Master of Disruptive Innovation

International Marketing


Marketing is the interface between the company and the marketplace. Managers in all functional areas of business need an understanding of marketing fundamentals. While marketing managers create and implement marketing strategy, managers in accounting, finance, and operations also need to understand marketing plans that require their approval or help disseminating to the wider organization. This course covers the processes involved in the creation, communication, pricing, and distribution of products. It takes a managerial perspective, exposing students to the tasks and decisions faced by marketing managers, including target market selection, competitive positioning, and the formulation of product, pricing, communications, and distribution strategies. The course places particular emphasis on international marketing contexts.


Disruptive Business Models


Superior business models do not arrive by accident; rather they are the result of a highly disciplined and systematic process of build-learn- adapt. Increasingly, business model innovation is the most critical form of sustainable competitive advantage. Yet all too often, companies attempt to compete and bring new products and services to market with outdated business models, a certain recipe for failure. This course prepares students to effectively manage creativity in the process of generating high potential ideas and converting them into disruptive new business models. It will provide a comprehensive foundation for additional learning in the context of innovative business model design, far more as practice than theory. The emphasis throughout the course is on drawing and synthesizing concepts, practices, and techniques from the functional areas of entrepreneurship, strategy, sales and marketing and business process design and implementing them in student teams.

Digital Disruption
Change induced by digital technology happens at a pace and scale that impacts existing business practice in disruptive ways, threatening and invalidating existing business models. At the same time, digital technologies offer new opportunities for the creation of innovative business models for entrepreneurs to compete with established business practices in a wide range of industries. How can a company protect its business from the negative effects of digital disruption and take advantage of the opportunities brought in by the development of ICT? This question will be the focus of the course. It will address broad industry change brought about by digital platforms in such industries as music, mobile communication, and advertising, as well as specific technologies such as the Internet of Things and Machine Learning. Tactics for both large, established competitors and SME’s will be explored.


Creativity and Innovation


Creativity can be developed and improved in individuals and groups. This course will explore how. The course will address mindsets and approaches common to the most productive innovators, with a focus on the “DNA” of disruptive innovators. Students will learn to accelerate possibilities for radical innovations. They will also acquire tools that will enhance their own creative potential.


Global Strategy


The objective of this seminar-like course is to help students develop a deep understanding of the challenges top management in today’s corporations face when implementing corporate and global strategy. The emphasis is on multinational corporations in developing countries. Executives face the challenge of constant change both in global industry as well as in their own backyard. The solutions that they have to define represent a delicate balance between adapting strategic thinking to their business realities and implementing attitudes that are essential to motivate their teams.


Entrepreneurship


Far too often, good business ideas fail because the entrepreneurs behind them don’t understand how to fit their ideas to the market or obtain the resources they need. Using a combination of case analyses, class discussion, outside speakers, and a final project, this course is a broad and realistic introduction to entrepreneurship to help students make career choices while sharpening their analytical skills. The course is invaluable to anyone who hopes to lead the development of a new product or service, whether starting a company, managing a privately-owned firm, or leading a project within a larger, more established firm.


Co-creation Networks


The course will explore innovations resulting from co-creations of partners in knowledge networks and the relationships and technologies that facilitate these networks. It will address a variety of open collaborations, including university partnerships, innovation contests, and research consortiums. Examples will be drawn from a variety of industry sectors, including financial services, power generation, and medicine.


Global Operations


This course addresses one of the major functions of the organization— the delivery of goods and services to meet customer demand. Students will develop an understanding of operations management in both service and manufacturing organizations, with an emphasis on international operations. Topics include the functions and roles of operations managers, how operations relates to and works with other functions in the organization, and how to carefully execute operations strategy.


Managing Emerging Technologies


Increasingly, the global economy looks to innovation hubs to help industries drive growth through technology innovation. Technology industries often have distinctive features which challenge conventional wisdom regarding economic, market, and organizational dynamics. Success in commercializing new technologies often requires these inter-related mindset shifts: from “diminishing returns” to “increasing returns” logics; from market environments which seek “equilibrium” to those which promote constant “disruption”; from tactics to achieve “market share” to “winner takes all” tactics; from understanding consumer “purchase behavior” to understanding the “dynamics of diffusion”; from gaining a dominant “market position” to gaining a dominant “design standard”; from a focus on working with “suppliers” to a focus on attracting networks of “application developers”; and from “vertically integrated” organizational designs to “virtually integrated” organization designs.


Disruptive Venturing


This course is designed for students interested in stimulating and preserving creativity and innovation in established organizations. Topics include the forces affecting the nature and rate of innovation, the advantages and disadvantages of existing organizations in pursuing innovation objectives, and the choices made by managers at different levels in the organization that promote or hinder creativity and its successful exploitation. A special focus will be on strategies and organizations forms for disruptive corporate venturing, including exploratory venture units, intrapreneurship, and strategic alliances.


Scenario Planning


The global economy is increasingly marked by volatility, ambiguity and uncertainty. In this environment business executives find it more and more challenging to make sound strategic decisions for their organizations. This course explores a framework for making strategic agendas more robust amidst uncertainty: scenario-based foresight. The integration of scenario craft with strategy frameworks will allow us to see uncertainty as opportunity and craft high- level portfolios of strategic options that have a better chance of yielding success. Scenario planning is valuable to and benefits from the diversity of perspectives of a cross-section of students. This course will walk through a step-by-step process of identifying global forces, critical uncertainties, divergent scenario narratives, early indicators for scenario evolution, business implications as well as high-level strategic choices for each scenario and a subset of choices that are robust against all scenarios.