovation management. Entrepreneurial transfer mechanisms including spin-offs, licensing and high-technology start-ups. Practical application with project and team management skills development.
Please note that this course is a prerequisite for MBA 577.

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Development of strategies to commercialize technology based on prioritized assessments. Investigation of various commercialization approaches. Business plan development. Practical application of technology management skills to actual cases with commercial potential.
Prerequisite: MBA 576

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Theory and practice of business, global, and corporate strategy for high technology firms and firm’s in industries affected by advancements in information technology. Alignment of technologically intensive organizations’ strategies and structures with their macro and industry environments.

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This class develops major themes and emerging strategies in the pharmaceutical industry. The focus is on strategic planning, process improvement, outsourcing, globalization, federal regulation, global distribution, and deployment challenges for executives in the pharmaceutical industry. The course will be explored in a series of management presentations, frameworks, industry collaborative projects, and secondary research, with an emphasis on driving change in a dynamic and competitive global pharmaceutical industry.

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Students will be exposed to an array of classical and contemporary issues that highlight the inherent friction between laissez faire capitalism and a highly regulated environment. Detailed analyses of Phase I-IV clinical trials, 510(k) and PMA steps, and other roles of the FDA; pharmaceutical sales; management issues; market identification; and the IP/patent process are some of the topics covered. Off-label usage and social issues such as ethics and corporate social responsibility are also broached. This course is centered on practical issues that will help students become effective business managers in the life sciences industry.

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Semester-long team project to work with an organization to begin the process of implementing enterprise risk management. Student teams will interview management and conduct surveys to identify risks the organization faces as it executes its strategy, develop metrics for assessing risks and work with the organization to use those metrics to determine the top priority risks, and develop key risk indicators to track the most significant risks.  Teams of graduate students will be created consisting of 3-5 graduate students per team and will be assigned to work with one organization for the entire semester (maximum two teams). A faculty member will provide close supervision of the project team and status to ensure the project is conducted professionally and help with any logistical challenges that cannot first be solved by the student team (i.e., scheduling issues that cannot be resolved by the client and team). The practicum will be restricted to graduate students who have completed the MBA elective course, “Overview of ERM.”  Preference will be given to full-time MAC and MBA students.  Eligible students must complete an application to be considered for selection. One of the dimensions considered will be the extent of their outside commitments.  Student schedules must be able to accommodate flexible times for client meetings. Mark Beasley and Bonnie Hancock will each lead one practicum team project for the pilot semester.

Course Syllabus

Semester-long team project to work with an organization to conduct cutting-edge consumer innovation research under the direction of Dr. Stacy Wood. Projects will vary with the firm's needs, but will entail processes to build consumer insight, typically around new product development or brand-building.  Teams of graduate students will be created consisting of 3-5 graduate students per team and will be assigned to work with one organization for the entire semester. Teams will be introduced to the project and organization, trained in relevant research knowledge and techniques by Dr. Wood, and then work with the organization to execute the project during the course of the semester with final results presented to the organization in the last week of classes. The practicum will be restricted to graduate students who are concurrently taking, or have completed, the MBA elective course, “Consumer Behavior.”  Eligible students must complete an application to be considered for selection.  Student schedules must be able to accommodate flexible times for client meetings and team work. While this course may be more effort-intensive than typical lecture courses, it offers an unparalleled opportunity to learn highly marketable skills that go beyond the average MBA curriculum and to work directly with marketing executives at highly successful firms.

Prerequisite/Corequisite: MBA 590 Consumer Behavior

Students must apply for this course. Contact Jackelyn Vander Veer for an application.

This course will provide the students with an understanding of the criteria required in decision-making including quantifying stakeholder value, dealing with uncertainty and risk, and critical problem-solving methodologies.  Understanding and qualifying data sources, use of structured and unstructured data, and unstructured text analytics will be used to provide input into the decision making process. Students will learn how data can be transformed into business intelligence while participating in an action learning setting.

This course will provide you with tools to analyze and exploit information in corporate financial statements. The course will teach you how to use financial statement information for numerous economic decisions, including investment and valuation. The course will also help you understand and analyze the issues that corporate managers face as they design and implement financial reporting strategies, increasing your ability to assess earnings quality and detect and undo earnings management. The analytical framework and practical tools of this course will help you (whether your career interests arise in finance, marketing, strategy, consulting, accounting, operations, entrepreneurship, whatever) to improve your ability to read and analyze financial statements.
 

This course is designed to increase students' awareness of issues in negotiation and resolving conflicts, and to develop skills for negotiating more effectively with others.  The course encompasses both distributive and integrative approaches to negotiation.  It is highly interactive, which most sessions including negotiations between pairs or groups of students.  Students will come to better understand their own preferred negotiation styles, improve those styles, and strengthen those areas where they are week.  Specific topics that will be covered include:

• The importance of planning for the negotiation, and how to plan for the negotiation
• Identifying when to use what negotiation strategy
• Extensive coverage of distributive and integrative negotiation tactics
• Understanding the crucial role of ethics in negotiation
• Designing agreements that maximize value on a sustainable basis
• Developing sources of power in the negotiation relationship
• Creating and capturing unseen value in the negotiation
• Building trust with the other party

This intensive practicum-driven course will teach and apply a structured methodology for discovering, creating and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities through shaping and applying combinations of emerging and existing technologies. Interdisciplinary student teams (Business, Science and Engineering grad students) will forge commercialization paths that require either new venture creation or the championing of new ideas within existing organizations. A primary source of technologies will be the ASSIST nano-ERC and the technologies that engineering students bring with them from associate labs. 

Concepts, theories, and techniques applicable to obtaining a sophisticated understanding of consumer motives, attitudes, decision-making processes, and satisfaction determinants.

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This course presents a structured framework for modeling business decisions. This framework supports managerial effectiveness through the discovery and presentation of compelling insights that help build organizational commitment to action. Business decisions are frequently made difficult by the presence of uncertainty in the decision environment and/or complex interactions among decision parameters that may be too difficult to grasp intuitively. Given the dynamic, global nature of the environment in which any modern business must operate, the stakes of bad outcomes may be too high to justify learning by experience.

The primary objective of this course is to develop and improve students’ modeling skills through a variety of realistic situations. We start with problems requiring “back-of-the-envelope” analysis and extend this framework to strategic conundrums requiring extensive investigation. Through realistic examples, cases, and projects students develop their ability to identify the problem at hand and its essential features, to develop a structure for analyzing the problem, to identify and make explicit the sources of uncertainty in the decision environment, to carry out a cogent analysis, and to present the analysis and insights to interested parties in a compelling manner.

In total, students will learn a structured approach to solving realistic business problems and how to effectively communicate the results of their analysis. The modeling and analysis skills learned in this course are applicable to a wide variety of business decision contexts.

Course Syllabus

Occupational fraud, which consists of asset misappropriation, corruption, and financial statement fraud, results in the theft of $2.9 trillion per year globally. How and why do people commit fraud? What happens to those who get caught? How can I take steps to recognize and reduce fraud in my organization?

If you are interested in criminology, psychology, investigative work, and justice for all, this course is for you. It provides you with both practical and theory-based knowledge in the area of occupational fraud. You will discover how and why fraud occurs in organizations, develop skills to detect fraud, and be able to identify and classify the various types of fraud. The course will also provide you with an understanding of controls and their implementation to help prevent the most common types of fraud. The course relies less on lectures and more on active learning through case analysis, problem-solving, quantitative reasoning, role play, group projects, discussion, and debate. Take this course and you will never look at fraud in the same way again.

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This course provides an overview of the acquisition and sale processes focusing heavily on middle-market companies ($5-500 million in revenues). It will integrate the various disciplines to provide a holistic view. The course will begin by highlighting the scope and dynamics of the private capital markets. Then we will address how an investment bank engages with a buyer and a seller of company and the various roles of the players. Next we will cover M&A from the view of corporate development in strategic buyers, why they acquire and how they evaluate acquisitions. We will provide an overview of valuation as it pertains to transactions followed by the financing alternatives for acquisitions and recapitalization. Lastly there will be a high level review of the tax and legal issues that must be considered as deals are put together.

Course Syllabus

This practicum is directed at projects unique to biosciences-focused companies. Examples of such areas are: new methods for market analysis and specific market segmentation, new trends in clinical studies, small-Bio and big-Bio partnerships, new product development, portfolio management, value chain analysis, etc. The companies are from all three biotech sectors: red (healthcare), white (industrial bioproducts) and green (nutrition and agriculture). The course provides a team experience for addressing these biosciences-specific issues.

Course Syllabus

The course on risk measurement tools will explore techniques used to (1) identify and measure risk from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives; (2) integrate measurement tools often associated with finance, statistics, and economics to explore how common risk measurement techniques could be applied to other more challenging risk categories including operational and strategic risk; and (3) leverage and develop decision support tools in the service of managing risk.

This course explores current issues in the rapidly changing arena of social media and virtual communities (web 2.0 and 3D.) Developments in social media are altering relationships between individuals and organizations in dramatic ways that are important to you as job seekers, employees, recruiters, managers and innovators. The course starts with an overview of social networks and key online communities and explores the impact of social media technologies on business. Traditional and niche social network sites, blogging and microblogging, use of video and photo sharing sites, wikis, virtual worlds and bookmarking sites will be covered. Delving into the specifics of content creation, tracking, tagging, digging and “mashing-up” will also be a component of the course. Creativity practices will be applied in conjunction with content creation. A key element will be the development and implementation of a social media plan.

Course Syllabus

Right before everyone’s eyes, businesses are changing the way they operate to become more sustainable. Will you be prepared to lead businesses in this new ever-changing world? If you don’t know what is meant by sustainability, how businesses are developing sustainable practices, and how they report their progress, this class is for you. In this class, students will explore the current sustainability trends, learn how businesses are integrating sustainability into their strategies, gain an understanding of the tools businesses are using to operate businesses in a sustainability manner, experience current and evolving sustainability reporting practices and finish up with a look at future trends. Want to be ready to lead businesses in the 21st century? If so, this class is a must!