Courses

• 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
  The changing relationship between business and the natural environment offers both challenges and opportunities for firms. In this course we will discuss many facets of business, including financing, risk management, measurement, competitive positioning, innovation, and strategy in the context of increasing pressures for improved environmental sustainability. The course will be interactive and discussion-oriented, with a case discussion in most class sessions, supplemented by debates, simulation exercises, visitors, student presentations, discussions of recent news articles, and mini-lectures. The course is appropriate for all students interested in how demands for sustainability will continue to change the business environment.
• GSM SI 839: Design Thinking and Innovation
  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 847: Strategic Analysis of Energy & Environmental Sustainability Projects
  SI847: Strategic Analysis of Energy & Environmental Sustainability Projects is a field-based team project course focused on real world issues related to energy and environmental sustainability. Course projects are provided by external "client" organizations and provide students with an integrative, hands-on experience in the development, deployment, and/or implementation of sustainable energy/environmental technologies/systems/initiatives. Examples of client organizations are public/private/non-governmental organizations that operate in the: a) energy generation, distribution or storage sector, b) energy/energy services (ESCO)/environmental services sector, c) energy/environmental project development services or financing sector, or d) public/private sector, such as a large energy-user evaluating sustainable energy/environmental strategy/implementation alternatives. The course is of hybrid design, blending in-class lectures, panel discussions and cases with on-line elements and field site visits. Prior course work in areas such as finance, marketing, policy and strategy will be augmented with specific/relevant industry/application/technical content through online sources, webinars and expert speakers.
• GSM SI 849: Corporate Sustainability Strategy
  Corporate Sustainability Strategy is an advanced corporate-level strategy course that explores such varied issues as the underpinnings, interconnectedness and systems dynamics of human-coupled natural ecosystems, limits to growth and the increasing influence of climate change, environmental degradation and natural resource depletion on the corporate strategy, industrial development and the global economy. Specifically, this course: 1) Applies situational analysis techniques and methods to macro-level social, economic and environmental systems and their driving forces, 2) Evaluates a variety of strategic planning/forecasting tools, methods and techniques, 3) Investigates decision frameworks for corporate strategy focused on creating/capturing value and risk management through a sequence of action over time, 4) Explores new emerging paradigms for product/service, business model, structural and financial innovations, 5) Identifies new opportunities/challenges for innovation and value creation/capture through collaborations and competition, partnerships/alliances/consortia and platforms. The course takes the perspective of the corporate leader/strategy analyst and challenges students to identify driving forces, evaluate global trends, understand implications and assess their impact on strategies, objectives, operations and performance of the firm.
• 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.
• GSM SI 870: Strategies for Sustainable Development
  SI870: Strategies for Sustainable Development is an advanced strategy course that explores the analysis, conceptualization and development of innovative, market-based solutions for sustainable development challenges for a future defined by natural resource, environmental and biological constraints. Specifically, the course the explores 1) the complex global context for sustainable development, 2) key stakeholders, 3) the emergent strategy (entrepreneurial) development process, method and practice, and 4) the structure, governance, and financing/microeconomics of new, emergent organizational forms and business models for sustainable development, such as cross-sector cooperative alliances, public-private partnerships with a particular focus multi-stakeholder platforms. Note: Market-based solutions for sustainable development are economically self- sustaining alternatives to traditional governmentally-funded or aid-based programs for addressing systemic social, economic and environmental problems. These solutions engage public, private, NGO and civil society actors and employ a variety in emerging organizational forms (both for profit and non-profit), innovative business models and strategies to deliver effective solutions at scale. The course takes a stakeholder-oriented, system-of-systems approach to the issues of sustainable development with a specific focus on the network of interrelated actors and interdependent issues within the class of "wicked problems"; .i.e. social, economic or environmental problems that are difficult to frame, scope and seemingly insoluable because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements. Cases, readings, video and lectures will establish global context and sustainable development worldview across nine countries; Brazil, China, India, Israel, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and South Africa, and explore solutions to a range of issues from energy, food, water and climate change to health, education, economic inclusion, gender equity, security, organized crime and the informal. Students will work in teams to initially identify, frame and scope a complex, global sustainable development challenge and then work throughout the semester to research, conceptualized, evaluate and propose a global initiative for a market-based solution to that challenge.
• GSM SI 871: Strategies for Bringing Technology to Market
  Strategies for Bringing Technology to Market is a unique course that guides student teams as they undertake commercial go-to-market strategy for scientific and engineering breakthroughs. By collaborating with faculty and graduate students in the University?s research labs and mentors from the business community, teams will assess the economic and social prospects of recent technology innovations, outline the technical and market risks and the key commercial milestones and make recommendations for the most effective commercialization strategy. 

Project work is supported by lectures that focus on critical skills required. Guidance will be provided in assessing critical commercialization milestones by a combination of faculty and mentors from the business community.
• GSM SI 898: Ds: Strat&Innov
  
• GSM SI 899: Ds: Strat&Innov
  
• GSM SI 915: Models & Methods for Causal Inference in Strategy Research
  What should you do when a referee says your paper has an "endogeneity problem" or a seminar participant asks how your empirical model is "identified"? This course will present a set of tools and concepts that should help you produce an intelligent response. There are two main goals. The first is to develop a clear understanding of the conceptual difficulties associated with establishing causality in empirical work. In particular to de-mystify several concepts that are frequently invoked as "problems" or "issues" in applied empirical research, but seldom clearly explained. A good grasp of these concepts will lead to improved research design and a sharper understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of various statistical methods. The second goal is to describe some of the practical problems that arise in the application of these methods. The course has special emphasis on testing the key underlying assumptions. This course is designed to complement a traditional two-semester graduate sequence in econometrics.
• GSM SI 920: Organizations in Strategy and Economics
  This doctoral seminar will compare and contrast ideas about organizational design and the performance consequences of organizational decisions from the closely related fields of Strategy and Economics. The first half of the semester will focus on the role of organizations (typically firms) in several schools of thought within Strategic Management. The second half of the semester will cover similar topics from an economic perspective, which places more emphasis on incentives, formal contracts and specific kinds of information problems (i.e. moral hazard and adverse selection). At the end of this course, students should be able to explain how the role of organizations differs across several key theoretical lenses used in Strategic Management (e.g. the Knowledge Based View vs. Strategic Human Capital Theory). Identify the core incentive and informational problems that underpin most economic models of organization. Articulate areas where Strategy and Economics have reached a consensus on the key drivers of organization, as well as questions where the two fields make different assumptions and/or reach different conclusions and describe key empirical regularities and associations that have informed organizational theory-building efforts in both strategy and economics.
• GSM SI 998: Ds: Strat&Innov
  

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