Strategy & Innovation

• 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 858: Innovation Eco-Systems
  This course is designed to help students to understand the importance of entrepreneurial eco-systems and the opportunities and support given to new ventures within these eco-systems. It provides a mechanism for MBA students to learn how the components of this innovation cycle interact with and complement each other. It will develop unique points of view on the role of Israel as a source of technology innovation and transformation and will present a mirror to examine the similarities and differences to the innovation culture that exists in the USA in general but Boston in particular. It will also develop a framework to identify the components that constitute an innovation eco-system to permit comparative analyses of how eco-systems differ in the ways they support innovation and entrepreneurship (e.g. Silicon Valley, Route 128, Israel, etc.).
• QST 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 a 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.
• QST SI 868: International Consulting Project
  Have you ever dreamed of climbing the Great Wall of China? How about consulting to a Chinese firm in Beijing? The International Consulting Project is an MBA course that involves consulting work during the fall semester on campus, with a trip to Asia in to deliver the team's recommendation personally to the client at their offices. Examples of past projects and more background can be found on this link: http://www.bclob.com/icp-home/ Much of the past students' work over the years has both been implemented and widely published in the Chinese business press.
• QST 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.
• QST SI 898: Directed Study: Strategy and Innovation
  Graduate-level directed study in Strategy & Innovation. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.
• QST SI 899: Directed Study: Strategy and Innovation
  Graduate-level directed study in Strategy & Innovation. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.
• QST SI 917: Research Seminar in Technology Strategy and Innovation
  This doctoral seminar serves as a survey course to the broad area of technology and innovation management. We will review and critique a large and diverse body of literature that can be considered "core" to the field. We will place emphasis on both classic theories and seminal contributions as well as on recent research that builds upon or extends the established theories. One key differentiator of this research seminar is that five professors actively doing research in the field will teach it. While having multiple instructors brings some coordination challenges (these are less critical in doctoral seminars than they are in masters level classes), it has one major advantage: it allows each faculty to lead those sessions that deal with topics of her or his direct research expertise. Students can expect to cover each topic with researchers that have been important contributors to the intellectual debate in the topic they teach. The seminar will cover key issues in the management of technology and innovation including innovation definitions and patterns (e.g. industry life cycle), entry timing strategies, platforms and standards, networks, dynamic capabilities, organizing for innovation, open and community-based innovation, licensing & patenting, technology diffusion, geography of innovation, and science and innovation policy. SI917 provides a solid base to critically explore many key topics of research in technology and innovation management. It is therefore aimed at doctoral students who plan to do research in technology and innovation management, or those who need a solid exposure to these topics to inform their research in related areas.
• QST 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.
• QST SI 990: Current Topics Seminar
  For PhD students in the Strategy and Innovation department. Registered by permission only.
• QST SI 998: Directed Study: Strategy and Innovation
  PhD-level directed study in Strategy & Innovation. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.

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