Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the Student Link for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• QST SI 475: Global Management Experience
  The Global Management Experience is a four-credit course that involves analytical work during the first half of the spring semester on campus, and culminates with a trip to Asia during Spring Break. Each year the countries and cities are changed. Pre-travel course work includes exploration of economic, governmental and social factors that affect the conduct of business, and ethics, in a variety of industries and contexts. The trip involves visiting business executives, government leaders and entrepreneurs, observing first-hand the application of management principles and strategies in the global arena. We also hope to meet socially with BU alumni in both cities.
• QST SI 480: The Business of Technology Innovation
  Open only to seniors and juniors in the College of Engineering. Questrom students cannot take this course for degree credit. Provides an introduction to entrepreneurship and business for the engineer. Topics include finding business ideas; recognizing good from bad; understanding the importance of business model; turning technology into a business, including what to sell and how to sell it; the role of engineering within a business; business financial statements; and startups and venture capital, including starting a company or joining a startup.
• QST SI 482: Strategy for Technology-Based Firms
  Serves Questrom students concentrating in entrepreneurship or who are interested in high-technology sectors, and ENG students who have taken SI480. This interdisciplinary course covers technology life-cycles, the co-evolution of industries and technologies, strategies for commercialization of new technologies (appropriability, acquiring complementary assets and capabilities, managing technical teams, and impact of regulatory and other environmental factors on commercialization). Special emphasis is placed on joint learning and interdisciplinary teamwork by students across Engineering and Questrom.
• QST SI 498: Directed Study in Strategy and Innovation
  Directed study in Strategy and Innovation. 2 or 4 cr. Application available on Undergraduate Program website.
• QST SI 718: Topics in Corporate Strategy and Innovation
  This course serves as a capstone to the accelerated core for the Professional Evening MBA program. It draws on findings from a number of academic disciplines, especially economics, organization theory, sociology, accounting, and management policy to build a comprehensive understanding of how and why some firms achieve and sustain superior performance. The primary objectives of the course are to: 1) build upon students' foundational understanding of factors that affect organizations' long-run economic performance, 2) refresh students' use of strategy frameworks and analytical tools used for making recommendations to organizations on how they can work towards achieving superior performance, and 3) extend students' knowledge into advanced strategy topics and contemporary issues. The course is designed to develop an integrative view of the firm and its environment, along with appropriate analytical skills. Issues associated with professional ethics and corporate social responsibility are pervasive throughout the curriculum and students are encouraged to incorporate these perspectives in case analysis and classroom discussion. Global strategic management is an important a theme of the course: many of the cases are global companies, students will be challenged to extend the conceptual frameworks and apply any lessons learned to an international context.
• QST 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.
• QST 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.
• QST 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.
• QST SI 820: Scaling New Ventures
  The purpose of this class is to increase students' chances of success in their early-stage ventures by helping them avoid common team-related mistakes. We explore specific dilemmas that founders face--decisions that arrive early on, can be uncomfortable, and that need to be made with minimal information--but that can have far-reaching consequences. Whether the founding team stays together, whether the venture achieves an attractive exit, and the extent to which the founder(s) share in those rewards can all be largely determined by early-stage choices. We will focus primarily on "people" issues as well as the trade-offs involved with enlisting outside resources to accelerate growth (e.g., VC funding). It is composed of three modules: 1) Assembling the Founding Team, 2) Scaling the Team, and 3) Tradeoffs in Scaling via External Resources.
• QST 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.
• QST 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.
• QST 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.
• QST 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.
• QST 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.
• QST 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.
• QST SI 849: Corporate Sustainability Strategy
  Focuses on embedding sustainability (ESG/CSR) into corporate strategy as an approach for creating long-term shareholder/stakeholder value, where value covers the broad spectrum of economic, environmental and social outcomes. Through readings, lectures, case discussions, in-class exercises, lab session and a team project, this course will: 1) Introduce students to problem framing and environmental scanning techniques as methods for understanding macro-level social, economic and environmental systems and their implications; 2) Apply a variety of long-range strategic forecasting and analysis methods, techniques and tools through a scenario planning lab simulation; 3) Develop decision frameworks for corporate strategy development focused on creating/capturing value and managing risk through a sequence of strategic actions over time; 4) Explore newly emerging paradigms for sustainability-driven innovations in product/service, value chain and business model development and stakeholder-based, non-market actions.
• QST 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.
• QST 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.
• QST SI 856: Global Perspectives in Entrepreneurship
  No matter where you work, a small young venture or a large mature firm, your company will soon be sourcing from, selling to, partnering with, or owned by a foreign company. In your entrepreneurially-minded role in a new venture, corporation, or social enterprise, the international dimension of business looms large. In this course, we will explore how entrepreneurship differs by country and how and why context matters in the ability to start and grow new ventures. Next, you will take a concept from a domestic setting and explore why you would expand to other countries, where to expand to and what information you need about that foreign market, who you need to know to make that expansion successful, how to expand to that market, and when expansion can be most successful. Cases and readings will support the development of a foreign market entry plan to help make you a successful international entrepreneur.
• QST SI 857: Dilemmas in Scaling New Ventures
  The purpose of this class is to increase students' chances of success in their early stage ventures by helping them avoid common team-related mistakes. We explore specific dilemmas that founders face --decisions that arrive early on, can be uncomfortable, and that need to be made with minimal information -- but that can have far-reaching consequences. Whether the founding team stays together, whether the venture achieves an attractive exit, and the extent to which the founder(s) share in those rewards can all be largely determined by early-stage choices.

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