Courses

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

• QST SI 830: Corporate Strategies for Growth
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTSI750 OR QSTSI751) - *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 Development, Finance, and Management
  Graduate Prerequisites: QST FE712 or FE722, QST MK723 or MK724, QST OM725 or OM726, QST QM716 or QM717 - 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 affecting real property, financial analysis, and valuation techniques.
• QST SI 836: Decarbonization of the Global Economy
  Graduate Prerequisites: QSTBE 720 or QSTBE 721.- 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
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTSI750 OR QSTSI751) - 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 845: Technology Strategy
  Graduate Prerequisites: QSTAC 710 or 711, QSTBE 720 or QSTBE 721, QSTFE 713 or 722, QSTMK 723 or 724, QSTMO 712 or 713, and QSTSI 750 or 751. - Technology Strategy is an advanced graduate class that equips students with an array of interrelated frameworks, concepts, and tools for analyzing and managing businesses in an environment with rapid technological change. The course complements both a core strategy course and other strategy and functional electives. It should be particularly valuable for students who want to work in or start businesses in high-technology sectors, and also those who want to better understand how growth and wealth are created through technological innovation in a modern economy. Technology Strategy provides a comprehensive review of the key theories and tools needed to understand: (a) how technological change creates new markets and prompts new business models; (b) how technology- based firms can outcompete rivals in fast-growing markets characterized by high uncertainty; (c) how firms assemble the resources required to commercialize an innovative technology; and (d) how the evolution of technology affects the type of firm capabilities needed to succeed in an industry over time. Specific topics covered in this class include: technology diffusion, models of industry evolution, technological discontinuities and disruptive innovation, R&D management, intellectual property, complementary assets needed to profit from innovation, industry standards, platform dynamics, and technology policy.
• QST SI 849: Corporate Sustainability Strategy
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTSI750 OR QSTSI751) - 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
  Graduate Prerequisites: QST FE712 or FE722, QST MK723 or 724, QST OM725 or OM726, QST QM716 or QM717 - There isn't a "one size fits all" approach to starting new ventures. Start-ups need a strategy that aligns with their scarce resources. This course highlights the process of how to choose an entrepreneurial strategy, the specific choices that matter, how key choices fit together to form an overall entrepreneurial strategy, and the playbook for particular entrepreneurial strategies. Students will develop, analyze, and recommend entrepreneurial strategies for business concepts they develop.
• QST SI 855: Entrepreneurship
  Graduate Prerequisites: QST FE712 or FE722, QST MK723 or 724, QST OM725 or OM726, QST QM716 or QM717 - 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 859: Strategy Implementation
  Graduate Prerequisites: QST FE712 or FE722, QST MK723 or MK724, QST OM725 or OM726 - 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 860: Managing Corporate Innovation
  Graduate Prerequisites: QST SI750 or SI751 recommended but not required - This course will give students an understanding of the challenges of undertaking innovation within an existing corporate organization or other large institution such as governments or universities. Established industries are being disrupted by innovative products and services at an increasingly fast pace. Corporate leaders are confronting a dynamic shift from formal stage gate innovation approaches toward more entrepreneurial, iterative, fast-paced innovation processes such as agile development, design thinking, lean startup, rapid prototyping, and the business model canvas. To deliver innovative results, corporations must bridge ideas generated in the labs of tomorrow with current operations. This course aims to accelerate learning on corporate innovation by examining how corporate innovators can stay nimble and enable smart experimentation without risking the competencies that made them great. As the need to innovate becomes a matter of "life and death," how do large organizations successfully innovate' We will examine how techniques and frameworks developed in the startup world are being adapted for the corporate one and how established organizations select from a portfolio of options to foster innovation. 3 cr.
• QST SI 868: International Consulting Project
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QSTSI 750 OR QSTSI 751) - 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 895: Action Learning Directed Study in Strategy and Innovation
  ALDS: STRAT&INN
• QST SI 898: Directed Study: Strategy and Innovation
  Graduate Prerequisites: Consent of instructor and the department chair - 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 Prerequisites: Consent of instructor and the department chair - 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 998: Directed Study: Strategy and Innovation
  Graduate Prerequisites: Consent of instructor and the department chair - PhD-level directed study in Strategy & Innovation. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.
• QST SI 999: Directed Study: Strategy and Innovation
  Graduate Prerequisites: Consent of instructor and the department chair - PhD-level directed study in Strategy & Innovation. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.
• QST SM 101: Introduction to Management
  Online offering. A broad introduction to the nature and activities of business enterprises within the United States' economic and political framework. Course content introduces economic systems, essential elements of business organization, production, human resource management, marketing, finance, and risk management. Key objectives of the course are development of business vocabulary and a fundamental understanding of how businesses make money. This course is intended for non-business majors. It may not be taken by Questrom students for credit nor can it be used by Boston University students toward the Business Administration minor. Non-Questrom students may register for this course directly via the Student Link.
• QST SM 131: Business, Markets, and Society
  Undergraduate pre-requisite: Required of all Questrom first year students in their first term. Open to non-Questrom students who have completed one full-time term at Boston University. - SM131 provides students with a philosophical, economic, and applied foundation for understanding the functions of business and the role of business, markets, governments, and other stakeholders in society. It is the first course in the Questrom BSBA curriculum and is a required course for the Minor. It introduces the functions of business, explains the roles of businesses in markets, and explores the roles of business in society and the interactions between business and other economic actors. Along the way, the course introduces students to Questrom's critical and analytic thinking, communication curriculum (including both written and verbal communication), teaming curriculum, and fosters civil discourse on issues related to the strategic conduct of business and the roles of business and markets in society. Effective Fall 2023, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Ethical Reasoning, Teamwork/Collaboration. Effective Fall 2025, this course fulfills a single requirement in each of the following BU HUB areas: Ethical Reasoning, Research and Information Literacy, Teamwork/Collaboration.
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  • Ethical Reasoning
  • Research and Information Literacy
  • Teamwork/Collaboration