Academics

This experience introduces incoming students to the program structure, faculty, staff, and expectations. Via team-based activities, students gain an understanding of the curriculum, classmates, Boston University and Boston. Students are exposed to the value of and need for international intelligence, ethics, diversity and resources available to support these.

This course introduces students to issues associated with formulating and implementing business strategy. It draws on findings from various academic disciplines (e.g., economics, organization theory, sociology, accounting, and management policy) to build a fundamental understanding of how and why some firms achieve and sustain superior performance. Readings and cases lead towards understanding of the underlying economics affecting a firm's external and internal environments and the implications of these fundamental factors for affecting the practice of strategy design. The course is designed to challenge students both inside and outside of the classroom.

"If you can measure it, you can manage it" is an axiom of management. Accounting is the language of business measurement, the means by which business describes what they do, why they do it, and the value that it generates. In this course, you will be introduced to this language via financial statements: corporate reports, balance sheets, earnings and cash flow analyses, along with CVP-based analysis and decision making.

This course introduces students to statistics and probability, the means by which we analyze customers, markets, firms, industries...any and all aspects of the business experience. The goal is to teach students tools and techniques for analyzing data with an appreciation for the theory underpinning such analyses. How do we collect and analyze data in an unbiased manner?

This course examines how teams function, how individuals within those teams operate, and how team members can deal with the sometimes tricky dynamics of working with others. The course is largely experiential, and involves individual introspection, one-on-one interactions with others, group exercises, and class discussion.

Persuasive written, oral, and interpersonal communications are essential skills that are required for success in every business discipline. In this class, students will learn how to communicate clearly and persuasively, and to connect authentically with their audience, in a way that inspires action. Students will learn to take a point of view on current business issues, support it with logic and evidence, and express it effectively in multiple media, ranging from written to verbal, and from formal to extemporaneous. Best practices for both in-person and virtual remote interactions will be explored and practiced. Coaching will be offered for client project meetings and presentations.

Although these activities could be considered components of marketing, this course takes the point of view that marketing is fundamentally about driving growth. No matter how we measure this growth (in terms of volume sold, revenues, or profits), it always starts with an understanding of how to create value for the customer. The most successful organizations understand that identifying, producing, delivering and capturing value is a strategic practice on which an enterprise thrives or dies. With so much on the line, growth cannot be relegated merely to the marketing department; it is a mindset to be embraced across the organization. This course provides students with an opportunity to deepen your understanding of the ever-changing world of marketing. It presents advanced concepts marketers in all companies are dealing with to grow their business.

Finance is concerned with the efficient allocation of capital, maximizing operational cash flows and the management of financial risk. Capital is said to be efficiently allocated when the risk/return profile of the investment is in line with investor preferences with respect to risk, time and expected return. This course includes the basics of investment analysis: time-value of money, portfolio theory, risk-return tradeoffs and capital budgeting. Time-value of money refers to the valuation of differing values of expected cash flows across time and accounts for differing levels of expected risk. Portfolio theory refers to the optimization of the weights of investments such that the portfolio outperforms the average of the investments. This is accomplished through the minimization of unnecessary risk. Capital budgeting refers to the process of capital allocation within the business (by managers) such that the financial performance of the firm is maximized.

This course seeks to familiarize students with customer data analysis related to digital marketing and sales, customer experience, and product management. The goal of this course is to help students uncover insights along the customer's journey as they move in stages of awareness, intent, conversion, and retention. Students will build foundational skills in analyzing customer data.

In this course, students will learn how to use the concepts, tools and techniques of project management in order to successfully manage projects. System development project failures are generally failures of management, not failures of technology. Good management, along with an understanding of the appropriate use of technology, is therefore essential. Students will learn how to apply the concepts, tools and techniques of project management in today's dynamic, digital business environment, where projects must be brought to completion under increasingly compressed timeframes and where decisions must be made under conditions of uncertainty

Persuasive written, oral, and interpersonal communications are essential skills that are required for success in every business discipline. In this class, students will learn how to communicate clearly and persuasively, and to connect authentically with their audience, in a way that inspires action. Students will learn to take a point of view on current business issues, support it with logic and evidence, and express it effectively in multiple media, ranging from written to verbal, and from formal to extemporaneous. Best practices for both in-person and virtual remote interactions will be explored and practiced. Coaching will be offered for client project meetings and presentations.

This course introduces students to the innovation processes, such as design thinking, and various types and models of innovation. Students will learn current approaches to developing value for innovators, companies, societies, and economies through entrepreneurship. The course will explore various contexts for innovation and entrepreneurship, including new ventures, mature companies, and foreign market entry.

Persuasive written, oral, and interpersonal communications are essential skills that are required for success in every business discipline. In this class, students will learn how to communicate clearly and persuasively, and to connect authentically with their audience, in a way that inspires action. Students will learn to take a point of view on current business issues, support it with logic and evidence, and express it effectively in multiple media, ranging from written to verbal, and from formal to extemporaneous. Best practices for both in-person and virtual remote interactions will be explored and practiced. Coaching will be offered for client project meetings and presentations.

This course introduces students to issues and best practices in successfully optimizing the value of goods and services over their lifetime. The goal of the course is to help students understand the value a product delivers to customers in a competitive environment. Students will build foundational skills in product portfolio management, lifecycle management, pricing and feature bundling and channel strategy.

The focus of this course is on leadership from a variety of perspectives: organizational leadership in the external environment, as well as leadership at the top, middle, and lower levels inside organizations. We look leadership from a behavioral, emotional intelligence, and situational point of view, developing students' awareness, mindset, and skills in the process. In addition, we explore the challenges, theories, and skills of change management.

This is an introductory course on Digital Marketing emphasizing analytics that seeks to familiarize students with digital marketing tactics. At the heart of marketing lies consumers and their marketing journey through the stages of awareness, intent, conversion, and finally retention. In this course, we will learn how digital has revolutionized the interactions between firms and consumers along this journey. Digital offers powerful tactics to reach consumers along the funnel: online display ads raise awareness, search listings reach consumers with intent, on-site e-commerce marketing facilitates conversion, and social media both energizes and retains customers. The course develops essential data analytics skills--critical thinking, data mining, experimental analysis, and design--applied to ad campaigns, ad attribution, and social media data

The ability to translate data into visuals can often make the difference between success and failure. The goal of this course is to enable students to use the most common data visualization applications such as Tableau or Microsoft Power BI to communicate data. The course will begin with querying relationship databases, integrating multiple data sources and data validation, followed by choosing the most proper visualization option, creating automated dashboards, and building an overall visual system.

In this course, students will learn how to use the concepts, tools and techniques of project management in order to successfully manage projects. System development project failures are generally failures of management, not failures of technology. Good management, along with an understanding of the appropriate use of technology, is therefore essential. Students will learn how to apply the concepts, tools and techniques of project management in today's dynamic, digital business environment, where projects must be brought to completion under increasingly compressed timeframes and where decisions must be made under conditions of uncertainty

Persuasive written, oral, and interpersonal communications are essential skills that are required for success in every business discipline. In this class, students will learn how to communicate clearly and persuasively, and to connect authentically with their audience, in a way that inspires action. Students will learn to take a point of view on current business issues, support it with logic and evidence, and express it effectively in multiple media, ranging from written to verbal, and from formal to extemporaneous. Best practices for both in-person and virtual remote interactions will be explored and practiced. Coaching will be offered for client project meetings and presentations.

This course explores the skills strategies and tactics of both collaborative and competitive negotiations. In addition, we look at team negotiations, multi-party negotiations, agency, stakeholder analysis, preparation, and conflict resolution. The course is largely experiential, and involves individual introspection, one-on-one interactions with others, group exercises, and class discussion

This course builds on design thinking concepts by helping students use a foundational set of innovation and development tools to convert customer insights into tangible offers. The goal of the course is to enable students to contribute to a development teams' ability to deliver innovation to the market through ideation, concepting, prototyping, piloting, and launch. Students will learn to deploy tools at each step and learn ways to include customer feedback in an iterative way.

The ability to take on unstructured problems and generate useful insights/solutions is something that cannot easily be taught. But, it can certainly be learnt through practice and guidance. For most quantitative problems in graduate courses, the decision options, goals, and analytical approaches are pre-defined. In practice, however, business problems are usually ill-defined, "messy", where the decisions are initially ambiguous, goals are unclear, and the relationship between decisions and outcomes are indeterminate. While each business problem is distinctive, a disciplined approach to problem solving can be incredibly useful across many career contexts. The concepts and exercises in this course will sharpen our professional ability to structure a messy problem and do some disciplined analysis on it. Examples will be drawn from Strategy, Operations, Technology Management, Marketing, and Finance to expose us to the broad applications of the concepts and tools learned in this class.

It was recently reported that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated each day; ninety percent of the world's data were generated in the past two years. With this in mind, it's not hard to see why the leaders of today's most innovative companies have adopted and implemented data-centric strategies throughout their entire organizations. No longer is the application of analytics a competitive differentiator -- it is a necessity in today's "always- on" global economy. This course will examine how data are being used throughout today's modern organization, ranging from the core principles of properly identifying data sources to the actual analytical methods being used to solve a wide range of business problems. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to recognize how data are being used across today's organizations, compare and contrast the use of specific data analysis methods in organizations, differentiate and question when certain analytical methods should be leveraged to address various organizational problems, and critique and weigh various analytical methods in organizational contexts, supporting their decisions.