Strategy & Innovation

• QST SI 471: International Entrepreneurship
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: QSTFE 223, QSTMK 223, and QSTOM 223; or QSTSI 480 - Designed for students who may at some point be interested in pursuing managerial careers in the international entrepreneurial sector, and covers the development of skills to identify, evaluate, start, and manage ventures that are international in scope. Over the course of the semester, the class "travels" to more than fifteen countries on five continents, and analyze operations at each stage of the entrepreneurial process. The course covers market entry, forming alliances, negotiations, managing growth, and cross-border financing. Support from local governments, and the cultural, ethical, legal, and human resource issues facing the entrepreneur is also covered. Please click here to watch a 1 minute video overview of the course.
• QST SI 480: The Business of Technology Innovation
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: ENG sophomores, juniors and seniors - 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. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Historical Consciousness, Social Inquiry I.
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  • Historical Consciousness
  • Social Inquiry I
• QST SI 482: Strategy for Technology-Based Firms
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: QSTFE 223, QSTMK 223, and QSTOM 223; or QSTSI 480 - 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 553: Strategies in Environmental Sustainability
  Pre-requisites: QST SM131, or QST SI250, or QST SI480, or COM FT591, or SHA HF307; Junior standing - With the growing global call for climate action, firms are recognizing business imperatives for climate resiliency. This course broadens our vision of corporate strategy to incorporate environmental initiatives as a way to create value. If you are a student who embraces the power of the private sector to lead climate imperatives, you will find this course particularly applicable. You will leave this course with a clear and actionable framework for implementing sustainability initiatives at all levels of the firm. Effective Spring 2021, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Teamwork/Collaboration. Effective Spring 2025, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Social Inquiry 2, Teamwork/Collaboration.
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  • Social Inquiry II
  • Teamwork/Collaboration
• QST SI 630: Cleantech Venture Consulting Practicum
  This course combines lectures on technology-based opportunity areas advancing environmental sustainability with an "Active Learning" consulting experience in which students work with a "sponsoring company" to address a real-world business issue affecting their potential success in the sustainability arena. In addition to being a requirement for students pursuing the dual MBA/MS Energy and Environment degree, the course will also appeal to students seeking to explore professional possibilities in management consulting, entrepreneurship, or the cleantech sector.
• QST SI 750: Competition, Innovation, and Strategy
  Graduate Prerequisites: QST AC710 or AC711, QST MK723 or MK724, QST MO712 or MO713, QST OM725 or OM726 - "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
  Graduate Prerequisites: QST AC710 or AC711, QST MK723 or MK724, QST MO712 or MO713, QST OM725o r OM726 - "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
  Graduate Prerequisites: (QST AC710 or AC711, QST FE712 or FE722), (QST MK723 or MK724), (QST MO712 or MO713, QST QM716 or QM717), or permission of the instructor. 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 828: Managing the Global Enterprise
  Pre-requisite: QSTSI 750 or QSTSI 751. Managing the Global Enterprise is a graduate-level elective providing students with a rigorous, strategy-oriented understanding of how firms expand, organize, and compete across national borders. The course equips business leaders with a global mindset by combining applied frameworks, research-based insights, and practical assignments. It integrates macro-level institutions, such as phases of economic integration and country-market analysis, with firm-level capabilities, including multinational corporate strategy, expansion strategy, and foreign-entry modes. The course content focuses on contemporary issues impacting firm expansion and international performance, such as geopolitical tensions, economic fragmentation, and the role of multinational enterprises in addressing societal challenges.
• 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.