2026-2027 Graduate Catalog

MBA 701. Purpose Driven Leadership. 3 Credits.

This course will explore the leadership imperatives and competencies that are necessary to act on business challenges and drive both personal and organizational success in a competitive business environment. On a personal level, it is important to create a leadership model to guide how you influence others, manage change, resolve conflict, make decisions, communicate with impact, and build partnerships to drive impact. On an organizational level, forward-thinking leaders must understand how to integrate operational initiatives into broader strategic plans while still maintaining operational excellence, ensuring talent readiness, and building inter-group alignment among other things.

MBA 706. Marketing: Creating Brand Value. 3 Credits.

This course helps students understand the strategies about building, managing, and protecting brands. Specific areas covered include brand equity, brand value, forming customer relationships around a brand, as well as creating and sustaining brand loyalty. Social media's influence has extended to many spheres of life and today's younger generations are more skeptical of marketing and not as brand loyal as were the previous generations. The course explores how to develop better consumer-brand relationships that can create a clear competitive advantage as branding is becoming more participatory and experiential between customers and organizations.

MBA 707. Financial Management. 3 Credits.

In this course students will understand and apply modern financial theory to the investment and financing decisions in the context of a corporate entity. Upon completion of this course, students should be able to gather and analyze financial data with the goal of financial management and decision making. Students will be familiar with and apply different tools and techniques of financial decision making with shareholders' wealth maximization in mind. Topics include financial statement analysis, capital budgeting, capital structure, dividend policy, cost of capital, international financial management and mergers & acquisitions. The course uses FactSet and Microsoft Excel.

MBA 708. Entrepreneurship: Disruptive Innovation. 3 Credits.

This course will creatively approach the subjects of ideas instigation, business opportunity need identification, and the development of suitable business models within the knowledge-driven, digital, global economy. The course will use numerous discovery, creativity, ideation, problem-solving tools and frameworks, and concentrate on turning them into a viable business solution. It will delve into best practices and strategies of companies that have successfully engaged in disruptive innovation. Further, we will identify internal and external barriers and ways to overcome them stimulating the comparison and integration of different cultural and professional perspectives.

MBA 709. Artificial Intelligence & Technological Advances. 3 Credits.

This course emphasizes the understanding of how artificial intelligence (AI) and technological advances could be used to shape and implement strategic and operational changes at various levels within an organization. The course focuses on how AI and technological advances: (a) are transforming businesses and how they could be used to develop competitive business advantage; (b) could be used in shaping and executing the organization's strategy; (c) could be leveraged to foster a culture of data-driven experimentation and decision making; and (d) must include an understanding of the ethical issues around the use of AI - and the importance of keeping algorithms transparent, fair, and unbiased.

MBA 710. The Path to Sustainability. 3 Credits.

This course provides an overarching understanding of sustainability, the relationship between business decisions and sustainability, and the reasons why each business decision must be evaluated in term of economic, environmental, and social performances. The course also demonstrates that business leaders must evaluate each business decision with a consideration of long-term sustainability. The course also explores the need for transforming organizational culture so that sustainability is prioritized as a way of life and it allows for the continual integration of lifecycle assessment, which includes sustainability of products from design through disposal.

MBA 712. Management: Alternative Futures & Strategic Foresight. 3 Credits.

This course focuses on new breakthroughs, changing technologies, and cutting-edge innovations that could impact business. Learners will apply strategic foresight and enable their organizations to reframe preferences and expectations for the future. By working as strategic managers, learners will usher in changes in firm strategies, tactics, goals, plans, recruitment efforts, and management styles. This course will introduce topics and enable deeper thinking into the applicability of artificial intelligence, future of biotechnology, the singularity, strategic design and design futures, and emerging issue analysis among other under-researched, highly critical future trends.