Programme Structure & Curriculum (Full-time)

Successful firms are those that integrate the objectives and resources of the organization with the needs and opportunities of the marketplace better than competitors—that is, those that identify untapped sources of customer value, and deliver and capture more customer value than their competitors. The role of marketing management in organizations is to identify customers' unfulfilled desires, determine which customers the business should serve, decide on the appropriate products and services, and determine the optimal methods of pricing, promoting, and distributing the products or services.

This course provides a broad but rigorous look at the international aspects of economics. The course is divided into two sections: the microeconomic section with a focus on trade, and the macroeconomic section with a focus on the international finance aspects. The trade section establishes the foundations of comparative advantages and the benefits of trade and assesses the issues of international policy concerning trade, including current contentions and controversies. The second section broadens the horizons to include international payments and flows of money, the issue of surpluses and deficits and international policy concerning exchange rate and monetary regimes.

One’s professional success in today’s complex organisations depends not only on technical, functional, and professional skills, but also on the ability to navigate the people side of organisations: to successfully work with and through others to achieve individual, group, and organisational objectives. Professionals will therefore benefit from a deeper understanding of, and an ability to apply, a range of concepts and frameworks for managing people and organisations. This course aims to provide such understanding and ability.

This course introduces basic financial and managerial accounting topics to enable students to have an appreciation of financial statement construction as well as understanding how accounting information is used by the various stakeholders both internal and external to the firm.

The course will enhance students’ technical skills in the following ways: analysing business events and transactions, solving problems and cases, application of financial statement information to decision making, and participation in problem assignments. Hopefully, the knowlege gained will also facilitate personal decision making in students' future everyday affairs.

This course presents the design of new supply chains and the restructuring of existing supply chains to be sustainable and provide better value in a global context. We will analyze the design of innovative supply chains that provide firms with a strategic and sustainable competitive advantage that utilise global resources and markets.

This course should be of particular interest to people aspiring for a career in designing and managing business processes, either directly (e.g., V.P. of Operations, Logistics Manager) or indirectly (e.g., management consulting). The course will also be useful to entrepreneurs who intend to serve new markets, or use new technologies, or participants who wish to strategically reposition their offerings in an existing market. The course should also be of interest to people who manage interfaces between operations and other business functions such as finance, marketing, managerial accounting and human resources.

The increasing availability of data is changing the way organizations are thinking about themselves and the way they interact with the world. Data is helping improve the profits of businesses, the quality of life of individuals, the performance of sports teams, and social interactions. In this course, you will learn how to use data and analytics to assist in the decision-making process. The course will expose students to real world examples of how descriptive, predictive, diagnostic and prescriptive analytics are used in various domains. Through these examples, you will learn how to use tools of analytics such as linear regression, logistic regression, classification and regression trees, random forests, clustering, matching, optimization, and visualization techniques in practice. The statistical software R will be used in the course, and class demonstration will be presented in R Notebooks. Students are encouraged to create their home works and project reports using R Notebooks.

This course introduces students to the theoretical concepts and analytical tools required for formulating and implementing appropriate strategies that affect the enduring success of the entire organization. Topics covered include external and internal environmental analyses, business-level strategies, corporate-level strategies, strategy process and implementation, and special topics such as competitive dynamics and competition in high tech industries. This course emphasizes the application of theory to a number of real world strategic issues. Students are encouraged to synthesize knowledge from other business courses into a comprehensive understanding of firms’ competitive advantages.

The course aims to provide students with fundamentally important ideas about what to look for in making good and informed investment, financing, and dividends decisions. Our analysis of these decisions will focus on how the right decisions can lead to the enhancement of firm value.

In examining investment decisions, we will evaluate existing investments, in terms of their fit to overall the firm’s strategy and their economic value. To the extent that new investments are essential to the future growth and development of the firm, new investments assessment becomes a critical area that we will be covering.

In order to make the right financing decisions, we will explore the various means of financing a firm, including the appropriate sources of funding in the various stages of development of the firm, the suitability of the vast array of financial instruments in the financial markets, as well as the achievement of an optimal financing mix.

In essence, dividend decisions involve the determination of how much to reinvest and how much to return to shareholders. As such, we shall look at the impact of dividend policy to future growth and development of the firm, and the rationale behind the return of cash to shareholders.

The concepts of risks and returns, of options value and applications in corporate finance, and of how to balance off the risks versus returns in asset pricing models will be discussed. This tradeoff is equivalent to finding optimal value or valuation of the opportunities that present themselves to corporate business.

In addition, the course will also cover important valuation principles/methodologies, applications to mergers and acquisitions situations, and value enhancement models will also be discussed.

Management Communication equips students with strategies that will enable them to successfully communicate their solutions to organisational problems. Since the course emphasises the importance of effective written and spoken communication within a business setting, students will be exposed to strategies that will enable them to communicate their ideas and values in a clear, persuasive and memorable way. Students will, therefore, learn the art of producing impactful business documents and delivering engaging presentations in various business contexts. By the end of the course, student will be able to function as proficient communicators who are ready to embrace the communicative challenges inherent in today’s dynamic business environment.

This course introduces students to new venture creation and design thinking tools for identifying new and better ways of providing products and services that meet customer expectations. In Part 1, the opportunity recognition process is introduced. We will look at how external factors (context, available resources) and intrinsic factors (motivation, network, risk propensity) interact to create opportunities that an entrepreneur then chooses to seize.

In Part 2, the qualitative design thinking process (based on the IDEO/Stanford Design School process) is introduced (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test). Applications of design thinking to product and service innovation will be discussed, along with varying of the design contexts, including the private sector, government and social sectors. Participants learn to think like innovators, from the initial idea to managing resources, building partnerships with committed stakeholders and dealing with contingencies. In parallel, participants are encouraged to consider their individual accomplishments and how these might support new venture creation. Participants will work on past accomplishments, chartering the skills, knowledge and abilities that create a unique set of means with which to drive their own innovation projects.

Professional success is largely dependent on one’s success in managing differences and fostering collaboration among people and organisations. However, in today’s highly dynamic and complex managerial environment, which is marked by increasing interdependence and often by conflicts of interest, it can be extremely challenging to bring together the relevant “players” – internal and external stakeholders who have different interests, perceptions, attitudes, behaviours, or values – to forge efficient, profitable, and lasting agreements. Professionals who understand the science and practice of negotiation are much better equipped to navigate these differences and create agreements that advance their own interests, and also the interests of the other parties involved.

The competencies to communicate cross-culturally well are indispensable in this age of globalisation. The course provides strategies on how to read a person’s as well as corporate culture. Features of culture such as individualism/collectivism, power distance, masculinity/femininity, and issues related to intercultural adaptation, ethnocentrism, prejudice, stereotyping and racism will be discussed. The aim of this course is to develop intercultural competencies, which will make business practices more meaningful and significant.

Using a country-specific study as its base, the ‘Business Study Mission’ course examines the rapidly developing business environment and the available opportunities in a particular city or region. Particular emphasis is placed on the socio-political, cultural, legal environments, and the influence they exert on business practices.

This course is a blend of theory and practice that begins by describing the investment environment, developments in investment theory, and the principles and practices of valuation. The focus is on the analysis of equities and equity portfolio management. The topics covered include the valuation of companies, stock valuation, the portfolio investment process, asset allocation, portfolio construction, and portfolio performance evaluation. Throughout the course, a global perspective will be emphasized.

This course focuses on the role of financial markets in facilitating the flow of funds to finance investments by corporations and governments. We will systematically examine each market and describe the participants and types of instruments offered. The key markets examined are equity markets, debt markets, foreign exchange markets, derivative markets, real estate markets, and insurance markets. We will also examine the role of financial institutions such as commercial banks and mutual funds. This course builds on the foundations provided by FNCE680 Corporate Finance & Financial Management. Our focus will be to understand how financial markets work practically. We will also learn how and whether one should invest or participate in each of the different markets.

This course aims to provide students with insights into the role of the investment banking industry in facilitating the raising of capital for corporations, in the equity and debt, or mergers & acquisition (M&A) markets, to assist a corporation to grow. The structure of investment banks and how each division inter-relate, will be discussed, e.g. corporate finance, Equity Capital Market (ECM), Debt Capital Market (DCM), Sales & Trading, Operations, Global Markets, Compliance, etc. Participants will learn about how primary market deals relating to equity, debt and M&A are structured to maximize share value, as well as how these are skilfully executed to ensure that values are preserved and achieved. Participants will also be taught about the fundamentals of valuation as well as the best practices in financial modelling. This course is not only useful for investment banker wannabes but also for those who are interested to learn about raising capital in corporations.

This course aims to provide students with an advanced study of Corporate Finance beyond the essentials. Students will be exposed to complex financial issues and be equipped with the necessary analytical tools to make sound financial decisions. The course covers a wide spectrum of topics such as optimal capital structure, mergers & acquisitions, payout policy and corporate restructuring . It will focus on:

• Understanding core financial tools that help managers understand strategic and tactical financial problems
• developing the linkage between corporate financial decisions and value creation in firms
• providing a framework to help managers make optimal financial decisions

This course helps student understand how sustainability challenges poses risks and opportunities to businesses and investors. It exposes students to emerging theories and practices on how businesses and investors can apply finance to manage sustainability risks and opportunities. Students will also learn how to frame managerial and investment objectives that are consistent with business sustainability. Topics covered in the course include Socially Responsible and Impact Investing, Microfinance, Responsible Lending, Green Finance, Climate Change and Finance Implication, and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Firm Performance.

The objective of this course is to introduce Decision Analysis, which is the application of the scientific method to managerial and personal decision-making. The decision analysis approach of analysing decisions consists of defining a problem, developing a model, acquiring data, developing a solution, testing the solution, analysing results and implementing results. Decision models can be categorized as Prescriptive, Predictive and Descriptive. This course will discuss some Prescriptive and Descriptive models. To be specific, this course will introduce quantitative modeling tools such as linear and integer programming, decision tree analysis and simulation.

A supply chain comprises firms, organizations, and individuals, linked through physical (material), information and financial flows, and whose activities enable products and services to be created and reach the consumers. In the last few decades, supply chain managers have reoriented their focus beyond the traditional logistics issues towards the development of integrated risk management approaches to handle the multiplicity and magnitude of risk factors in global supply chains. These risk factors include disruptions arising from natural and man-made disasters, fast-changing customer preferences, tight financial credit environments and fluctuating exchange rates and commodity prices. Building a functional supply chain requires careful planning and consideration of a variety of risks, and it is of paramount importance to integrate management of physical flows, information and financial flows in dealing with such risks. All logistics and supply chain organizations that effectively manage their supply chain risks enjoy a level of robustness and resilience that leads to unprecedented levels of operational excellence with all consequential advantages. The objective of this course is to provide a framework for supply chain risk management and to outline a portfolio of proven strategies to access, reduce, hedge, and mitigate supply chain risks.

With the convenience of the Internet at our fingertips, e-commerce has grown into a huge industry and the world of business is changing rapidly beyond brick and mortar. Customers not only shop through different retail channels - in store, on the web, and on mobile devices, but also expect a consistent buying experience across these channels. This creates a host of new business models, such as marketplaces and omni-channel retailing, that require new sets of skills to manage. The objective of this course is to provide students with these necessary skills. Topics that will be discussed include online retailing, marketplaces, logistics and technologies, omni-channel retailing, consumer analytics, and sharing economy.

This course provides students with foundational knowledge and techniques on how to embed sustainability into business operations. Students will learn how firms develop effective programs and strategies in waste reduction, pollution prevention and product stewardship. Topics covered in the course include Ecologically Sustainable Organization (ESO), Environmental Regulations and Incentives, Environmental Management Systems, Sustainable Supply-Chain Management, Green Purchasing, Green Buildings, Life Cycle Analysis, Product Stewardship, Remanufacturing and Recycling, Industrial Symbiosis, and Green Technology.

With the globalisation of operations and the penetration of technology into virtually every business activity, projects are becoming more and more challenging and demanding. Increasingly complex products, processes and services, vastly shortened time-to-market windows, and the need for cross-functional expertise make project management an important skill for success. Project management aims to improves an organization’s ability to plan activities, control the ways in which it utilises resources, and minimises risks. Professionals launching and managing these projects must understand the concepts, methods, techniques and tools that support modern project management, covering project selection, initiation, planning, implementation, control and evaluation. The participants will get hands-on experience with state-of-the-art software tools for project and project portfolio management.

The study of consumer behaviour is an important part of the science underlying the development of marketing programs. Consumer behaviour is a natural extension of the application of the marketing concept that prefaces the study of marketing. Consumer research is a prelude to the formulation of marketing programs. The course introduces important theories, methods, and findings of research on attention, comprehension, memory, attitude formation and choice.

In this course, we will take a deeper look at the role behavioural science plays in people’s path to action, whether it be search, evaluation, purchase behaviour, or more. We will examine how brands and companies leverage the theories and principles of behavioural science to shape, shift, or even completely disrupt people’s preferences in marketing contexts—with the aim to better achieve marketing objectives and positively impact the bottom line. We will also discuss the tools to implement and measure the impact of behavioral science. To achieve these learning objectives, in this course we will directly examine extant theory, research, and scientific findings concerning the behaviour of individuals, with the goal of understanding how marketing managers can use these ideas to design their products, advertising, and marketing programs.

This course is designed to meet the increasing needs of industry and recruiters in applying quantitative and analytical skills for understanding consumer decision-making. Business managers utilize marketing data to assess the return on their investments and better understand their customers. The course provides students with an opportunity to analyse real-world marketing problems. The best way to learn all the material in this course is through “hands-on” experience. As such, we will use developments in statistical science to examine solutions to important issues faced in consumer analytics. There will be various datasets and tools provided and used in the class to get practical experience. Specifically, we will discuss market and customer segmentation techniques, regression and choice modelling, economic models of pricing, retail and web analytics. The emphasis being on understanding, interpreting and proper use of these research techniques. The primary aim of this course is to learn new skills and tools that will provide students with important quantitative acumen for understanding consumer analytics

The world of commerce is going rapidly beyond brick and mortar, and is increasingly relying on digital technology. Today, customers expect a consistent buying experience across all retail channels - in store, on the web, and on mobile devices. This leads to a host of business models that require or can benefit from new functional expertise and processes. The objective of this course is to provide students with the necessary skills to evaluate the changing business world, and identify opportunities to harness and optimise businesses through digital technology. The course would focus discussion around digital business and would cover aspects relating to business strategies, digital business supply chains, fulfilment technology and innovations, technology leverage for management, and consumer insights. Specifically, the course consists of two parts: (i) business strategies and operational challenges for digital business and (ii) the applications of consumer analytics to digital business. The course will be an eight-week elective with each part covered over four weeks.

Understanding consumers is at the heart of a successful marketing process. Methods of generating consumer insights such as in-depth interviews and focus groups, ethnography, survey research, systematic observational research and experiments are key to diagnosing both the current status of a market, as well as the issues underlying a specific marketing challenge. The course will cover a variety of these methods of generating consumer insights and statistical methods used to analyse survey data.

The first half of the course examines the social and environmental impact of current consumption patterns and looks at how consumers can be influenced to make product choices that are sustainable. Theories in psychology will be drawn upon in looking at ways to change consumer behaviour and in examining the relationship between consumption and wellbeing.

The second half of the course looks at how traditional marketing tools can be modified and how new tools can be effectively applied to market sustainable products more effectively. For example, it delves into how a product can be designed, promoted, priced and distributed to mitigate its environmental impact over its entire life cycle (from supply chain to disposal). Case studies of companies with strong sustainability initiatives will be used to illuminate current best practices.

This course aims to help you instill and apply an entrepreneurial mindset in the context of business planning. We will achieve this through a number of ways including: generation of business ideas, and identification of business opportunities to commercialize the ideas. This course covers some ongoing management challenges for entrepreneurial ventures and integrates inter-disciplinary knowledge customized by your personal experiences and goals. By combining problem-based learning and hands.

This course helps student understand how sustainability challenges poses risks and opportunities to businesses and investors. It exposes students to emerging theories and practices on how businesses and investors can apply finance to manage sustainability risks and opportunities. Students will also learn how to frame managerial and investment objectives that are consistent with business sustainability. Topics covered in the course include Socially Responsible and Impact Investing, Microfinance, Responsible Lending, Green Finance, Climate Change and Finance Implication, and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Firm Performance.

This course provides students with foundational knowledge and techniques on how to embed sustainability into business operations. Students will learn how firms develop effective programs and strategies in waste reduction, pollution prevention and product stewardship. Topics covered in the course include Ecologically Sustainable Organization (ESO), Environmental Regulations and Incentives, Environmental Management Systems, Sustainable Supply-Chain Management, Green Purchasing, Green Buildings, Life Cycle Analysis, Product Stewardship, Remanufacturing and Recycling, Industrial Symbiosis, and Green Technology.

This course examines the terms and meanings of sustainability including their origins. It discusses the linkages between sustainability and other society challenges. It helps students understand how business and society interacts within the natural environment. Students will learn how to distinguish between effective and rhetorical sustainability strategies. Topics covered in the course include Global Environmental Issues, Origins of Sustainability Thinking, Systems Thinking, Triple Bottom Line, Green Value Chain, IT and Sustainability, and Strategic Sustainability.

The first half of the course examines the social and environmental impact of current consumption patterns and looks at how consumers can be influenced to make product choices that are sustainable. Theories in psychology will be drawn upon in looking at ways to change consumer behaviour and in examining the relationship between consumption and wellbeing.

The second half of the course looks at how traditional marketing tools can be modified and how new tools can be effectively applied to market sustainable products more effectively. For example, it delves into how a product can be designed, promoted, priced and distributed to mitigate its environmental impact over its entire life cycle (from supply chain to disposal). Case studies of companies with strong sustainability initiatives will be used to illuminate current best practices.