Business Administration

This intensive course enables students to understand and measure the process, impact, funding needs, and challenges of sustainable social entrepreneurship. Students learn about the growing trend of entrepreneurs looking to identify and bring about transformative societal change through their business activities. Students assess current approaches, profitability, challenges, and opportunities of social entrepreneurship, as both business owners and consumers seek to find sustainable solutions to complex social problems. Discover how social entrepreneurs develop creative solutions to address both local and global social problems and gain the tools to make an impact on the lives of others. The course increases awareness and understanding of the main challenges affecting the world, and how Social Enterprises can be a definite factor of change. The course focuses on team development; self-awareness for leading, persuading, and working with others; effective business planning; and communicating. The subject concentrates on social impact projects targeting areas such as the environment, inequality, poverty, education, future employment, etc. The course re-introduces key concepts that students may have studied in previous syllabuses in entrepreneurship, economics, and social science. It also develops more advanced themes that address emerging issues in business planning, finance, funding, and marketing literature specifically relevant to projects with a social impact. The course emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of social change and stresses practical business matters when addressing transformation via the formulation of a specific proposal/project that students deliver at the end of the term.

This course provides holistic and comprehensive coverage of the development and implementation of business and functional action strategies for firms in manufacturing and service industries. It investigates the recent changes in platform business models and strategies related to the advances in IoT, AI, blockchain technologies, industry 4.0, smart factory, digital transformation, etc. It also delves into enterprise risk management (including COVID-19 pandemic) and sustainable ESG management issues. Specifically, the course covers: 1) Business model and strategy development, including environment, capability and resource analyses, corporate vision, competitive strategy and priority, operating pipeline and platform business models, and performance management and assessment, 2) Details of technology and innovation strategies, operations and supply chain strategies, procurement and supply management strategies, and enterprise risk management strategies, 3) Corporate growth strategies and required capabilities and resources in different growth stages, including the 4th industrial revolution and blue ocean shift strategies, and 4) Social value and sustainability management strategies based on the triple bottom line. 

This course offers a study of the basics of marketing including its multiple dimensions, as well as consumer knowledge, market research, and strategic decision-making.. 

This course engages with some of the key theories that explore how language and social interaction underpin organizational life. It draws on an interdisciplinary research field to interrogate the unique properties of "organizational discourse" and "institutional talk." The course is structured around studies of organizational texts (e.g. recruitment brochures, mission statements, websites, and adverts), as well as studies of social interaction in organizational settings (e.g. business meetings, call centers, healthcare delivery, and sales encounters). 

When studying organizations, different social science disciplines do not merely define this concept, they propose theories about why organizations exist, how they operate, how they can be structured, how they develop, how they interact with their external environment, and how they innovate. Insights into different organization theories are thus crucial for the understanding of a wide array of social science theories that build on the notion of organizations. The first part of this course examines seminal theories concerning different facets of organizations: stakeholders and ethics, structure and culture, strategy and relation to the external environment, and lifecycle and change. Near the end of the course, students review how organizations are shaped by organizational politics and cognitive biases in decision-making and how platforms are changing the organizational landscape. Students use case studies to analyze an existing organization using the theories learned in the course. 

Consumption has come to dominate our lives, is driving economies, yet also endangering the future of our planet. This course asks questions about consumption from multiple perspectives, such as how did consumption assume its prominent place, how do economists rationalize consumption, how do companies use behavioral models to craft marketing strategies, whether consumption is good or bad for society or the individual, or whether consumers need to be protected.