Business Administration

This class explores how technology is transforming banking and finance, with a focus on distributed ledger technology (DLT), blockchain, and innovations such as digital currencies, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and decentralized exchanges. It also examines the rise of Regulatory Technology (RegTech) and the growing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in financial markets and services. The class reviews these developments through a legal and regulatory lens, highlighting key challenges and opportunities. No prior knowledge of FinTech or related fields is required.

Ecosystems are central to addressing business and societal challenges; they foster collaboration and the pooling of resources to drive innovation aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This course adopts a managerial perspective to create and manage ecosystems—physical, digital, or hybrid. Explore strategic, engineering, and technological intersections, stakeholder relationships, and real-world examples such as Brightlands campuses and global hubs like Silicon Valley. Through designing your own ecosystems, participants build practical skills in developing value propositions and collaboration structures, highlighting the practical relevance of ecosystem management.

The course develops students' professional communication skills. It enhances their vocal qualities and connection with the audience. It aids them in becoming fluent and confident speakers, and effective and efficient writers, who know how to state a clear main idea and provide clear and structured substantiation for their claims. The course focuses on projecting the voice, pronouncing clearly, breathing effectively, and relaxing the voice. Students give presentations throughout the course. 

The course examines contemporary developments and emerging challenges in business and commercial law. Students explore current legal issues related to contracts, corporate governance, and the legal structures used to establish and expand businesses. Through the analysis of real-world cases and legal advisory projects, the course develops students’ understanding of how legal frameworks shape business operations and decision-making. Emphasis is placed on critical thinking, legal reasoning, oral communication, and the practical application of legal principles to modern business scenarios. Topics may include recent developments in contract law, company law, business formation and growth strategies, and legal problem-solving in commercial practice.

This course provides an introduction to climate change science for students of economics and business. It provides the basics to understand the physical challenges of sustainable development and the key role of businesses in tackling climate change. 

This course equips early-stage entrepreneurs wishing to start their own venture or work in a start-up with the theoretical frameworks, practical tools, and entrepreneurial mindsets required to identify, design, and launch new ventures—ranging from profit-driven startups to mission-driven social enterprises. Students apply concepts to develop a business pitch based on one of the ideas they generated in class, bridging theory and practice.

This course introduces the creative and mysterious world of the venture capital (VC) and private equity(PE) investments. This course brings in the latest and most used VC/PE investment methodologies and practical tools from Silicon Valley, the heart of the global VC/PE industry. It starts with investigating the overall ecosystem and relationship between start-ups, VC’s, and Fund of Funds. Then it picks up the practical tools on the legal framework, organizational structures, funding channels and types, pre and post-money valuation methodologies, and pipeline generation. The course takes a deep dive into the exiting strategies including M&A, roadshow preparation, IPO, (Leveraged) Buyout, secondary market sales, and final LP/GP distributions. Throughout the course, students track the current start ups and VC/PE funding rounds as they happen and cross-reference these real life deals with the tools and methodologies delivered in this course.

How to make money in China? How to avoid to losing money within China? While the first issue suits business schools, the latter is a typical law school issue. However, this course stands up in between, in the belief that without the helmet and shield from the legal premise, a business pioneer would risk all the efforts of his innovations, products and business models in the long-term race, not to mention safeguarding his harvest from such business. A proper parachute is instantly and constantly necessary before the entrepreneurship soars high into blue sky. This course applies PEST and SWOT analyses, as well as case-study methods, in the POV of a start-up, to walk the students through the whole business-life, including but not limited to soft-landing phase, the formation of business, the transaction rules, the legal compliance of routine operations, and the dispute resolutions.

Students study how marketing strategies, tactics, and analytics tie together to create a digital marketing campaign, learning how a market position is selected and bolstered by the appropriate marketing tools to achieve success, critically considering the advantages and disadvantages of different digital marketing choices, and applying a range of tools to create realistic and viable marketing campaigns. 

This course examines concepts and theoretical frameworks that influence the management of cross-border operations in multinational enterprises. It explores a series of conceptual tools to understand the building blocks of competitive advantage of multinational enterprises and their global value chains. It examines contemporary business problems exploring issues such as how multinational enterprises innovate and upgrade their global value chains in different countries.