Business Administration

This course provides the fundamental concepts and frameworks of strategy formulation and implementation to create sustainable competitive advantages. Students gain strategic insights by applying techniques taught in the classes to case analyses. By the end of the course, students are expected to know how to recognize the important factors in the external environment and understand the managerial process of establishing feasible and concrete strategies based on the resources and capabilities of firms.

This course is composed of two parts. Part one covers the theoretical principles and concepts relating to the marketing of real estate, including aspects such as marketing mix, market research and segmentation, product management and pricing, negotiation and selling techniques, distribution methods, etc. Part two focuses the practical applications of marketing theories to actual case studies in the real estate market, emphasizing on residential, commercial and industrial properties.

This is a practical course that employs a simulation of business competition in a global environment. Students work in teams as active participants in the management of a company working around rules set by the instructor using a computer model. The simulation uses knowledge of strategic management, international business, marketing management, human resources, logistics, accounting, and finance. Through class activities, processes, and decision-making the course reinforces the following competencies: adaptation to dynamic teams and environments; successful operation of a business or international marketing project; capacity to take complex decisions and carry out negotiation processes.

The course focuses on the new product development process as a complex inter-functional management topic, which requires strategic initiative, aligned organizational solutions and appropriate supporting methodologies. Collaborative innovation is presented in order to discuss the potentialities of the involvement of external players in the innovation process, also thanks to the opportunities offered by internet-based technologies. Despite the increasing relevance of innovation strategies and new product development, few companies seem to have mastered their ability to identify, create, and exploit opportunities for innovation on a systematic basis. Crafting and delivering a new product is not an easy and intuitive process, but the result of a set of structured and organized practices. This course explores these practices and exploits the tools and techniques that can be used to this purpose. The New Product Development and Open Innovation course is organized in two main parts. The first provides a set of integrated frameworks and tools to effectively design and manage the strategies, processes, and techniques for innovation. It provides the conceptual tools to understand the nature and characteristics of different types of innovation, as well as practical insights on how to design and manage a new product development process. The second part of the course is focused on how digital environments can help companies to open their boundaries and pursue processes of open and collaborative innovation, involving several external partners in their new product development activities. Special attention is paid to the role of users in enhancing innovation and to ad-hoc mechanisms supporting their active involvement, among which user communities, virtual knowledge brokers, and Open Source Systems.