Core
curriculum
Enrolled students take a total of ten courses in a single cohort for one year: five courses in fall semester, four courses in spring semester, and an integrative capstone experience during the summer semester.
Leadership, Organizations, and Communications
Using management and organizational behavior theories, students will identify and evaluate examples of functional and dysfunctional leadership in workplace settings. Students will also learn and apply strategies for effectively managing employees and other human resources through the use of organizational case materials, leadership assessments, and team exercises involving both oral and written communications. Class and group discussions will focus on improving individual and team performance in work organizations with sensitivity to cross-cultural differences.
Spatial Analytics
Introduces methods for acquisition, analysis, and assessment of spatial data. Emphasizes geographic information systems and spatial statistical packages as support tools for problem solving and decision-making in natural resource management, market-based institutions, and non-profit organizations. Students will work in teams to acquire, explore, analyze, and assess spatial information from a given set of management case studies. The course will culminate with a team presentation where students will convey spatial data through visualization techniques and communicate findings.
Managerial Finance and Accounting
Introduces students to fundamental concepts and principles of financial capital, and how to apply them in the budgeting and accounting of organizational projects and entrepreneurial ventures. Concepts include the time value of money, business valuation, capital sources and structure, equity distribution and dilution, as well as financial aspects of the management of small business and entrepreneurial firms (sole proprietorships, partnership, small private corporations).
Technology-Enabled Service
Students will gain an understanding of how information-based services and systems can be used to meet the needs and challenges of modern organizations. Additionally, students will gain an understanding of how internet-related technologies add value to organizational and business functions, including marketing, management, and more. Students will be asked to use design thinking and management principles to improve strategies, processes, operations, and the decision making in specific cases to better meet customer and other stakeholders’ needs.
Strategy: Regional and Global Perspectives
This course introduces students to strategic management and marketing in both regional and global contexts. Students will learn frameworks and theories about strategy formulation, competitive advantage, market research, product-market fit, value creation and business model innovation. Students will integrate and apply this knowledge during their participation in programs and field trips involving for-profit and non-profit enterprises.
Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Provides graduate-level exposure to key concepts and theories of entrepreneurship and innovation. Using a variety of cases, we will explore the basis of creativity, processes and practices of innovation within new ventures and established enterprises, and the fundamentals of entrepreneurial action and innovative organizational cultures. We will also discuss design thinking, innovation strategy and the alignment of innovative projects to corporate strategy.
Integrative Capstone Project
This course focuses on how to align people, information, and resources effectively to meet the triple bottom line (3BL): value generation, ethical treatment of workers, and environmental sustainability. Students will reflect on and analyze their management of the 3BL in their internship, entrepreneurial venture or professional position. An individual final report and presentation is required.
Quantitative Tools for Management
This course will prepare students for qualitative, quantitative and data-oriented reasoning for complex decisionmaking scenarios. In qualitative scenarios, when quantitative information and data are sparse, reasoning draws on careful thought experiments. When the problem has a measurable component that nevertheless lacks data, insights and direction can still be obtained from back-of-the-napkin estimations that also require an assessment of error propagation. In the digital era, the increasing availability of data for decision-making clarifies some aspects of problem solving, but there are still statistical pitfalls that should be addressed and overcome using careful analysis design. To this end, this class will largely focus on identifying best practices for collecting, processing, visualizing, and communicating data-driven analysis strategies.
Project and Operations Management
Introduces operations and project management concepts and tools to assist managers in efficient and effective delivery of goods and services. Explores project and program management concepts including critical path, crisis management, human resources, budgeting and planning considerations. Operations management topics explore value creation in both private and public sectors, quality service delivery, supply chain, and techniques for efficient service delivery.
Law, Policy, and Risk Management
Utilizes theory and frameworks at the intersection of law and economics, as well as case studies, to train students how to consider law, policy, and risk in the management of corporate, non-profit, and public sectors. Concepts include: the Coase theorem; market failures and policy tools; laws as individual rights and obligations scaled-up to society; policies as prevailing strategies to reconcile social, ecological, and economic tensions; and risks as real or perceived exposure to loss of value for individuals, the environment, or the market.