This applies to students enrolled in the single degree MSc in Management programme. For more information about our double degree MSc in Management programme with CEMS MIM, please click here.
The MSc in Management programme is a full-time programme and students are required to complete 40 Units offered by NUS Business School over two semesters.
Please click here for the NUS Academic Calendar.
The NUS MSc in Management programmes allow students the flexibility to select from a wide range of courses offered by our seven esteemed departments, as there are no core courses. Full Course = 4 units (3 hours/week, 13 week duration)
This course is essential for students seeking careers in corporate finance, equity research, fund management, credit analysis, and business consulting. The emphasis is on techniques used by financial analysts in order to provide recommendations to help investors and creditors make economic decisions. It shows how to use financial statements, and more generally business analysis, in order to generate expectations of future performance.
This course will provide a strong conceptual foundation in corporate finance. Main topics include risk and return of individual securities and portfolios, cost of capital, capital budgeting, valuations of bonds, stocks and firms, efficient market hypothesis, behavioural finance, and FinTech. Finance theory will be used to solve practical problems faced by financial managers.
This course analyses the problems unique to family firms and discusses the solutions such as setting up good governance within the family and the firm to minimise such agency problems; structuring the ownership so as not to lose control while benefiting from external finance such as M&A, IPO, private equity funds; and succession planning.
The objective of this course is to give participants a comprehensive introduction to key aspects of FinTech paradigm and practice. Starting from theory and concepts, students will be taught the ongoing developments in the field and how they can integrate paradigms into practice and how practice drives paradigms.
The course will integrate various categories of FinTech development areas into a core wealth and investment platform which will be used as a framework for project work. The varied nature of the project is designed to stimulate either the entrepreneurship spirit or the technological aspirations of the student.
The course is targeted at students looking to better understand the business (and societal) effects of technological change in the financial sector, and is particularly well suited for those students seeking to pursue and enhance their careers in the financial, banking and insurance sectors by enlarging their knowledge base and skill set.
The creation of new wealth in the past decades has pushed philanthropy into strategic philanthropy where social investors treat contributions as investments, and seek measurable impact and accountability on their investments. This new philanthropy borrows best practices from interdisciplinary areas, such as entrepreneurship and finance, to create more strategic practices with emphasis on operational efficiency and measurable returns that are aligned with the goals of all stakeholders. In this module, students gain a better understanding of investments with both financial and social returns.
This course covers major private equity investment types including venture capital, growth capital, and buyouts. The course format will include lectures, interactive discussions, case studies and hands-on simulation. Topics will cover the entire private equity investment cycle from fund raising, structuring to deal screening, valuation, investment negotiations to post-investment value add and exits. Cases highlighted are deliberately diverse; from technology to traditional and spans different geographies (US, UK, China, Korea, Singapore).
The objective of this course is to give students a well rounded understanding of mergers & acquisitions (M&A), and the essential role that valuation analysis plays as part of an M&A transaction. Ultimately, this course will provide the students with a framework for analyzing M&A transactions, including understanding strategic rationale, valuation methodologies, deal structures and bidding strategies.
*These courses are not offered in both semesters. Our courses offerings are periodically reviewed and are subject to changes.
This course uses the “Models, Data, Decisions” framework to develop an analytical mindset and prepare participants to tackle business problems in a data-rich era. Focus is on sound model development and practical problem solving rather than software technicalities.
The course will cover key supply chain concepts and management trade-offs in operationalising strategy. It will integrate functional areas into a holistic perspective, and provide frameworks for analysing global supply chain configurations and realignment. It will examine the impact of macroeconomic trends, new technologies and new business models on supply chains, and how to plan for supply chain risk and disruption.
While many companies recognize the importance of analysing their supply chains, most of them perform the analysis using experience and intuition with very few analytical models. In contrast, the academic community has developed various models and tools for supply chain management. This course intends to fill this gap by discussing state-of-the-art models, strategies, and solution methods that are important for supply chain management. Impact of trade tension and disruption caused by COVID-19 will be discussed too.
An organization needs self-renewal, involving transformation through redefinition of its business concepts, reorganization of its business relationships and re-engineering of its business processes. Creating a new venture from scratch is challenging, but developing it within an existing organization is a totally different thing. This course focuses on corporate entrepreneurship with four key elements: new business venturing, innovativeness, self-renewal and proactiveness. It has two primary objectives. First, it aims to enable the students to apply corporate entrepreneurship-related concepts in practice. Second, it seeks to broaden the students’ education by helping them to appreciate the application of corporate entrepreneurship knowledge to companies.
This course aims to raise the understanding of the significance of Design Thinking, Business Modeling & Lean LaunchPad; and its innovative applications to businesses.
This course is designed to help students develop a deeper understanding of the issues that confront global managers today, and to prepare them for leadership roles in international organisations. The course is organised around six themes:
The course strives to provide students with an understanding of the key principles by which leaders influence other people, and to gain insights on their personal journey as a leader.
To succeed in the business world, it is imperative that HR provide data-driven answers and insights on how to implement and execute strategy through the people in the organization. The course provides students with practical, hands-on approaches to connect HR policies and practices to business performance.
This course addresses the foundations for decision-making in modern organizations, where the requirements of speed, global reach and change that our organizations face also create conditions for unsafe and unethical business practices to persist. Reports of insider trading, graft and cronyism, unsafe products, unfair trade practices, and environmental waste are commonplace in the media. Thus, our concern is with anchors for morally decent or ethical decision-making.
This module introduces students to the key concepts in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The module will equip students with the vocabulary, understanding and simple techniques to interact with the technology function in their organisations.
The challenge of managing successfully, self, and others, in an increasingly complex and global environment is the focus of this course. The course leads students to develop a deeper understanding of how management practices and processes can often differ across national and regional boundaries, and why. Students are also led to consider the social identities that they and cultural others bring to cross-cultural interactions. Leveraging on such understanding, managers will learn to explore strategies and tactics for navigating these differences to develop global management capabilities.
This course aims at improving students’ analytical and interpersonal skills in negotiation and conflict management, and make sure they do first things first. They will learn how to utilize their own negotiation strengths and focus on key areas of improvement. Combining lectures, interactive discussions and hands-on activities, it will enable students to develop cutting-edge negotiation/ conflict management strategies and be equipped with powerful influencing, persuasion and conflict resolution skills.
Moreover, since globalization created today’s world, a future business professional must also have the skills and knowledge to make deals and resolve conflicts in a cross-cultural context. Therefore, the instructor will also introduce the concepts and skills of cross-cultural negotiation, apply them to business reality and teach students the techniques of making deals and managing conflicts in different cultures, to help them become truly global negotiators in the future.
The course will highlight the components of an effective negotiation and teach students to analyze their own behavior in negotiations. The course will be largely experiential, providing students with the opportunity to develop their skills by participating in negotiations and integrating their experiences with the principles presented in the assigned readings and course discussions.
In this course, we will bring you to the cutting edge of how people can be organized using analytics, the foundation of (re-)designing and improving organizations. The suite of new ideas characterizing Org 2.0 represents a significant departure from the traditional views of and stereotypes about human resource practices – those that treat incentive compensation and reporting as the primary decisions; that rely on long-standing traditions, hear-say, and gut-instincts; and that highlight “copy best practice” approach to building the boxes and arrows of organizational charts. The new approaches bring scientific understanding and methods into improving organizations and are enabled by a combination of theoretical advances and the increased availability of computational power and data.
People are the core of any business, and many work challenges are people-related. In this course, we address key questions about how and why people behave the way they do at work. We shall also explore how features of the workplace can influence people’s behavior.
The main objective of this course is to examine the often neglected darker side of the organisation i.e., deviant and unethical behaviours at the workplace. We will also discuss the issues of organisational misconduct and corporate ethics. Both the employee and organisation will be the subjects of analysis. The course is aimed at providing an understanding and analysis of deviant behaviours, corporate wrongdoing and organisational ethics.
Marketing has been going through a rapid and significant evolvement, most of which happens in the digital arena. The technological changes enable marketers to communicate with consumers in novel ways and provide marketers access to consumer behavior data at a granular level. Managers, however, are grappling with this transformative change, finding it challenging to be understood at a strategic and systematic level. In this course, we will develop a systematic understanding of digital marketing by learning concepts and tools whose applicability will endure even as specific technologies and implementation procedures change.
We will discuss topics including search advertising, display advertising, and social media marketing, facilitated by real-world examples and cases. We will learn in-depth the theory and quantitative metrics for outcome and effectiveness measurement and campaign effectiveness evaluation. Towards the end of the course, we will discuss a host of varied topics such as budget allocation and privacy regulations.
To facilitate well-informed marketing analysis and decision making, marketing scholars and practitioners have both developed and also implemented a large variety of analytical models and tools. These tools are often used in high-level strategic consulting. This course helps students to digest the underlying mathematical details of the most popular analytical marketing models, and more importantly will guide students through the development and use of applicable software, as well as the interpretation of results. The aim of the course is to build the skills and confidence in undertaking analytics for marketing decision making.
This course combines theory with practice, linking the classroom with the consumer marketing workplace. It employs Destiny©, a business simulator that mirrors the buying behaviour of consumers, to give participants the unique experience of running a virtual organization.
Based on established analytic techniques and research methodologies that leading consumer marketing companies like P&G, Unilever and Coca-Cola regularly use, the course is designed to train marketing professionals in the application of market intelligence, analytic techniques and research practices, for taking day-to-day marketing decisions, and developing and executing marketing strategies.
In addition to the experiential learning, the lectures, presentations, class discussions and case studies, teams are coached and grilled in close business review meetings. It is a rigorous programme that is intended to impart the critical analysis and decision-making abilities that students need to tackle the issues they will confront in a career in marketing.
Businesses & Brands are repeatedly challenged for their very survival in an ever-increasingly VUCA (Volatile-Uncertain-Complex-Ambiguous) world. Consequently, approaches to Marketing & Sales are also challenged as boundaries blur between countries, categories, consumer segment and channels. At the same time, traditional consumer engagement & brand building models are being disrupted by the combined forces of technology and the increasing need for meaningful & relevant consumer engagement in the face of reduced attention spans. This is taking place while businesses simultaneously face unprecedented economic pressures on Commercial RoI. This course explores the opportunities arising from the fact that the traditional “P”s of the Marketing framework need to constantly evolve & adapt (eg. Price => Revenue Growth Management, Place => Omni-Channel Arms-Reach). Students will explore new knowledge frameworks and will have the opportunity to practice relevant skillsets that will help them create & deliver marketing strategies in a globalized VUCA economy. The course utilizes practitioner frameworks, case studies, real-life examples & a culminates in challenging team project designed underscore the course’s key learning outcomes.
This course provides students with an overview of the theory and practice of personal selling and sales management. This course will cover issues faced by sales practitioners and learn the practical ins and outs of how to sell products and services to a sophisticated marketplace.
Marketing research is the systematic and objective identification, collection, analysis, dissemination, and use of information for the purpose of generating insights to improve decision making related to marketing problems and opportunities. Research for marketing insights serves as a central basis for marketing decision making; therefore, it is critical for a manager to understand marketing research and be able to specify what needs to be studied, how to study it, and how to interpret the results. The goal is to familiarize students with the fundamentals of research for marketing insights and enhance their abilities to define and solve marketing problems.
Services form an essential component of many consumer societies around the world, and service experiences are an integral part of our lives. In this course, we will examine the development, distribution, pricing and promotion of services and how excellence in these areas results in offerings that are of value to consumers. We will also explore the human factor in services marketing (e.g., managing service staff, leadership, building loyal customers) and how processes, people and policies are managed to achieve and deliver exceptional service quality.
True insight into how consumers feel, think, and behave is the foundation of many organizations’ success. This course provides a comprehensive coverage of concepts, tools, and techniques with an emphasis on uncovering, generating, and interpreting business-relevant consumer insights. Topics include consumer needs analysis, consumer learning and information search, consumer decisionmaking, and social influence. The course is targeted at intellectually motivated students interested in pursuing careers in general management, marketing, entrepreneurship, business consulting, as well as not-forprofit marketing. The format will be action-learning-oriented with many individual exercises and a group project, in addition to more traditional lectures, readings, and case analyses.
This course aims to provide students an overview on the field of real estate investment and financing. It introduces the market structure, institutions, and financial instruments. It will help student develop an analytical framework to make and evaluate real estate investment and financing decisions in residential properties, commercial properties, and real estate developments.
Sustainability, ESG, inclusion and impact: What lies behind the soundbites and how do they fit together? What do they mean for the practical workflow of role-players in corporations and institutional investors?
This course traces developments and milestones in the global sustainability agenda in recent decades, from the perspectives of policymakers, investors and corporations, in developed and emerging economies.
Taking a systems approach, it provides context for the plethora of initiatives and interventions underway in the public and private sectors. It explores frameworks, methods and theories of change for assessing sustainability actions including dependencies, trade- offs, and unintended consequences.
This course focuses on economic growth, politics, culture, and institutions in Asian countries. The first half of the course examines relationships between economic growth, institutions, culture, and management practices. The second half of the course covers industrial policy, trade, and global financial flows.
Family firms play an important role in all economies, but especially so in Asia, where family firms not just dominate the small firm category but also constitute the majority of companies listed on most Asian stock exchanges. This course provides students the opportunity to develop a deep understanding of family firms across Asia, with examples from ASEAN countries, India, China, Korea, and Japan. Aside from a focus on how to sustain a family firm from the perspective of the family, the course will also analyze family firms from an outsider’s perspective, including investors, partners, executives, and policy makers.
This course examines the key strategic issues found for companies operating in global markets. All businesses in the present day have some level of engagement with international markets. In this course, we are concerned with the strategies that can be used to build and leverage a firm’s advantages for successful competition in global markets. We focus primarily on competition, more so than the organisational structural and management issues that are typical to firms operating in global markets.
This course establishes a common foundation of strategy for all participants. We emphasize global strategy as a practical and applied function within a firm that can have tremendous value for creating value for a firm’s stakeholders. We emphasize that the primary building blocks of a global strategy are three critical activities that must be achieved by a firm’s leaders: (1) position, (2) prioritize and (3) align. We bridge these three activities to conceptual and analytical issues that form the foundation of good strategic analysis in global markets. We consider the decisions involved in entering foreign markets. We extend this to a discussion of the strategic challenges encountered when operating in multiple countries across the world and when competing with leading firms from all corners of the world.
Digital transformation is happening to all businesses today. The course approaches this from two perspectives: how to build a digital transformation roadmap in a traditional industry as an incumbent and how to disrupt the incumbent by building the business plan as a disruptor.
This course gives an insight into the processes and varietals of entrepreneurship, fund-raising and management. The course draws heavily from theory and research but is at its core, practice oriented.
This course allows students to learn how to build a sustainable new green business venture based on local/global opportunities, partnerships and metrics for success.
C-Suites are recognising the competitive advantage of ethical leadership and values based decision making. This course provides a practical foundation for how to achieve a triple bottom line through a strategy that embraces business sustainability i.e. economic success through Environment, Social (Labour/Human Rights) and Governance (“ESG”) actions and decisions that current and future leaders can drive and embed within their organisations – established corporations, start-up ventures, family owned businesses, consulting firms, for profit, not for profit, SMEs etc.
This MSc elective course provides a rigorous non-cooperative game theoretic view for managers to analyse rational decision makings under various conjectural behaviours in such strategic interactions together with strategic moves to possibly influence the outcome for one’s own or mutual gains. We will start by introducing the elements of games that are fundamental in representing interdependent strategic situations in rigorous game forms, and then we will discuss the equilibrium concepts and behavioural algorithms together with managerial/economic and daily life applications. The former applications include bargaining, oligopolistic market competition, predatory and pre-emptive conducts, strategic trade policy, entry and entry-deterring actions, signalling/screening/incentive scheme to get around the incomplete information matters, and the latter include sports, dating, parenting, politics, strategic diet and negotiations. In-classroom game experiments will be conducted as well. Students are expected to develop insights behind each concept together with the rigorous logics to formalize it and, more importantly, reshape their learning to apply to the practice.
This course introduces students to the strategic framework, and provides opportunities to apply this framework in a global setting. Students will be given the opportunity to apply theoretical knowledge using strategic frameworks while considering different perspectives when applying firm strategy at a global level. Effectively, students should enhance their process/dynamic capabilities in order to deal effectively with key management issues and challenges facing companies with worldwide operations as seen by the managers themselves.
All companies operating in emerging markets face two major hurdles: low purchasing power and many institutional voids (e.g. poor infrastructure, limited access to health and education, pollution, lack of transparency and a weak regulatory framework). This course drives graduates to develop an intuitive, innovative and deep understanding to resolve and rise to challenge these obstacles.
Entrepreneurs must know the business structure which best suits their business plans. Similarly, Managers must understand the decision-making mechanisms in the business structure they manage, to avoid potential personal liability. This course will equip entrepreneurs and managers with the legal fundamentals to propel them in their start-up journeys or new management roles. Through case studies, participants will gain insights into real-life corporate tussles, and acquire skills to navigate their way effectively through different stakeholder relationships.
This course explores the link between macroeconomics, financial markets and policy in Asia, from a structural as well as cyclical perspective. The course draws on and extends many analytical tools of macro and international finance.
Topics covered include: capital flows in Asia and policy challenges, exchange rate adjustment in Asia and macroeconomic imbalances, regional economic integration and implications for business cycles and asset price, trends in global finance, financial crises and their implications for Asia.
This course is suited for students who work with new technologies in various roles, as managers, investors, founders and citizens. Rather than repeating the well-worn clichés of innovation fetishism and disruptive technologies, we place innovations within a larger context of technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms. This course provides a thorough understanding of how innovations develop and evolve: from invention to commercialization, from creation to destruction, from competition for a dominant design to market saturation.
Managerial Economics, as a discipline that combines microeconomics to managerial issues, aims to apply microeconomic analytical tools to business practices. The course focuses on analyzing the functioning of markets, the economic behaviour of firms and other economic agents and their economic/managerial implications through a selected set of topics that are motivated by real-world observations of business operations. Topics to be covered include: fundamental market forces, consumer and firm behaviour under various market structures, sophisticated pricing strategies with market power, decision-makings under uncertainty/risk/information asymmetry, strategic interactions in game-theoretic situations and a variety of behavioural insights.
This course will provide you with an introduction to business sustainability. Sustainability is increasingly an important aspect of an organization that stakeholders, particularly investors, are taking an interest in. As such, your knowledge of sustainability will enable you to contribute positively to your organization.
This course aims to provide students with a nuanced view of the structure of the venture capital industry and the relationships between venture capitalists and both limited partners and the firms in which they invest.
It prepares students to:
To stay and complete the programme, you must maintain a Grade Point Average (GPA) of at least 3.2. In the event that you are unable to maintain a GPA of 3.2 and above, the following scenarios may occur:
“As an HR professional, I considered that I needed to gain more experience in other fields and the NUS MSc in Management was precisely what I was looking for. It is undoubtedly one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, and despite it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, I believe it is more valuable as it also challenged me to adapt and reinvent myself and be more ready for the “new normal” era.”
Juan Sebestian Hernanadez Urrego Columbia Master of Science in Management, Class of 2021
