1996-2016中外合作办学20年

Curriculum Information

The program consists of fifteen modules that are made up of eleven core modules and four electives. Ten of the eleven core modules are held in Shanghai, the final module is held in Oslo in conjunction with your graduation. Modules run from Thursday to Sunday.

You choose four of eleven elective courses. Either you select courses to further develop and refine an existing skill-set; or you branch out and gather expertise in new areas. If you have always wanted to study abroad and never had the opportunity then our MBA program is for you. Inclusive of the eight courses we offer, there are five that run at some of the world’s best business schools such as Haas School of Business in Berkeley, IE Business School in Madrid, Nanyang Technical University in Singapore, HPI Academy in Germany and NORRSKEN in Sweden.

We have categorised the modules into four distinct groups

Position the Business

Enables you to lead your company into a profitable situation with a strong competitive advantages.

Tools to Keep on Track

Provides you with an understanding of how to control your company.

Developing Innovative People

This is essential when gaining competitive advantage.

Overseas Courses

Hass School of Business, IE Business Schools, Nanyang Technological University, the Hasso Plattner Institute and NORRSKEN are world's leading producers of new ideas and knowledge in all areas of business.

 

Core Courses

  • The students will learn how decisions in organizations have different short- and long-term consequences. They will learn why forecasting and systemic understanding is important for planning and the anticipation of future events and results. They will also learn to integrate concepts from corporate governance and global management, understanding how different organizational stakeholders and global perspectives on a company create complex and sometimes conflicting interests when making and carrying out decisions. Finally, they will learn about simulation as a way of training management in businesses so that they can later use these methods themselves.

    The students learn how to combine knowledge from all the modules in the program to understand how they mutually interact and creating systemic effects across time (20 years of business operations) and space (different geographical locations).

     

  • Students learn how to develop and manage operations environments and facilities for industries and service companies. There is an ever increasing pressure to improve the operations processes and corresponding improved out put results with respect to production rate, capacity, regularity and reliability, cost effectiveness, competitiveness, quality and customer satisfaction.  These harsh requirements lead to the demand for excellent leadership and management of operations and production. Deriving appropriate key performance indicators associated with corresponding strategy maps is a part of this effort.

    Cost effective operations and lean manufacturing are relying on smooth and smart materials management and supply chain management. 

    The delivery of products and services must meet all specified and expected quality standards and requirements set by the customer, which require thorough understanding of the importance and impact of Total Quality Management approach in operations and for continuous improvements. In this context the students shall learn about how to benchmark and what are relevant parameters for benchmarking.

     

  • The term “management by projects” more precisely describes the way projects today are used as strategic and tactical tools for company development and success. The module demonstrates the way modern project work enhances “business by projects”. The planning and organisation of projects as well as their management are discussed from a variety of angles.

    The module will give the students a tool for more practically mastering the multitude of areas the program subsequently contains. Varying from the very strategic projects developed for achieving strategic company purposes, to the creation of tactical projects within marketing, finance, product development and organisational change, and to the typical operational projects needed for the daily operations in areas such as production, logistics and personnel training.

    In the module the students are taught how to regard project management in a holistic perspective, learning them to create projects that contribute to the all the different goals modern organisations have. The integration processes the students will be exposed to include the selection of projects that best support the organisation, the stakeholder and network attitude modern project managers must master, and the important project management processes needed in order to complete projects.


     

  • This course addresses the topic of organization design and the various management control approaches. Create an understanding of organizational design for different types of institutions, and build practical skills related to designing and implementing contemporary organizations. The latter includes the dynamics and processes of structuring organizations, and the specific ways organizations can set up and use their management control and performance measurement systems.

     

  • Students learn how to develop and manage operations environments and facilities for industries and service companies. There is an ever increasing pressure to improve the operations processes and corresponding improved out put results with respect to production rate, capacity, regularity and reliability, cost effectiveness, competitiveness, quality and customer satisfaction. These harsh requirements lead to the demand for excellent leadership and management of operations and production. Deriving appropriate key performance indicators associated with corresponding strategy maps is a part of this effort.
    Cost effective operations and lean manufacturing are relying on smooth and smart materials management and supply chain management.

    The delivery of products and services must meet all specified and expected quality standards and requirements set by the customer, which require thorough understanding of the importance and impact of Total Quality Management approach in operations and for continuous improvements. In this context the students shall learn about how to benchmark and what are relevant parameters for benchmarking.

  • In its essence management is about getting things done through people and human resources. This course addresses how organizations can and actually do manage human resources at strategic, tactical, and operational levels. The course will expose the participants to current trends in research and practice of human resource management by engaging them in both practice-oriented experiential learning as well as evidence-based approach towards HRM.

  • We will emphasize the importance of leadership as behaviors influencing employees, co-workers and other stakeholders towards commitment and co-operation towards busines objectives. The module focuses on fundamentals in leadership theories (particularly transformational leadership), assessment of leadership performance and potential, and on how leadership capacity in organizations may be developed. A particular emphasis is made on the relationship between leadership, leadership development and strategic business objectives. Additional emphasis is given to cross-cultural aspects of leadership, authority and interpersonal behaviors. First and foremost theories of leader traits, leader styles, and leadership effectiveness will be reviewed and the students are expected to acquire broad knowledge in this area. Cultural differences in personality and leadership behaviour will be discussed and the possible limitations in previous leadership research for the non - western cultures will be emphasized. Participants will also be assessed on tests of personality and leadership styles and feedback will be given. Thus, participants should acquire an expanded perspective on their own dispositions and preferences as regards their leadership behaviour.

  • The objective of this module is to familiarise the students with how firms should analyse financial issues, and how decisions should be made. The financial decisions dealt with in the module are
    What methods should be used in analysing financial issues?
    The real asset decision: How should the firm invest in real productive assets?  This is the topic of economic project analysis.
    The financing decision: How should the firm finance its real assets?  Specifically, how much debt and equity capital should the firm have?
    An important issue that influences the firm’s decisions is how to deal with a risky environment.  Specifically, how should management balance risk and return when it deals with the above decisions?

  • The objective of the course is to provide the students with an insight into various management accounting models, to understand these models and apply them in practice, including a variety of valuation problems. Emphasis will be given to Chinese practice with presentation of the Chinese accounting system and the legal requirements set for the annual report and accounts.
    The students shall be given an introduction to the budgeting process, the various budgets and their interconnection (total- and sub-budgets). A thorough understanding of the link between budgets and accounting reports as a system for management control is vital, as well as understanding the importance of cost and income variation analysis. It is also important to be able to extract information from the managerial accounting system that is relevant for decision-making. It is vital to understand how the information in financial statements can be used to evaluate the activities and financial status of businesses (ratio analysis).

  • The purpose of the module is to study the behaviour of rational economic agents in order to understand how their interaction – under various market arrangements – determine the price – and output constellations we observe in “the real world”. Emphasis on the strategic considerations of profit maximizing business firms – for instance in regard to their decisions concerning advertising, product differentiation and entry/exit in an industry.
    The ambition of the module is to develop in the students an intuitive (an also analytical) feeling for the workings of a market – described as a movement from one equilibrium configuration to another. It is often said that a business manager neglects market forces “only at his peril” – the module will try to minimize these kinds of mistakes.

  • The essence of corporate strategy is the creation of sustainable competitive advantage, i.e. creating products and services that the customers perceive as valuable and unique. The field of strategic management provides a range of models that is useful in the attempts to develop sustainable competitive advantage. In this module the students will get acquainted with several of these models, both through lectures and case applications. We will study environmental conditions, internal resources, markets and competitive arenas. Strategic expansion, alliances, mergers and acquisition will be given specific attention. We will also discuss firms operating across borders, and the specific challenges met by internationalisation. Finally we will look at some challenges related to strategy implementation.

Elective Courses

  • This course, conducted in Stockholm, focuses on how you can develop smart green ideas and make business models for innovations. We will visit leading Swedish entrepreneurial networks, such as Norrsken, the “Impact Unicorn Factory” and meet leading impact entrepreneurs, business angels as well as investors. We will also learn more about design thinking in practice, social entrepreneurship and impact investment, and how companies can tackle cultural and organisational inertia. We delve into entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship; how new green ventures go from seed to growth stage - and from start-ups to scale-ups.

  • Rapid and unpredictable change, emergence of ubiquitous intelligent technology, and the consistent decline of routine work render conventional static organizational designs inadequate and provide a vastly expanded repertoire of available ways to organize work. Participants will learn about the demands and opportunities facing leaders and organizational designers in a digital work environment. These developments will have consequences for internal processes such as the ways we organize and the way leaders understand their roles. Participants will learn about how the traditional role of leadership needs to adapt to the changing nature of work in the digital age, agile ways of organizing, how leadership relates to learning and innovation, and how digital technologies, as a value-creating resource, may affect leadership.

  • ICT (information and communications technology) has evolved extremely rapidly, and is now increasingly pervasive in all aspects of business or public administration. Many of the most difficult decisions (strategic or administrative) to be taken by managers involve information technology, both as medium and content; and many actions (both external and external to the organization) are carried out within a fully digital environment. Rapid communications networks, mobile computing and communications equipment, and vast storage capabilities means that many industries are facing changes in their business environment that deeply influences their strategic options and future profitability. Clearly, managers need to understand information technology - if nothing else, so that they can communicate effectively with the organizational units charged with its implementation.


    The intent of this module is to give the student an understanding of the role of information technology in organizations, the impact of the rapid technology evolution for business environments, and the challenge of managing the technology (and the organizational units charged with its introduction and support). The discussions will be within three main areas:


    -Managing IT for competitive advantage: Understanding how IT can give the organization a competitive advantage, and how to sustain that advantage.
    -Understanding the role of IT in organizations: This part of the course will analyze organizations in terms of the chains, shops, networks framework, trying to understand how value is created in each of these strategic configurations, and how IT supports this value creation.
    -Managing the IT resource: Understanding the organizational challenges of IT management, the interface between IS and the business, governance models and organizational processes, systems development and delivery, outsourcing.

  • Branding is still relatively new in China. In the last 20 years, Chinese consumers have seen a radical transformation of the consumption landscape from few products and practically no brands in 1998, to a proliferation of products and brands favored by the exceptional economic development of the last 20 years and by the impact of globalization. Strong in the early phase of this fast expansion path, the voice of the brands is now getting weaker due to the abundance of choices and the difficulty to stand out of the crowd.  At the same time, the digital revolution empowered consumers with e-commerce, social media, online cross border and Chinese consumers today can access from their mobile phones all the products and brands they are interested in, even those which are not yet in China. Brands are also increasingly squeezed between these empowered consumers and powerful digital market places and integrated digital platforms. The development of local consumption continues to attract foreign brands but more and more Chinese brands also realize the huge opportunities they have to compete with western brands by leveraging on their understanding of Chinese consumers culture, aspirations and also digital consumption journeys. However, there is still a certain deficit of branding skills among many Chinese companies and the real “power of the brand’ is still a relatively new concept, not fully understood. This course aims at developing a stronger branding culture and helping Chinese brands and businesses learn from the best practices of successful western brands, primarily in the premium and luxury sector, where we can often identify the best branding and marketing techniques. These best practices can be applied partially or totally to many brands and businesses in China, not only in the premium and luxury sector and help them upgrade their branding and marketing activities, increase their brand equity value, become more aspirational. Last but not least it should be reminded that Chinese luxury consumers will account for 40% of the global luxury consumption by 2025 from 34 % today and that most of the growth will be driven by millennials and Gen Zers. This constitutes a huge opportunity for western premium and luxury brands but also for upcoming Chinese premium and luxury brands.

  • Digitalization creates high speed, high volume digital activity traces – Big Data. Using recent advances in machine learning, organizations can use these data to automatically build models that predict specific events in real-time. Managers can use machine learning-based analytics to improve a wide variety of tasks ranging from targeted marketing to preventative maintenance to fraud detection. The course emphasizes processes for approaching and defining problems assessable through machine learning. The class will function like a lab in which students get hands-on experience with cutting-edge analytics processes, tools, and techniques. This firsthand experience provides students with insight into how big data analytics can improve business processes and decision-making.

  • Digital organizations excel at rapid-fire development of products and services adapted to user needs. Digital development requires new design methods. This module, provided in partnership with Hasso Plattner Institut in Potsdam, Germany, provides participants with an intense introduction to Design Thinking and the experience of hands-on team-based solution development within short time-frames. Teams will run through the complete Design Thinking process, working on a real-life project and coming up with solutions to an actual problem – including user research and digital prototyping. Upon completing this module, participants will be able to apply Design Thinking to digital development and creative problem-solving efforts, as well as critically asses how to apply Design Thinking in different organizational contexts.

  • The objective of this course is to provide students with an overall understanding of how firms should manage the global financial issues in a dynamic world. It explains why fundamental theories in international economics can be translated into the competitive edges for multinational firms in both the product market and the financial market, and thereby affect their global investment, financing and risk management decisions. 
    Learning outcome
    Acquired knowledge:
    · Knowledge of exchange rate regimes, the impossible triangle in international economics and the history of RMB exchange rate reform.
    · Understanding of the Purchasing Power Parity and Interest Rate Parity and how they respectively affect multinational firms' global competitiveness and cost of capital.
    · Being aware of the operational and investment arrangements for MNCs to reduce global  tax burden
    Acquired skills:
    · Ability to identify currency over/undervaluation based on simple PPP.
    · Ability to design foreign exchange risk hedging plans for accounts receivable/payable.
    · Ability to incorporate FX risk and political risk in overseas investment NPV assessment.

  • Latin America Economic Outlook surveys current economic trends in this major region and highlights repercussions for Latin America-operating enterprises;
    Going Global provides an integrative vision as it explores the full implications of internationalisation from a market, strategy and organisational perspective, as illustrated by the experience of Spanish multinationals in Latin America;
    Business, Government & Society focuses on the nonmarket forces that increasingly shape the business environment of globally-operating companies and introduces participants to the process of nonmarket strategy formulation and implementation;
    Value Creation and Strategic Change highlights the most recent thinking about how firms create and capture value and pays particular attention to the strategic drivers and challenges of internationalization;
    The program combines sessions led by IE Business School Faculty with several company visits designed to enable participants to gain first-hand experience of issues covered in the program

  • Innovation is the engine that drives revenue and profit growth in most organizations. In this segment, we will explore different models of innovation management from those used by large design firms in Silicon Valley to the ones employed by large industrial firms in other parts of the world. Using cases, videos and in-class exercises, we'll examine the context in which innovation takes place, the ways in which customers can be embedded in the design process, and the systems, tools and techniques used to successfully manage innovation. The course will help the student develop their own business canvas to prepare a viable plan for starting their own company. Techniques for improving organizational creativity are demonstrated.

  • Recent economic growth in Asian countries (e.g. China, India) has forced companies to re-evaluate their strategies to take advantage of these opportunities. What are the current financial and human capital costs of doing business in Asia and globally? What might future challenges be? How do firms compete to capture emerging business opportunities? How should firms strategically position themselves today to take advantage of key developments in the Asian and Western economies to sustain high corporate growth? These fundamental concerns will be addressed by the proposed Asia EMBA Programme, specially designed for BI Norwegian Business School, to be conducted by the Nanyang Business School.

  • New business does not have to be entrepreneurship. Most companies face possibilities where new business opportunities can be captured and exploited. However, going from a well-known business model into new types of organizing and allocating resources may be just as demanding as starting from scratch.

    This module is meant to complete the other two modules on entrepreneurship and idea works by offering an organizational approach to exploiting new business ideas in an existing type of business.
    The module will offer a mix of theories on creative destruction, entrepreneurship and control models with focus on renewing existing business in a Chinese environment.

  • The basic question in strategy is ‘why do some firms succeed and others fail?’ Our usual and traditional answer to this essential question has been explained by the fact that successful firms have developed a competitive advantage. A challenge with this expression, and with the basic strategy question, is that the unit of analysis is an individual firm. Yet, today we know that more and more firms depend on relationships to others; firms are interdependent, not independent.
    Taking interdependence as the fundamental starting point for the understanding of business performance has a number of significant implications. Rather than focusing on individual firm competitive advantage, we need to acknowledge cooperative advantage in relationships and networks.

  • The course provides the students with managerial knowledge and analytical skills that are important when companies do international business. Students learn about trade theories, deregulation of markets and the globalization of business, as well as the role of industrial clusters, the economics of location and the drivers of international business at the various levels. The concept of industrial competitiveness is central in the course. The economic role of China and India will be emphasized.
    The students are taught to analyze the internationalization strategies of business companies, both as international companies are entering the Chinese market and investing in China and as Chinese companies are entering foreign markets and investing abroad. At the end of the course the students should be able to analyze international business cases and to master a range of internationalization strategies that can be applied in modern business. Corporate social responsibility is discussed.

Thesis

  • The students shall, as part of the exams requirement, write a thesis. Students are expected to work on the thesis in groups of two to four students. Exceptions are possible (with explicit prior approval), but experience indicates that group work creates better results and students are encouraged to create diverse working groups.

    The topic should be an analysis and evaluation of a real life challenge facing a company. The students should choose the topic from their own company or a company that they have close connection to. The students should be able to observe and discuss the topic with people dealing with the challenge in the company. Issues encountered in the coursework should be discussed in the thesis, and the students should demonstrate their ability to apply the models, theories and methods that they have studied to a real situation.