Business (BUS)
Develop financial analysis skills using various quantitative tools and qualitative factors to determine the financial health and risk of companies across industries. The course cover business applications including credit analysis, financial analysis, and investment analysis. The course will also introduce fundamental business concepts that will be used in more advanced application courses such as financial management.
This course applies economic principles to key decisions with organizations and solidifies intuition for understanding the business environments in which organizations operate. A key objective of the course is to develop tools useful in other Stuart courses. Economics is a key foundation for much of what is taught in finance, marketing, business strategy, environmental management, and virtually every other course in the graduate program. Economics is a way of thinking about problems, issues, and decisions that managers face in each of the functional areas of their organization. It stresses the importance of incentives in impacting human decision making and emphasizes the consideration of costs and benefits when making decisions. The course introduces and develops concepts in areas of microeconomics such as competition and market structure, incentive contracts, and pricing. Topics covered range from the most basic demand and supply models to principal-agent models and economics of information. The course will also touch on some of the primary macroeconomic topics (including GDP, inflation, and unemployment), topics in game theory (simultaneous and sequential games), and issues of ethics in economic policy-making pertaining to competitive and oligopolistic markets, pricing, and trade.
To succeed in today's knowledge intensive organizations managers need to understand how individual differences in personality, learning style and cultural values, group dynamics, organizational culture, and human resource management policies shape employee attitudes and behaviors. This course teaches managers creative problem-solving and ethical decision-making, change management, leadership techniques for enhancing social capital and influencing other organizational members, and management tools for multicultural and geographically dispersed teams. Students will relate management concepts and techniques to real-world situations through the extensive use of case studies and experiential exercises.
Power Skills is a comprehensive graduate-level course designed to refine the essential interpersonal and leadership competencies necessary for today's managers. This dynamic program goes beyond traditional "soft skills," delving into the nuanced "power skills" that differentiate competent managers from exceptional leaders. Throughout the course, students will engage in practical exercises to enhance active listening, ensuring clear and effective communication within diverse teams. Students will be tasked with real-world conflict management scenarios, developing strategies to navigate and resolve workplace disputes diplomatically. A special focus is placed on emotional intelligence (EI) – a skill set that is crucial for understanding and managing both personal and team emotions in a professional setting. Interactive sessions on EI will help students recognize emotional cues and foster a supportive work environment. The curriculum emphasizes adaptability, preparing future leaders to pivot strategies in response to the ever-changing business landscape. Through case studies and collaborative group projects, students will learn the art of negotiation, balancing firm objectives with the art of compromise. Teamwork is a pillar of the course, encouraging collaborative problem-solving and collective goal achievement. By incorporating PMI's Talent Triangle®, the program also integrates technical project management, strategic business management, and leadership into the learning outcomes. Upon completion, students will emerge as well-rounded professionals, ready to leverage power skills for career advancement and organizational success in the dynamic workforce of the future.
In this course, the student will learn the concepts and processes that underlie enlightened financial decision making in a global world. Students will explore how to raise debt and equity capital, how to think about what portion of earnings to retain and reinvest and whether to share some earnings with stockholders via dividend payments or repurchase of shares, how to value stocks and bonds, how to distinguish good from bad financial decision rules, how to decide which projects a firm should engage in, how to use futures, options and swaps to manage firm risk, how to ensure good corporate governance, why sustainability can be profitable while still protecting future generations, and how to manage the financial decisions required to effectively operate in a global setting.
How do companies outperform their rivals to become market leaders in today's hyper-competitive global business environment? The answer lies in developing great strategies and executing them flawlessly. Strategic Management is the rigorous business process that helps you develop and execute highly effective strategies. The SM process has three major components: Analysis (of external and internal environments), Strategy (business-level, corporate and functional) and Performance (strategic competitiveness and above-normal profits). The course has a strong experiential learning component. With the help of a strategic management computer simulation game, you will run a simulated company in a highly competitive marketplace to outperform your competitors and become market leader. At the end of the course, you will learn business fundamentals, the strategic management process, strategy formulation and implementation, data-driven decision making, and a good understanding of accounting, finance, human resources, marketing and production. This graduate course is suitable for students with or without a business background.
The course focuses on teaching students how to successfully analyze a business process, research methods of improving a process, and adapt/integrate the improvement methods into the business process in a prioritized and actionable manner.
This course focuses on human resource planning, recruitment, examination, and promotion of procedure. It familiarizes students with the key human resources management factors involved in supervising employees as well as collective bargaining, affirmative action, and employee productivity and performance evaluation. It is directed towards practical applications in dealing with these topics as managers and employees working in their teams or individually and covers employee professional responsibility and behavior. Students in this class will learn to utilize human resource planning, recruiting, interviewing and selection processes to improve organizational outcomes; analyze the legal/cultural aspects of personnel when making organizational decisions; identify the key components of performance management to improve themselves and their direct reports; develop specific solutions to solve critical workplace personnel issues; and apply a variety of motivation and team performance techniques in current and future organizational settings.
This course is designed to foster an understanding of incentives and strategic decision-making as they apply to negotiations. The course has both theoretical and applied components with the objective of addressing both theory and skills as they apply to dyadic and multiparty negotiations, to buyer-seller transactions, to competitors' interactions, to the resolution of disputes, and to the development of negotiation strategies. The theoretical component is focused on an analytical study of strategic interactions using game theory while the applied component is based on a series of simulated negotiations in a variety of contexts including one-on-one, multiparty, and team negotiations. The objectives of the course are to provide an analytical foundation, to show where practice and theory diverge, and to provide a forum where negotiation tools in a variety of business-oriented settings can be actively applied. Instructor permission is required.
This course is designed to provide an introduction to the evolving area of AI, with an emphasis on potential business applications and related managerial insights. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the science behind systems that can program themselves to classify, predict, and offer solutions based on structured and unstructured data. For millennia, humans have pondered the idea of building intelligent machines. Ever since, AI has had highs and lows, demonstrated successes and unfulfilled potential. Today, AI is empowering people and changing our world. Netflix recommends movies, Amazon recommends popular products, self-driving cars learn to navigate safely around other vehicles without human assistance, and programmed robots distinguish trash from dishes that are to be washed. This course focuses on how AI systems understand, reason, learn and interact; learn from industry’s experience on several AI cases; develop a develop a deeper understanding of machine learning (ML) techniques and the algorithms that power those systems, and propose solutions to real world scenarios leveraging AI methodologies. The course also presents students to develop a high-quality proposal to plan and execute the deployment of an AI application at a business enterprise.
This course solidifies AI business knowledge with a focus on the leadership/implementation challenges and opportunities of agentic AI - autonomous systems that can reason, plan, and act independently to achieve business objectives. Students will master executive-level decision making for AI agent deployment, from competitive positioning to organizational transformation. Through lectures, Hands-On learning Sessions, C-suite case studies, strategic considerations, and boardroom-ready implementation plans, students will develop the leadership skills to drive the next generation of AI-powered business transformation.
Introduction to Block Chain will provide students with a basic understanding of the Hyperleder Fabric project sponsored by the Linux foundation. This class will mainly focus on Business applications for Hyperledger Fabric along with the introduction of basic code structures for Hyperledger fabric.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is undergoing a remarkable transformation, evolving from early systems focused on narrow, well-defined tasks to the current era characterized by increasingly sophisticated and versatile AI paradigms. This evolution is marked by a shift towards models capable of understanding context, generating novel content, reasoning through complex problems, and acting autonomously within dynamic environments. Understanding the trajectory of these advancements is crucial for navigating the increasingly complex technological landscape.
Quantitative techniques are very important and useful for analyzing business and financial markets, especially in today’s world of big data. This course reviews the basics of statistics, including sampling and data, descriptive statistics, probability, distributions, statistical inference, the Central Limit Theory, estimation, hypothesis testing, Analysis of Variance, and regression analysis, a widely used statistical technique in business and finance supporting decision-making under uncertainty.
The BUS 571 Capstone Studio course in the Master of Technological Entrepreneurship program provides students with a hands-on, real-world opportunity to complete a project in one of the three following roles: 1. Startup Founder: Bring your startup ideas to your Capstone project. Identify, investigate and/or evaluate the suitability of a product or service to the marketplace. 2. Creative Researcher/Research Commercialization: Apply your talents to investigate and/or evaluate a research-based technology for suitability as a product or service. 3. Corporate Innovator: Make an impact within a business or organization. Work with an existing company to evaluate and/or investigate a product or service opportunity for the company. Students will either build or join a small team to develop a prototype, engage customers and partners, and identify support and/or funding.
The BUS 572 Capstone Studio course provides students with a hands-on, real world opportunity to complete a project in one of the three following roles: 1. Startup Founder: Bring your startup ideas to your Capstone project. Identify, investigate and/or evaluate the suitability of a product or service to the marketplace. 2. Creative Researcher/Research Commercialization: Apply your talents to investigate and/or evaluate a research-based technology for suitability as a product or service. 3. Corporate Innovator: Make an impact within a business or organization. Work with an existing company to evaluate and/or investigate a product or service opportunity for the company. Students will either build or join a small team to develop a prototype, engage customers and partners, and identify support and/or funding.
The course concentrates on the preparation of business plans, methods for evaluating and screening new venture ideas, formulation and implementation of business strategies for new ventures, and the financing of new ventures. The course will also focus on identifying, examining, and evaluating various sources of original and growth capital. Emphasis will be on legal, financial, and tax issues related to capital formation as well as specific problems experienced by the entrepreneur in the high technology space. Topics discussed will include venture valuation, financing startups, financial planning and strategy.
Designed for leaders focused on implementing new ideas, staying ahead of the competition and aligning their people, data and technology to drive digital transformation. First, we discuss the pace of change, and its impact, implications and opportunities. Next, we provide the context and framework to help you identify key areas to digitize, including strategy, core processes, and technology. The course culminates with a capstone project where participants create an action plan for a challenge at a level that is appropriate for their role or responsibility.
The BUS 592 Capstone course in the Master of Technological Entrepreneurship program provides students with a hands-on, real world opportunity to complete a project in one of the three following roles: 1. Startup Founder: Bring your startup ideas to your Capstone project. Identify, investigate and/or evaluate the suitability of a product or service to the marketplace. 2. Creative Researcher/Research Commercialization: Apply your talents to investigate and/or evaluate a research-based technology for suitability as a product or service. 3. Corporate Innovator: Make an impact within a business or organization. Work with an existing company to evaluate and/or investigate a product or service opportunity for the company. Students will either build or join a small team to develop a prototype, engage customers and partners, and identify support and/or funding. Students are required to take BUS 592 in every semester of their program to facilitate application of learning to their project.
Special topics in business administration.
This course provides graduate students with a supervised, immersive, hands-on experience in a US workplace where they will gain exposure to an industry and practical experience with projects related to their interests. Students will work for a minimum of eight weeks, 32 hours/week. Students will be matched with an organization according to their area of study, related experience, and/or relevant skillset.
