Business Administration

This course reviews international contextual influences and strategic factors that shape organizations and managerial practices across different cultural settings, and highlights cases concerning China, Japan and Korea (CJK).  

The course develops skills in reviewing and determining methods for critiquing and recommending solutions for businesses through case studies.  By the end of the course, participants are expected to: 

1. Know the relationship between strategic and structural aspects of comparative international business organizations; 

2. Analyze and identify the various socio-economic and cultural influences on international organization issues; and, 

3. Demonstrate an understanding and ability to apply concepts and find solutions to issues identified. 

This is an integrative and interdisciplinary course, which takes a general management perspective. It views the firm as a whole, and examines how policies in each functional area (such as accounting, economics, finance, marketing, and organizational behavior) are integrated into an overall competitive strategy. The course develops a general management point of view. This point of view is the best vantage point for making decisions that lead to sustainable business performance. The key strategic business decisions of concern involve determining organizational purpose to evolving opportunities, creating competitive advantages, choosing competitive strategies, securing and defending sustainable market positions, and allocating critical resources over long periods. Decisions such as these can only be made effectively by viewing a firm holistically, and over the long term. 

This course introduces the main kinds of derivatives, with an emphasis on pricing and hedging issues, and on how investors and corporations can use these instruments in practice. The main contents of the course are: introduction to financial derivatives; forwards, futures, and swaps (institutional apsects, pricing, hedging); options (institutional aspects, pricing, hedging); and basics of credit risk and credit derivatives. Prerequisites: a solid understanding of financial economics; familiarity with the mathematics of interest rates (discounting/compounding, equivalence of rates at different maturities), with basic statistics (expected values, standard deviation and variance, ordinary least squares), and calculus (limits, differentials, differentiation, Taylor expansions, partial differentiation, optimization, basic integration). 

This course introduces students to the fundamental concepts, principles, and techniques of financial accounting and reporting for students who are not specialists in accounting. It takes a conceptual and practical approach which emphasizes general principles and methods in order to allow these concepts to be applied to specific problems and issues in accounting and the wider business/social environment. The course assumes no background knowledge in accounting.

This course covers the world of luxury fashion from a brand management perspective. Topics include the nature of luxury, brand promise, and brand engagement. The course also discusses how global market dynamics, digital transformation, and customer expectation shifts shape the future of luxury fashion.  

Students gain a deep understanding of how luxury fashion brands differentiate themselves from mass market brands as well as strategic brand management skills. 

This course introduces key concepts of the service-dominant logic of business on an international scale. Focusing on themes such as co-production, service leadership, and service competition, the course familiarize students with current academic theories, while frequent guest speakers emphasize how these are applied in practice across the private, public, and Third sector, and across developed and emerging countries. The course is an essential asset for anyone planning a career in service industries, with relevance for consulting, retail, healthcare, hospitality, the arts, or financial services. The course also introduces the role of services in development, drawing from global case studies.
 

This course examines distinctive forms of innovation as an experimental process, a recombinant search process, human-centric process and data-driven process. It also explores innovation at different levels of analysis from the team level to the firm level, all the way to the regional and global levels. It also covers what managers need to better understand and manage innovative businesses successfully and strategically.

This course provides students with a model of marketing appropriate for organizations operating in creative industries. The core concept of the model is the value for the customer. In creative industries this value is generated by transforming the creativity contained in creative products into intense and satisfactory customer experience. The course gives evidence to the cultural and organizational role of marketing within organizations operating in creative industries. This role consists in keeping organizations aligned to their markets, by means of the development of a broad and deep market knowledge and the building of long-lasting relations with customers through the continuous renovation of value propositions.