Business Administration

This lecture offers a theoretical background to macroeconomic, psychological, and microeconomic aspects of entrepreneurship. Among macroeconomic aspects it presents the role of the entrepreneur in the national economy, economic growth, and the value of entrepreneurship. Psychological aspects include the personality of the entrepreneur and a typology of entrepreneurs. Microeconomic aspects treat problems at firm level such as incentives in entrepreneurial teams and financing problems. This course has two components, a lecture and exercise.

This course discusses techniques and strategies to mediate and manage conflict. 

Business decision making involves considerable complexity and uncertainty. This course introduces the basic concepts in quantitative business analysis and the key elements in the decision making process. The course examines methods that are used extensively in business organizations. These methods provide the tools and the skills to approach, analyze, and solve problems of varying scales. Course topics include: basic probability and statistics; queuing theory; decision theory; regression models; linear programming; inventory control models; supply chain management; and game theory. 

This course explores the decisions that executives in the creative industries have to make in order to carve competitive positioning and ensure long-term sustainability for their companies. The schedule is organized into four modules with the goal to help students develop an analytic toolkit for understanding strategic issues and hone their ability to structure complex business problems and make decisions in lack of complete information. The modules are: 1) formulation of competitive strategy for a given business of a firm (how to play in relation to the external and internal environments and the changes both constantly undergo); 2) developing an understanding on how multi-business firms determine the scope of their activities (where to play in terms of product/customer segments, geographies and value chains); 3) operations management and its strategic centrality to cope with constant changes in customer preferences, networks of supply and demand, and developments in technology; and 4) analyzing strategic decisions that are specific of and key to current competitive landscapes in the creative fields. The ultimate objective of the course is to provide students with a coherent theoretical framework useful to the stimulation and development of their strategic decision-making in different situations. Prerequisite: students should be familiar with the fundamentals of management and microeconomics.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is responsible for, now on a global scale, the delivery of value-added goods/services in any organization – public or private, profit or non-profit. SCM costs in total typically exceed 25% of the cost of doing business, and logistics-related assets (including inventory) can represent as much as 50% of a company’s total assets. This course instructs and applies various key concepts of SCM and the related decision-making tools to solve practical supply/demand problems in the context of global supply chains.  The course discusses core SCM-related concepts including time-based inventory management, warehousing, transportation/distribution systems design, facility location decision process, and information handling in SC operations as competitive advantages in service-based emerging economies.

No specific prerequisite for this course, but an understanding of college-level algebra preferred.