Business Administration

This course examines the central principles and concepts of marketing strategy and management. It highlights the challenges that marketing managers face in planning and implementing effective marketing mix strategies.

This course offers a systematic approach to different types of decision-making problems that allows for thoughtful, sensible, and better decisions that are effective and applicable in a real context. It focuses on the determination and criteria for comparing and assessing different alternatives (certain, uncertain, and risky). This course introduces the game theory reasoning method in a context of complete information. Specifically, it analyzes the concept of equilibrium both in situations of simultaneous and sequential decision-making, and rationalization through a process of dominant alternatives or backward induction.

This course explores how organizational change, albeit necessary and difficult, should be managed. It discusses organizational change from various angles such as leadership, organizational structure, job design, organizational culture, etc. 
The course examines Japanese and British case studies to see how organizations handle hardship in change management. 

Students are expected to develop critical thinking of the theories introduced for each respective theme as well as to articulate their own original ideas to manage barriers to organizational change.

This course introduces cutting-edge concepts, frameworks and practices that are current in social entrepreneurship, as well as critical issues in business ethics as a knowledge foundation for analyzing and practicing social entrepreneurship. The course considers how social entrepreneurship plays out in organizations ranging from conventional companies seeking to adopt corporate social responsibility practices to double-bottom-line businesses and social enterprises. The course specifies strategic and implementation tensions inherent in aligning business and social/environmental values, and provides frameworks with which to analyze and resolve the tensions at play. Students learn to be a quasi-expert of social entrepreneurship by applying frameworks to make tough decisions in real business contexts. The course includes four modules: strategic corporate social responsibility (SCSR); double-bottom-line business (DBL), social enterprise (SE) and business ethics (BE). It begins by analyzing and making decisions on the cases of conventional companies conducting social innovation initiatives through SCSR and DBL. Students then explore the cases of social enterprises and observe both the common and distinctive challenges facing conventional companies and social enterprises. The modules of SCSR, DBL and SE are followed by an Entrepreneur Panel where social entrepreneurs introduce their initiatives and engage in a highly interactive conversation with students. The course concludes by analyzing business ethics theories and issues of social entrepreneurship.

This course introduces students to the distinct communication activities related to social marketing, including the practice of achieving societal change for the benefit of the greater social good through the integration of commercially inspired skills and tools with other approaches. Sustainability, diversity, health, and community development have all become global societal concerns. Social marketing communication is therefore a much-needed individual and organizational proficiency for popularizing these concerns in a credible manner and for inferring voluntary behavioral changes among specific target audiences. The course provides relevant theoretical insights within social marketing communication, cause-related marketing communication, and commercial marketing communication. It also develops expertise in employing analytical tools belonging to narrative and discourse studies for working with and developing social marketing communication materials across various media.

This course develops an understanding of the reasons, the range, and the extent of business-government relations, and develops concrete skills in order to effectively manage these relations. Through an interactive approach, the course shows the empirical application to healthcare sector. More specifically, the course illustrates the relations between the industry of medical technologies and public administration as to the several strategies of market access as a concrete and interesting case of how managing business government relations becomes crucial to succeed from both sides. The case of the healthcare sector covers a relevant part of the whole course because it is highly representative of public-private interrelations and lends itself to be representative of different jurisdictions.

This course focuses on corporate entrepreneurship with a special emphasis on the role of venture capital and spin-offs, including managerial efforts aimed at the identification, development and exploitation of technical and organizational innovations and on effective new venture management in the context of large corporations. Students evaluate business models and appropriateness for development in a corporate setting. As an advanced course, students improve analytical, creative and communication skills. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

This course introduces the basic tools to understand how to analyze economic phenomena and presents the main topics in macroeconomics and international economics. It focuses on applications and policy implications rather than formal demonstrations to provide a critical perspective on economic models and apply them to many different situations. Critical thinking and knowledge of the basic formal mechanisms of macroeconomic and international trade models is essential. The first module on modern macroeconomics analyzes the determinants of economic well-being in the short and long run and key macroeconomic terms (for example, defining and measuring economic growth, inflation, and unemployment). It examines how the economy grows in the short and long run, the role of productivity, and the impact of the business cycle, as well as the role of monetary and fiscal policies. The second module on policy in the open economy analyzes the financial linkages between different countries, especially regarding the Balance of Payments and its effects on national economies. It also surveys the role of money and finance in the world today and the role of government policies toward the foreign exchange market, including the choice between fixed and floating exchange rates, strategies to keep currencies under or overvalued, and the use of exchange controls to create impediments to currency flows. Finally, it incorporates climate change and income inequality in regular macroeconomic models and examines development problems and the role firms can play in fostering growth.

Digital Business is rapidly evolving and today it should be regarded being a central resource in the pursuit of business objectives and strategies. As a result, the role of Digital Business in organizations needs to be re-evaluated to develop a sophisticated understanding of how it supports today’s organization to gain and sustain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Incorporating a generic Digital Business Framework, this applied course evaluates and discusses components of a comprehensive Digital Business strategy and investigates its impact on different industry sectors.

This course analyzes current aspects of digital markets and the relationships between market participants - suppliers, consumers, and digital platforms. It examines the implications on consumer protection that arise within digital environments. Special focus will be on European law with emphasis on comparative aspects with US law. Topics include: consumer protections, consumer law, and behavior problems in consumer law; European Data Protection; E-marketplaces; technology and digital markets; contracts and data.