Business Administration

This course prepares future managers for the cross-cultural challenges and opportunities awaiting them in an increasingly globalized business environment. The course examines pertinent theories and practices of high performing teams to gain a greater understanding about how culture influences an organization’s internal and external relationships, decision making, and operations. It explores strategies to bridge cultural gaps and to preempt or resolve conflict in teams. It provides insight into best dealing with culturally diverse customer, employee, supplier, and other stakeholder groups. Management communication techniques that heighten awareness of differences across cultures are a key aspect within the curriculum. Theories cover a range of brand management, leadership, organizational behavior effectiveness, work-life balance, and intercultural conflict styles, as well as team collaboration across cultures. Discussions focus on team performance and the experiences of numerous companies including Bang and Olufsen, Coloplast, Ecco, Novo Nordisk, Microsoft, Sony, and Huawei. The course also includes experiential learning by observing businesses with a focus on culture and team collaboration.

The globalization of markets and industries has created new growth opportunities for companies by accessing resources and serving markets worldwide. At the same time, managing across different cultures, administrative systems, geographic distances, economic structures pose its own managerial challenges. This course is designed to help integrate the existing knowledge of the functional areas of business into an internationally oriented view of the firm by evaluating the global environment and speculating on the future international direction of the firm. This course addresses the strategic and organizational challenges involved in managing activities across borders and introduces theories of international trade; differences in political economy and culture; barriers to trade; foreign exchange; business government relations, and the strategic alternatives available to companies operating in the global economy. It goes on to consider strategic options for the major functions of marketing, manufacturing, materials management, research and development, human resources, and finance, relating them to the firm's overall global strategy.

This course examines the basic theoretical framework of marketing, including segmentation, buyer behavior, product management, market communications, channel management and pricing decisions are introduced in this subject. Students are also introduced to basic concepts in market research and management of marketing programs.

The course discusses topics including organization and tasks of project management; project teams and project responsibility; project structuring, phases of the project, and milestones; project planning,  tools for project planning (Gantt, etc.), and basics of network planning; project risk analysis; and project execution, and controlling and completion. The exercise on project management is oriented to training and deepening the methods of project planning and controlling presented in the lecture. More in-depth knowledge about those methods is acquired in a practical-case study. For this task, students learn to use specific project management tools.

This course examines fundamentals of international finance, international asset allocation and international financial management.
 

This course provides students with a theoretical and practical understanding of entrepreneurship. Providing students with a broad picture of entrepreneurship means, it focuses on the process of new venture creation and growth. The course provides students with a conceptual and empirical understanding of entrepreneurship literature and new venture growth. The course combines theory-based lectures and practice-based tutorials. In the lectures, theories and cases are presented. In the tutorials, students develop a business project to ultimately pitch it to a panel of investors composed of entrepreneurs from the King’s Entrepreneurship Institute who provide feedback to students’ business projects.

This course provides students with a deep understanding of how firms develop and sustain a competitive edge. By engaging with real-world case studies, students learn the key concepts and theories in the field, and how they can be used to interpret and evaluate business situations. Paying special attention to the factors that explain why some firms perform better, students understand the drivers of competitive advantage both in the short and long term.

This course offers a basic introduction to business administration including broad areas within this topic such as: firm strategy; financial management; organization and human resource management; production management; marketing decisions.