Master of Business Administration (MBA)

In this module you will 'examine the complex cycle of financial reporting, management accounting, corporate financing, and investment within a business.

You will learn how good financial stewardship ensures that financial resources are in the right place, at the right time, and in the right form to sustain the business in meeting the needs of its stakeholders.

You will enhance your financial literacy through the practical experience of developing financial reports, analysing risk, recommending financing, and making investment decisions.

Core to your ethos will be environment, society, and governance (ESG) objectives, sustainable value creation, and responsible investment.

Experienced professionals will share their insights into global capital markets, micro-finance, and funding in the non-profit.

In this module you will gain an advanced understanding of the function of a wide range of markets for the production, exchange, and consumption of goods and services.

We will examine how people perceive the choices available to them, and assess the associated risks, to make optimal decisions.

We will also explore the nature of competition in dynamic markets, and the approaches that companies take to gain temporary and lasting advantage.

Change is at the heart of our teaching. You will learn about innovation and the impact of disruptive technologies, such as digital platforms that create new markets, and how transformation occurs whilst protecting consumers and building market resilience to achieve lasting social good, and how greater environmental awareness is impacting and changing market behaviours.

Identifying, defining, and solving problems is key to a thriving society and economy.

Whether working individually, within an organisation, or setting up a new business, it is your entrepreneurial skills that will enable you to establish new sources of value.

Challenges and opportunities come in many forms. Whether it is the need to develop a circular economy, expand clean technologies, enable regeneration, or ensure resource sustainability for future generations, this module gives you the opportunity to make your mark.

Using the University’s Ingenuity™ creative problem-solving model, you will work in teams, mentored by experienced entrepreneurs, to address a practical entrepreneurial challenge.

This module will integrate your thinking to build your business planning and pitching skills.

Designing, forming, and leading organisations provides people with essential livelihoods. Doing this with a shared sense of purpose enables the organisation to amplify its social good across many markets and countries.

Within a good governance structure, we examine what leaders do to motivate and empower employees, shape cultures, drive change, resolve conflicts and increase inclusion using power and effective decision-making.

We will explore a range of human interaction techniques including motivation and rewards, job design, teamworking, and leadership. From this you will enhance your team-working skills, leadership profile, and your interpersonal effectiveness.

You will hear from experienced and successful leaders of the challenges they faced in their careers and the lessons that were learned leading to their improved practice.

We are all consumers and the targets of marketing activity from many organisations. But do we really understand why these companies do what they do for us? How do they know what products we want, how much we are prepared to pay, where we want to buy them, or how we want to be spoken to?

You will explore how companies create valuable relationships in a context of changing consumer behaviour, varied needs, dynamic market conditions, and unrelenting global competition.

This takes place in an era of improving professional standards as the marketplace rewards ethical marketing, transparency, customer engagement, and responsible consumption.

You will learn through case studies and from discussions with a range of expert practitioners.

Well designed and well managed operational systems that align with an organisation’s strategy are central to achieving and sustaining high levels of performance.

We focus on contemporary and emerging practice across the industrial, service, public, and not-for-profit sectors, emphasising high performing operational processes capable of delivering an organisation’s products and services efficiently and effectively.

You will be able to assess the challenges in managing complex operations, projects, and supply chains to deliver high-quality outcomes, using Lean techniques and Six Sigma. You will understand the critical importance of IT and digitally enabled systems in supporting strong operational performance.

We share insights from business and industry, including analysis of contemporary case studies and expert practitioner views to drive business agility, rapid fulfilment and customer-focused product variety while promoting resource sustainability and operational resilience.

Strategy is the practice of how an organisation fits within its chosen environment to ensure sustainability, competitive advantage in the good times, and resilience in more challenging times.

You will develop strategic analyses both for the external competitive environment, and for the organisation’s internal resources and competences, establishing priorities for where and how to focus development resources.

Ever mindful of current and emerging global competition you will use creativity and nuance to make clear the organisation’s strategic purpose, giving clarity of role to key stakeholders, and ensuring transparent governance.

Experienced practitioners will share their successes and failures of developing and delivering business, societal, and international strategic interventions. You will learn from a dynamic blend of case studies, cutting-edge research insights, and guest speakers.

How do business leaders recognise their need to be responsible and accountable for their environmental and social impacts? How can they develop effective strategies to address sustainability challenges such as climate change, and how can those strategies play a fundamental role in core company performance and success?

This sustainable business simulation tackles these questions in an innovative way. Students gain first-hand experience of leadership roles in sustainability, and the complexities of creating sustainability strategies to ensure ‘shared value’ for companies, their stakeholders, and the environment. They learn how to defend those strategies in a board conference with experienced business practitioners, and how to approach a sustainability crisis through a simulated press conference with real journalists.

The aim is: student understanding of what is required to be a responsible business leader.

The idea that managers should operate in the interests of shareholders is examined and its consequences explored. The course looks at what should happen in practice, but also what does happen. Where theory and practice apparently diverge possible reasons are explored. 

Learning outcomes:

• The dynamic and changing nature of business and the consideration of the future of organisations within the global business environment, including the management of risk.
• The sources, uses and management of finance.
• The use of accounting and other information systems for managing financial risk.
• The development of appropriate policies and strategies within a changing environment to meet stakeholder interests.
• The use of risk management techniques and business continuity planning to help maximise achievement of strategic objectives.

The module examines the risk and return characteristics of classes of financial securities (equities, bonds, derivatives) and the processes and consequences of combining these securities in portfolios. The traditional meanvariance approach is extended in two ways, first by recognising that return distributions may not be well described by mean and variance, and secondly by examining the possibility that investors take into account non financial, ethicalconcerns in their portfolio building decisions. Any finance module, and a portfolio management module, in particular, needs, post 2008, to reflect (and to reflect on) the gap between textbook treatments and "the real world". Standard textbook treatments offer "the efficient markets hypothesis", "the capital asset pricing model" and "the Black Scholes model" in a relatively uncritical way, but post 2008 these models have been ridiculed in the financial press as "unrealistic". This major difference of opinion is examined in the module.

This course provides students with an appreciation of the role of law in consumer and commercial transactions. One of three central aims of the course is to offer participants an appreciation of the legal status of corporations and the rights and responsibilities of the various stakeholders in the corporate entity.

This module examines ethical issues and dilemmas, covering a range of complex and controversial problems relating to business in a global economy. The main concepts and theories underpinning the business ethics field will be introduced, and students shall have the opportunity to apply these to business situations. More specifically, the course explores issues of human rights, globalization and sustainable development, and places these within different philosophical and cultural perspectives. The course also explores the role of corporations, multinational corporations, and Nation-States from an ethical perspective, and situates these explorations within a political-economic framework. 

This module explores the role of Business Intelligence (BI) in transforming the way companies strategize and organize for change to induce sustainable growth and innovation, new organizational forms, and intellectual property. BI is prevalently relevant to the digital economy. Being digitally fluent is a must to lead and manage, and to respond to changes in competition and markets. 

Entrepreneurship in Practice will introduce students to the more practical elements of innovation and enterprise activity across multiple contexts, including not just new venture creation but corporate and social entrepreneurship as well. Whereas Entrepreneurship and Creativity focus on idea generation and entrepreneurial theory, Entrepreneurship in Practice will prepare students to recognise opportunities and to implement innovation and enterprising ideas. The ability to make informed and timely decisions will be an important aspect of this, and the module will use a start-up business simulation to encourage this. 

What is Innovation Management? - definitions and models of the process; Innovation Strategy; the national and competitive environment; innovation processes within multinational firms; innovation processes within large public sector organisations; the systems of innovation specific to small high technology firms; Management techniques for innovation, shared vision, effective team working and a creative climate; Learning from Markets, marketing technological and complex products and learning through alliances; Integration of Approaches, Key themes, learning to manage and measure innovation and through the group presentations - Appraisal of innovation management within different organisations.

This course is about leadership based on the observation that the leadership needs of organisations vary by the stage of the organisation's existence. Leading an entrepreneurial start-up requires different skills from leading a mature organisation. Consequently, organisations need to be aware of their progress through the organisation's lifecycle and evolving needs. This course examines the stages of an organisations existence and the associated evolving leadership needs, plus additional situations such as leading in a crisis. The course focuses on identifying leadership needs and the necessary decisions together with the appropriate leadership style. As a secondary theme, there will also be a number of sessions focussing on leadership qualities and styles which will encourage participants to reflect on their own development as leaders. A number of models of leadership are considered and different leadership perspectives. Understanding of the concepts is achieved predominantly but not exclusively through the use of case study material.