Programme Structure

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 blends traditional financial analysis with ESG factors. It covers the fundamentals of financial statement analysis, including business and accounting analysis, and analyzing investing and operating activities. Students will explore financial and prospective analysis, including valuation using the residual income model, and understand the quality of earnings and earnings management. The course also delves into ESG risks, information disclosure according to the ISSB Standards, and the essentials of carbon accounting using the GHG Protocol. By the end of the course, students will proficiently combine financial analysis with ESG factors, equipping them to make informed and sustainable investment decisions.

This course introduces students to non-technical fundamentals and economics of digital assets and blockchain. The goal of the course is to provide students with a basic set of skills to understand the foundations and concepts of the blockchain technology which underlies digital assets and its applications in finance. We will focus on the applications, not the technology itself. We will occasionally invite an industry expert(s) to and interact with students and give a guest lecture(s) on the real-world application(s).

Entrepreneurs who recently are more commonly referred to as founders identify new opportunities, bring together different pieces, and introduce a new product and service that brings together the change in the society. Often that is done with the help of external capital or finance. In financing their early stage ventures, founders have to evaluate the potential of business growth, its risk, liquidity needs, information environment and how much of decision making control they are willing to give up to the potential investors. Importantly, the capital markets that founders face – and private equity investing more generally – differ fundamentally from capital markets considered in standard corporate finance. Founder ventures are young, often unprofitable companies, with short operating histories and little capital. These ventures face exceptionally higher degrees of uncertainty, constraining financing and creating difficult decisions about financial contracting, keeping in mind that today’s financial decisions may have implications for future opportunities and choices. Further, available capital markets for privately held companies are predominantly “deal markets” where terms and valuations are negotiated on a case-by-case basis, where investors can add value and are actively involved with the companies they finance. Throughout this Financing Founders course, we will emphasize financial opportunities and decisions of founders and private equity investors investing in these founders. We will attempt to take the perspectives of both founders and investors as some students may want to start their own businesses or be part of emerging businesses, while others would be interested in participating directly in the growth of venture capital and private equity. How would they agree on the valuation, deal terms, control, and eventually exit?

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 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.

This course provides learners with the strategic insights, tools, and leadership skills necessary to drive transformational change and maximize operational value. Completing this course can enable learners to elevate their organization to sustainable dominance and position themselves as strategic leaders with advanced concepts and industry-driven insights. The course utilizes Lean Six Sigma principles and methodologies, which are widely adopted by leading organizations across different industries.

This course explores organizational (re)design at its most cutting-edge. As a result, Organization Analytics’ innovative ideas represent a significant departure from conventional management practices and organizational structure design—those that emphasize incentive compensation and reporting; those that rely on long-standing traditions and hearsay; and those that emphasize a “copy best practice” approach to building organizational charts’ boxes and arrows. The new approaches apply scientific knowledge and methods (e.g., Machine Learning) to the improvement of organizational design, and are enabled by a combination of theoretical breakthroughs and increasing processing power and data availability as a result of digitalization.

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:

1. Leading people, teams and organisations
2. Developing self and others
3. Leading across borders
4. 21st century leadership
5. Responsible leadership
6. Leadership resilience

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.

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.

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.

This course aims to equip students with a strong conceptual foundation for managing technological innovation. Students will be introduced to the importance of technological innovation as a driver for value creation and economic growth. The dynamics of technological change will be analysed through concepts such as technology life-cycles, dominant design, network externalities, and first-mover advantage. This course has its foundations in theory and research but is practice oriented. This means that students will be exposed to the challenges in managing technological innovation through case studies of – real world companies.

Customer Centricity With hyper-competitiveness, companies must be customer-centric and leverage technology to deliver meaningful customer experiences across offline and online channels. Companies must integrate corporate social responsibility and sustainability into their value proposition to build financial and social capital. Brand Alignment Organisations need to strategically invest in brand alignment to build passionate, high-performing cultures and to achieve sustainable profitability. External alignment triangulates the pursuit of marketshare, brand leadership and customer intimacy to achieve sustainable market leadership. Internal alignment weds the values of the organisation with the brand, such that employees live by these values and consistently deliver great customer experiences.

This course focuses on understanding that consumer behavior is essential to the development of marketing strategies. A clear understanding of the principles of consumer behavior and the factors that shape consumer behavior is critical to developing effective marketing strategies.

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.

Data visualization is crucial for managers and business leaders in today’s business world. This course provides students with the necessary tools and techniques to understand business data, effectively communicate their findings, and tell compelling data-driven stories using visual graphics. Through this course, students will learn how to evaluate data visualizations based on principles of analytic design, create compelling visualizations using Tableau (with Python/R integration), and explore various visual methods for presenting data, including dashboards, infographics, and interactive visualizations. By the end of the course, students will have a solid understanding of the key principles of data visualization and how to apply them effectively in a business context. Students will gain the skills and knowledge necessary to explore, analyze, and present data visually, and communicate critical insights clearly and effectively to stakeholders at all levels of the organization.

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.

Successful pricing strategy is a key to successful business. This course is designed to introduce the concepts, techniques, and latest thinking on pricing issues. The overall emphasis is not about the theory but the practice of pricing, although theoretical foundations will not be overlooked. This course is less about the mechanics of setting a price – it is more about understanding the process of formulating pricing strategies and making pricing decisions. In line with the current trend in pricing practice, we focus on pricing-related data analytics methods and cases.

This course examines product management beginning with the process of new brand/product development. It is designed to give students in-depth exposure to the development and management of products using theories and concepts, case analyses, problem sets, class debates and project assignments so that students are prepared for the customer-driven marketing challenges of a product/brand manager.This course examines product management beginning with the process of new brand/product development. It is designed to give students in-depth exposure to the development and management of products using theories and concepts, case analyses, problem sets, class debates and project assignments so that students are prepared for the customer-driven marketing challenges of a product/brand manager.

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.

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 reshaping businesses. As digital technologies and agile methods advance, established corporations are crafting strategies to avoid disruption, while start-ups seek ways to challenge industry leaders. This course offers dual insights: guiding incumbents on crafting a digital transformation roadmap and instructing start-ups on how to counter traditional business models.

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.

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.