Central Saint Martins Birkbeck MBA

Course detail

Unit One: Provocation and enquiry (60 credits)

Sprint One: Team working

Location: CSM
Dates: September 22–24 2017

• Collaborative teams: identifying their value, cultural capital and experience
• Tackles complex, multi-themed problems involving points of provocation
• Communications, problem definition, stakeholder analysis and action plan formulation.

Sprint Two: Systems, complexity and networks

Location: Birkbeck
Dates: November 10–12, 2017

• Practical systematic and holistic approaches to composite problem solving
• Basic systems concepts
• Principles of systems thinking, stakeholders, pluralism, critical systems, complexity, complex adaptive systems, agile working networks and network analysis.

Location: CSM
Dates: January 12–14, 2018

• Business model innovation and development
• Strategising networks of stakeholders, sustainability and ethical considerations
• Practice and process of strategic management.

Sprint Four: Finance and governance

Location: Birkbeck
Dates: February 9–11, 2018

• Resource management: governance; accounting; financing decisions; sustainability; ethics; alternative value systems; law and regulation
• Resource and planning
• Finance and management accounting techniques.

Sprint Five: Project

Dates: March 9–11, 2018

Working from both tutor- and student-led themes, contexts or questions, you will be tasked with self-organising and proposing an approach and/or set of responses which puts into practice the knowledge and skills developed in the earlier sprints.

Unit Two: Entrepreneurship in action (20 credits)

Dates: April – August, 2018

• Entrepreneurship: creativity, innovation and problem solving
• Value systems beyond economics
• Emergent approaches to venture design: Lean Startup, Design Thinking and Effectual Entrepreneurship
• Enterprise and entrepreneurship over the past three decades
• Practical experience applying these tools by iteratively designing a new start-up project.

Unit Three: Effecting change: Collaboration in practice (40 credits)

Location: CSM
Dates: April 13–15, 2018

Organisational behaviour, leadership, change management, team working, and human resource development.

Location: Birkbeck
Dates: May 18–20, 2018

• Marketing decision making in contemporary business
• Marketing strategies within the context of corporate objectives
• Technology, consumer decision making and marketing practice
• Exploring analytics and ‘big data’ strategies
• Strategic marketing, consumer behaviour, digital channels, social media and marketing metrics.

Location: Birkbeck
Dates: June 29 – July 1, 2018

• Business processes, quality systems, risk management, production, ICT, and supply chain management
• Customer orientation and competitive advantage
• Strategic role of operations and operations strategy
• Design of processes and the implications for layout and flow
• Design and management of supply networks
• Resource planning and management
• Lean systems
• Quality planning and managing improvement.

Dates: August – September, 2018

Working in small groups and choosing a self-selected theme, context or question, you will tasked with self-organising and proposing an approach which draws on and puts into practice the knowledge and skills developed in earlier sprints.

Unit Four: Extended live project or dissertation (60)

This final unit acts as a culmination of your learning, and requires critical reflection on previously encountered theories, discourses, tools and process, while developing new approaches to social challenges and business/organisational opportunities.

You will test some of the ideas and knowledge by electing one of the two following options:

• Live Project: develop an individual practical project which revolves around the creation of an intervention, based on the theoretical approaches and practical tools and processes encountered earlier in the course. The project chosen can either be a real-world intervention, or can take the form of a detailed hypothetical proposal
• Dissertation: create a critical academic study based on in-depth, critical analysis of the theoretical principles and discourses of contemporary social challenges and business/organisational opportunities. These may encompass sociology and ethnography, economic and political theory, management and organisation theory, and other relevant fields of academic analysis and critique. You are encouraged to explore the boundaries of the disciplines concerned, and to identify new areas of research within a potentially expanded field of practice within business and organisations.

MA Business Administration Programme Specification 2018/19 (PDF, 159KB)

Term one:
Friday 22 September 2017 – Friday 8 December 2017
Term two:
Monday 8 January 2018 – Friday 16 March 2018
Term three:
Monday 9 April 2018 – Friday 24 August 2018
Term four:
Monday 1 October 2018 – Friday 7 December 2018
Term five:
Monday 7 January 2019 – Friday 15 March 2019

Staff

Course Leader: Pamela Yeow
Director of the Innovations Insights Hub: Lucy Kimbell
Head of College: Jeremy Till
Programme Director, Culture and Enterprise: Dominic Stone
Lecturer/Associate Professor: Julian Sims
Lecturer/Associate Professor: Daniel Nunan
Associate Lecturer: Lorna Jean Dallas-Conte
Associate Lecturer: Paul Sturrock