Courses

• GSM PL 870: Government, Society and Sustainable Development
  Government, Society and Sustainable Development is a broad and far-reaching course in scope and topics. After an introduction to the concepts of the limits-to-growth and global sustainability challenges resulting from population growth, resource scarcity, environmental degradation and climate change students dive deep into the cultural, societal and economic development issues of globalization, study the implications of globalization on the current social and economic development of nations/regions/industries and explore new development models (for-profit and non-profit entrepreneurship) for sustainable development at the international, national, and sub-national levels. The Course has three major themes: ? The first major theme of the course is a series of country cases that explore the cultural, social, political and economic context in which business enterprise has historically been conducted. ? The second major theme of the course overlays the international institutions that emerged from Bretton Woods; the UN, GATT/WTO, the World Bank and the IMF, (the emerging World Environmental Organization, WEO) onto the country cases and explores emerging topics of international Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and International Environmental Protection (IEP). ? The third major theme of the course explores the emergence of new models of sustainable development; contrasting bottoms-ups collective action and entrepreneurship against classic aid-based models as a force for change and driver of sustainable development.
• GSM PL 882: Public Policy Analysis
  This course explores the economics of the public sector and the impact government policy and programs have on society and business. The course provides students with tools to systematically examine the financing and measure the impact of government policies and regulations. It explores the rationale for government intervention, appropriate levels of intervention and how to measure the effectiveness of policies and regulations. This course is helpful to those who desire a deeper understanding of the central role government plays in the economy and how government impacts the business and nonprofit sectors.
• GSM PL 888: Ds:Policy&LAW
  
• GSM QM 716: Business Analytics: Data Analysis and Risk
  The overall goal of this course is to improve student ability to learn from data, specifically to 1) assess the validity of conclusions that have been drawn from statistical analyses; 2) recognize the extent to which variation characterizes products and processes, and understand the implications of variation on organizational decisions when interpreting data; and 3) portray, summarize and analyze data to support operational and strategic decisions associated with the core business models. Students will increase their understanding of the use of probabilities to reflect uncertainty; how to interpret data in light of uncertainty to assess risk; and how to build and interpret regression models, which can be used to inform core business and organizational decisions.
• GSM QM 717: Data Analysis for Managerial Decision-Making
  The overall goal of this course is to improve student ability to learn from data, specifically to 1) assess the validity of conclusions that have been drawn from statistical analyses; 2) recognize the extent to which variation characterizes products and processes, and understand the implications of variation on organizational decisions when interpreting data; and 3) portray, summarize and analyze data to support operational and strategic decisions associated with the core business models. Students will increase their understanding of the use of probabilities to reflect uncertainty; how to interpret data in light of uncertainty to assess risk; and how to build and interpret regression models, which can be used to inform core business and organizational decisions.
• GSM QM 880: Business Analytics: Spreadsheet Optimization and Simulation
  The modeling process illustrated throughout the course will significantly improve students? abilities to structure complex problems and derive insights about the value of alternatives. You will develop the skills to formulate and analyze a wide range of models that can aid in managerial decision-making in the functional areas of business. These areas include finance (capital budgeting, cash planning, portfolio optimization, valuing options, hedging investments), marketing (pricing, sales force allocation, planning advertising budgets) and operations (production planning, workforce scheduling, facility location, project management). The course will be taught almost entirely by example, using problems from the main functional areas of business. This course is not for people who want a general introduction to or review of Excel. This course is for students who are already comfortable using Excel and would like to use it to create optimization and simulation models.
• GSM SI 750: Competition, Innovation, and Strategy
  "Competition, Innovation, and Strategy" is an integrative course designed to capitalize on your understanding of Finance, Operations Management, Marketing, and other functional issues. The course draws on a number of academic disciplines, especially economics, organization theory, and sociology, to build a fundamental understanding of how and why some firms achieve and sustain superior performance. We also study why some firms persistently generate returns that are lower than average. The course is analytically focused and requires that you evaluate both the external environment and the internal capabilities of organizations. Corporate diversification and global management are important topics that are also featured.
• GSM SI 751: Competition, Innovation, and Strategy
  "Competition, Innovation, and Strategy" is an integrative course designed to capitalize on your understanding of Finance, Operations Management, Marketing, and other functional issues. The course draws on a number of academic disciplines, especially economics, organization theory, and sociology, to build a fundamental understanding of how and why some firms achieve and sustain superior performance. We also study why some firms persistently generate returns that are lower than average. The course is analytically focused and requires that you evaluate both the external environment and the internal capabilities of organizations. Corporate diversification and global management are important topics that are also featured.
• GSM SI 814: Intellectual Property Strategies
  This course covers the ways in which companies use intellectual property to protect their investments in knowledge assets. Traditionally a concern for technology-intensive businesses, patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets have become important business tools throughout the knowledge-based economy. A good understanding of what IP assets are and how they work has become essential for managers in all types of organizations. This is not a law course, nor a how-to manual rather it is intended to develop your analytical understanding of fundamental economic and legal aspects of intellectual property systems, and how they drive competition and strategy.
• GSM SI 830: Corporate Strategies for Growth
  This course will examine strategies for firm growth that involve expanding the range of the firm?s business activities. We will study strategic logics underlying vertical integration, franchising, related and unrelated diversification, alliances, corporate venturing and spinouts, and other such strategies. We will also study the management challenges associated with these strategies, including designing organizational structures and managerial incentives, managing acquisitions, structuring supplier relationships, and fostering organizational cultures.
• GSM SI 835: Real Estate Management
  This is an introductory course that covers the basics of real estate investing and managing. Subject materials include mortgages, lenders, forms of ownership, tax laws effecting real property, financial analysis and valuation techniques.
• GSM SI 836: Foundations of Environmental Sustainability
  This course introduces students to the Social Enterprise and Environmental Sustainability sector. Firm actions have increasingly broad and visible social consequences; private, non-profit, and public leaders need to be able to respond to the challenges and opportunities that these consequences impart. In this course, we will discuss a broad set of contexts, including "green" products, renewable energy, carbon markets, and worker health and safety, unified by their creation or destruction of social value. This course provides students with an understanding of how the tools and concepts of business apply to contexts of significant social value, where there are often externalities generated by firm actions that call forth regulation and public policy, NGO activism, and consumer attention. It explores how the social and environmental impact of firm actions can provide both challenges and opportunities for firms to create and capture value.
• GSM SI 839: Design and Innovation Strategy
  This class will examine how managers and leaders can create the conditions for innovation at the individual, team and organizational levels ? and how those conditions differ for startup and mature organizations. Managing innovation includes the generation of ideas; the integration of ideas into new product concepts; and the commercialization of ideas. While core strategy courses address the questions of what innovations to pursue and whether and when those innovations will bring value, this course addresses the question of how managers can create organizations to deliver innovations of value. Thus, the course will focus on the practices and processes that mangers need to put in place to enable organizations to execute on an innovation strategy. In doing so, students will evaluate how to balance the challenges of organizing, managing and leading innovation with the need to produce concrete, routine and expected outcomes within the organization. To be innovative, any new idea must resolve the innovation paradox ? introducing enough novelty to appeal to new markets while retaining enough familiarity to tap into existing behaviors. Because design and innovation are frequently inseparable in managing this paradox, the class will assess how design contributes to innovation in product, process and business models across industry sectors. The course will also consider the role that all sources of innovation play ? including communities, networks, brokers and other forms of open innovation. Students will be asked to reflect upon innovations that have been critical to their lives, and how these innovations were produced and gained market traction. Final group projects will explore how to ?rescue? innovations in trouble with turnaround teams.
• GSM SI 842: Real Estate Development
  The course provides a framework for evaluating the aspects underlying successful real estate development from concept and feasibility, through site control to regulatory review and construction. The course is taught utilizing class discussion, cases and outside speakers to reinforce the functional areas in the development process.
• GSM SI 845: Technology Strategy
  Technology Strategy focuses on the interface between technological innovation and strategic management. This advanced strategy course covers the tools and concepts needed to understand how technological change creates new markets and new wealth; how technology-intensive industries differ from other industries; and the type of capabilities that technology-based firms need at different stages of their rapidly evolving industries. Some of the key topics covered include: platform dynamics and business models, standards wars, technology diffusion, technological discontinuities and disruptive innovation, models of industry evolution, dominant technological designs, complementary assets needed to profit from an innovation, and mechanisms to protect intellectual property. The course provides a rigorous treatment of the topics covered, combined with hands-on exercises and projects to help students apply the concepts to specific companies and technologies. Teaching methodology is a combination of interactive class discussions, online simulations, digital multimedia cases, paper-based cases, and guest speakers from industry. The course has been designed to provide students with a solid foundation of theories, tools, techniques and practices that will allow them to understand how to compete successfully in technology- intensive environments.
• GSM SI 852: Starting New Ventures
  This course focuses on the process of identifying and obtaining the necessary resources to launch an entrepreneurial venture through the development of a business plan. A well-written business plan will communicate the business concept in a way that attracts the various resource providers necessary for the venture?s success. Students will individually develop a business concept and prepare and present a professional business plan.
• GSM SI 855: Entrepreneurship
  The course is a comprehensive introduction to the entrepreneurial process from idea generation through venture launch and later growth. Initial lectures and case studies focus on idea generation and concept feasibility along with the skills, competencies and perspectives entrepreneurs must develop to manage the organization through each phase of development. Later lectures and cases emphasize the issues faced by entrepreneurs in scaling innovative enterprises; use of strategic alliances, attracting funding and managing investors, managing growth expansion and choosing among exit options.
• GSM SI 856: International Entrepreneurship
  This course focuses on international entrepreneurship, covering the development of skills to identify, evaluate, start and manage ventures that are international in scope. Specific topics will include market entry, forming alliances, managing growth and crossborder financing in different regions of the world. Support from local governments and the cultural, ethical, legal, and human resource issues facing the entrepreneur will also be discussed. Readings will primarily be in the form of case studies and will be supplemented with outside articles and guest speakers. Team projects addressing current events, international negotiations, and business strategies will be used to integrate the course material.
• GSM SI 859: Strategy Implementation
  Gain the skills and know-how to manage up and across your organization, passing the normal organizational tests along the way from technical expert to cross-functional integrator to directing the future course of your organization. This is strategy implementation for the middle manager who needs to 1) size-up the situation and 2) determine how to gain the power needed to achieve their objectives. One of the qualitative factors that will be explored in great detail is personal style choice vis à vis different stakeholders and organizational politics and the resultant perceptions of you and your programs. Students will study both successful and less-successful managers through cases and readings, honing their own, personal managerial style.
• GSM SI 863: Strategic and Financial Analysis and Design
  The purpose of this course is to increase students' awareness of what they already know about business and what they can know through strategic corporate financial analysis. Students will use numeric thinking and documentation to reduce uncertainty and to bring the strategic and limiting factors of managerial decisions into focus. The course is appropriate for students who have financial savvy as well as those who want to develop their analytical capabilities. It is case-based, emphasizing business sense first, and developing through first-hand experience a sense of the strengths and limitations of corporate financial data, financial theory and strategic evaluation models. It stresses fast approximate analysis to achieve managerial insights over precise calculation.

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