Online electives

Real estate is the biggest global store of wealth – worth more than equity and bond markets combined. It is typically the largest asset on the balance sheet of a company, and the most common form of collateral for loans.

This module will equip you with specialist knowledge of the most important aspects of real estate as an investment asset. If you intend to work in general business and finance, it will provide you with a basis to understand the real estate issues you’re likely to encounter. If you intend to specialise in real estate as an investor, fund manager or lender, this module will serve as the foundation for further development.

Module Leader

The Global Real Estate module is led by Alex Moss.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the use of technology systems to perform tasks that typically require human skills and intelligence.

Over the past decade, business has seen a surge in the use of AI-based systems that are either replacing or augmenting familiar human tasks. Concurrently, with the coming of age of AI, new human tasks that did not previously exist are also being designed.

AI-based systems present a seismic shift – not only in tasks that managers perform, and the way organisations are run, but also a shift in how we understand the macro-relationship between labour and capital – the key pillars of any capitalist economy.

This module will provide students an opportunity to examine the leadership implications of AI, the significant macroeconomic trends that have and will emerge from its use and the implications that these changes have for industry.

Module Leader

The Leading AI and Industry 4.0 module is led by Dr Aneesh Banerjee.

This module will equip you with the skills you need to recognise financial and strategy-related situations you may come across in your professional life as an advisor or manager.

You’ll focus on strategic decisions made by healthy and distressed companies, particularly regarding: capital structure, dividend policy, corporate restructuring, and bankruptcy.

This module is a great fit if you’re thinking of becoming a management consultant or starting your own consulting business, or if you’re a specialist/professional who wants to advise/intervene in organisations as an internal consultant.

Visiting speakers from consulting firms, internal consultants, and purchasers of consultancy services will deliver a variety of practical perspectives to ensure you’re able to put theory into practice.

How can you compete in rapidly-changing markets that are influenced by disruptive digital technologies?

In a world where digital technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Big-Data analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics Automation, and Blockchain appear to be changing the competitive dynamics of industries, managers and future business leaders need to understand how to skillfully harness these digital technologies.

This module focuses on 4 levels of analysis, each dealing with topics of competition and digital technologies. You’ll explore areas such as how organisations use technology as a competitive edge by experimenting and scaling, decision-making using big-data analytics, artificial intelligence, and automation.

Module Leader

The Competitive Edge with Digitial Technologies module is led by Dr Aneesh Banerjee.

Most companies believe that after careful strategy analysis and strategy formulation, they have a winning strategy. However, there is broad consensus both from practitioners and academics, that strategy execution brings its own layer of problems.

Drawing upon the latest research and best practices, the Leading Strategy Execution module takes a C-level approach toprovide the insights and tools to bridge the difficult gap between strategy formulation and strategy execution. It helps to identify hidden traps, and looks at how to balance the formal and rational aspects of strategy execution with the informal and emotional ones. By the end of the module, you will have a practical, yet academically rigorous, knowledge of the key aspects enabling, or hindering, strategy execution and will have built the confidence of leading strategy execution in action.

Some of the key learning outcomes include:

• Developing a realistic and actionable plan of execution
• State-of-the-arts insights about the hidden barriers to strategic execution and how to overcome them
• Acquire a deep understanding of how formal and informal organization interact
• Understand explicit and hidden agendas of the key stakeholders in strategy execution

Strategists need to have skills in both formulating and implementing strategies. For planned strategies to become a reality, strategists need to be able to link strategic thinking with action.

This module focuses primarily on analytical skills associated with strategy formulation. With its focus on managing strategic change, the purpose of this elective is to give you an overview of different theories on strategic change and to introduce you to some practical frameworks that can be applied in organisations to translate strategies into action and deliver strategic change.

This elective aims to give you both a theoretical and practical understanding of the issues involved in managing strategic change. In particular, it emphasises the need for context-sensitive approaches to change in organisations.

Many MBA students choose to start their own business after finishing their course.

The process of developing a new venture involves testing the commercialisation of a business idea, and choosing the best options for developing the business.

This module equips you with the knowledge you need to develop and refine your business creation strategy.

The aim of this module is to provide you with a broad knowledge and understanding of the entrepreneurial and innovation agenda, the need for innovation, and all aspects of the new venture creation process – including feasibility testing, marketing, financial forecasting, and securing finance.

You’ll be expected to come into this module prepared with a business idea you’d like to develop. Your business concept plan will then be reviewed before the module starts to ensure its suitability. At the end of the module, you’ll be able to produce a comprehensive business plan so you can launch your business.

In this module, you’ll gain clarity on the definition of digital marketing and explore the differences between digital and electronic resources. You’ll also review some wider considerations in the development of a digital marketing strategy.

An important part of digital marketing is social media, both in terms of interaction avenues for customers as well as new and evolving native advertising platforms. You’ll explore how the approach to digital marketing has evolved from accumulating to selecting traffic.

The availability of high-quality and voluminous data has increased and renewed interest in business analytics – a discipline that is redefining how organisational decisions are being made and managed.

Today’s business is eagerly looking for those with analytical skills able to understand and analyse data and draw insights that support and determine the way decisions are made. This module aims to equip you with analytical thinking, problem-solving skills and a spectrum of modern analytics tools and techniques that will assist you in the process of decision-making in a number of business areas including finance, marketing and operations management.

The aim of this module is also to introduce you to some of the most important machine learning tools used in business analytics. The focus is on application and interpretation of the tools and results.

Module Leader

The Machine Learning for Business module is led by Dr Dimitris Paraskevopoulos.

This module aims to bring investment management and strategic level asset allocation into real life, encouraging you to rehearse skills that will be important in your future career.

It aims to bring financial theory and investment practice together and engage you in discussion about the fundamental concepts of traditional finance and challenge this against the observed behaviour of investors.

It will explore and educate you in both how and why, in practice, different investment funds and approaches are put together and illustrate why investors should critically analyse and understand their own needs before setting their investment strategy.

Module Leader

The Investment Strategy and Practice module is led by Professor Stephen Thomas.

Data science tools are increasingly regarded as a lever to achieve a competitive advantage position. However, the adoption of these tools poses peculiar challenges to business leaders, who need to connect established strategic analysis frameworks, with a solid understanding of the data science approach.

This module helps business leaders in mobilising modern data science tools in order to explore, evaluate, and communicate strategic courses of actions. This is possible by adopting a practical, problem-solving stance. Particularly, participants will be exposed to (i) concrete examples that illustrate how to integrate strategic analysis and data science tools; and (ii) a library of concrete business cases (based on consultancy projects run by MSc in Business Analytics students from the Business School).

The entire module is delivered in a powerful, point-and-click data science software (e.g., Exploratory-R).

Module Leader

The Strategic Business Analytics module is led by Professor Vali Asimit.

This module focuses on the topics you need to know to prepare yourself for a world where M&A is an integral part of the strategic and financial business landscape.

With its global perspective, the aim of the module is to familiarise you with the various aspects of M&A. You’ll explore the general concept in the life of a corporation, how to apply valuation techniques learned elsewhere, the various techniques used in the different stages of a merger or an acquisition, and alternatives to M&A. This is a multidisciplinary module that combines strategy, finance, and individual and group behaviour.

Through this module, you’ll be able to:

• Become fluent in the topic of Mergers & Acquisitions
• Gain an in-depth understanding of the blend of strategic and financial concepts applied to M&A
• Fully recognise the impact of corporate restructurings on organisations and people.

The aim of this module is to give you a thorough understanding of how private equity functions as an asset class, including the different sub-classes it contains and how its returns are earned, measured and analysed.

During the module, you’ll also cover areas such as venture, capital, due diligence, and planning an investment programme.

Through this module, you’ll be able to:

• Model and analyse buyout returns and analyse venture returns
• Gain a thorough understanding of the drivers of returns in the different private equity categories
• Segment private equity funds by size, sector, stage and geography
• Plan and implement a private equity fund programme
• Understand the main documentation used in the private equity industry
• Consider the ethical implications of the PE model.

We daily make decisions in our professional and personal environments and sometimes, these decisions are difficult to make, whereas other times we feel confident and certain about the decision we made. A major factor that affects the decision-making process is uncertainty. How can we deal with uncertainty? Using data analytics we can make predictions that provide us with extra information that is crucial during the decision-making process. With the assistance of analytics tools we make data-informed decisions, while improving the efficiency and effectiveness of decision making processes.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to some of the most important decision making tools used in business analytics. The focus is on the application and interpretation of the tools and results and no previous experience of software coding is required. Below are some of the intendent learning outcomes:

• Develop analytical skills in structuring and analysing business decision problems
• Build analytical models for a variety of problems in a number of functional areas
• Understand usefulness and limitation of selected techniques
• Use software to generate computer solutions of the models
• Demonstrate skills in interpreting the business significance and communicating the analysis and results of business decision problems.