Maastricht University - School of Business and Economics

The course Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practices introduces students to a range of topics in the field of entrepreneurship and links both entrepreneurial theory as well as practice. Critical questions like who, why, when, and where start-ups embark on their entrepreneurial journey, are covered during this course. The course seeks to introduce the students to the vast literature about entrepreneurship and business start-ups and it challenges students to connect this literature to actual cases. The course covers aspects like entrepreneurial competences, regional eco-systems, opportunity recognition, appropriation, female and minority entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial success, etc. From a more practical standpoint, it explores how to put together an entrepreneurial team, develop approaches for evaluating the market reception, and discover the value creation potential of one’s venture idea.

The course focuses on the application of techniques in the area of Operations Management. Covered topics include forecasting, material requirements planning, routing, and scheduling of assembly lines. Addressing these topics, several quantitative techniques (mostly heuristics and metaheuristics) that have shown to be successful in these areas are applied to examples and exercises. The course combines cases, exercises, and discussions, facilitated by your tutor and the students themselves. Prerequisites for this course are basic knowledge of the role and scope of operations management within business; advanced mathematical skills; ability to understand quantitative models and concepts and the application of such models and concepts; moderate level of understanding of simulation; moderate level of knowledge concerning linear programming.

This course examines historical knowledge about the process of productivity growth since the Middle Ages. It cover the standard neoclassical (Solow) growth model and some augmentations; basic endogenous growth models; and the process of productivity growth.

The objective of this course is to provide an introduction to modeling univariate and multivariate time series in economics. The topics covered include modeling non-stationary time series, Granger causality, co-integration, ARIMA, seasonality, ARCH, and Unit roots.

Organizations increasingly face diverse types of crises, such as natural disasters, accidents, scandals, employee discrimination, or cyber-attacks. Crises have negative, long-term consequences for organizations’ functioning, profitability, legal system, reputation, and human resource management systems. Managing organizational crises is, therefore, complicated and challenging, as it is difficult for organizations, leaders, and individuals to perform under urgent, ambiguous, stressful, and emotional situations. This course offers a framework to help understand how organizational crises arise and insight into the complexity of crisis management. The course consists of two main parts: (1) conditions that affect the vulnerability to an organizational crisis; and (2) crisis management. The first part concentrates on the factors that make an organization crisis-prone, such as human, social-cultural, and organizational-technological causes. The second part discusses crisis management, including what organizations can do to prevent crises and how to contain and resolve organizational crises.

This course improves students’ understanding of the complexities presented by managing businesses in an international environment. It begins with a historical background of globalization and the development of institutions to support international transactions. Potential similarities and differences between countries in economic development, political and legal systems, culture, government policies on trade, and in accepting foreign investments are discussed. Differences in national monetary systems and capital markets are considered with reference to globalization and the integration of world markets. The second part of this course reviews the role of location, the strategy and organization of multinational corporations (MNCs), cross-border alliances and international mergers and acquisitions, and the formation of international knowledge networks for technology creation. The course concludes with ethical issues faced by international businesses. The course uses Hill’s 14th edition of ISE International Business: Competing in the Global Marketplace. Students also need to register on the Harvard website (www.hbr.org) and purchase assigned cases using a link included in the course manual.

Ethics is characterized by a discourse on moral values, norms and standards, and the decision-making on the basis of sound argumentation. This ethics course confronts students with ethical and responsibility dilemmas which they study, reflect on, and discuss in small groups. Students who complete this course master the core insights of business ethics theory and corporate responsibility. All participants should have a basic understanding of the functioning of organizations, management of and co-ordination within organizations, organizational ecology, co-ordination mechanisms in industries, and of economic order.