Vision Statement

By Howard Frank, Dean
Robert H. Smith School of Business

MBA Curriculum Adds Value

The Smith School has become one of the world’s leading business schools in transforming its curriculum to reflect the needs of leadership for an economy driven by globalization and technology. All elements of the school have participated in the transformation. In many cases, clusters of courses combine exposure to the capabilities of new technologies with the use of such technologies in corporate transformation. Many business models and examples of corporate transformations are drawn from company cases. The curriculum transformation at the Smith School is pervasive, continuous, and impacts all areas of the school. Here are some examples.

Securities: The transformation has required significant changes in terms of the content of finance courses, including discussion and analysis of the advances mentioned above, as well as illustration of traditional content (e.g., IPOs) with vivid examples from digital-driven or -enabled companies. Given the dramatic advances in the areas of derivatives and fixed-income securities, we have introduced courses that focus on these areas.

Computational Finance: New courses in computational finance train students to implement a variety of sophisticated computational tools that are now widely used in financial institutions, as well as non-financial corporations.

Content Delivery: In addition to driving new content in our courses, the information revolution has also enabled innovative delivery of content. Most notably, the Internet provides a great deal of historical and short-lag-time data, and thus is used to varying extents in all of our courses. On the corporate finance side, companies’ financial data and information on their activities can be easily obtained, and are used to illustrate a wide range of concepts and topics. On the investments side, data from global equity, bond, options, and futures markets are used to illustrate implementation of valuation and risk management techniques, as well as to demonstrate the way in which market prices change over time in electronic markets.

Many Internet sites also provide useful methods for presenting and analyzing data. On corporate or academic sites, one can find, for instance, spreadsheets to value companies that include recent data, or dynamic yield-curve simulations showing changes in yield-curve shapes over time. Consequently, presentations can be more graphic and interactive, and thus more memorable than conventional teaching methods. Numerous portals also help faculty and students find relevant information on specific topics, such as equity valuation, project finance, or real options.

Financial Laboratory: The Netcentric Financial Markets Laboratories take the learning experience one step further by allowing the use of real-time data (from Research Insights and Reuters), together with readily available software for processing the data and gaining insights about the behavior of financial markets. Some courses (e.g., the Investment Management course for MBAs) use the lab for every lecture, while other courses (Options and Futures Markets) use the lab for delivery of specific content that is best illustrated in this manner. In addition, several courses involve assignments for which students must use the lab. The data are used for the specific tasks assigned and for group projects, whereby students download data via Reuters feed and perform tasks, such as computation of efficient investment portfolios, bond duration and convexity, implied volatilities from the option pricing models, etc. The integration of the financial markets lab into finance courses has been remarkably successful, and we plan to expand the set even further in view of the expanded new lab.

Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship courses contribute to advancing our understanding of how managers of new ventures can be leaders for the digital economy. For example, elective courses such as “New Venture Creation,” “New Venture Financing,” and “Technology Management” focus on the practical aspects of creating successful new ventures in the digital economy, including opportunity recognition, feasibility analysis, sources of funding, evaluation of deals, and business model creation.

Human Resource Management: Human Resource Management courses prepare students to deal with a firm’s human capital requirements for competitive advantage. Students learn the basics of building high-investment human resource systems. Specific courses, “Performance Management and Rewards,” “Executive Power and Negotiation,” and “Organizational Change,” help prepare managers to effectively use key management tools (change management, conflict resolution and negotiation, pay for performance, performance management) to maximize the productivity and satisfaction of an increasingly diverse workforce comprised more and more of knowledge workers. Future leaders also learn about the contribution of these tools to strategy implementation and the creation of core competencies that drive competitive advantage.

Organizational Behavior: These courses help students understand how to effectively manage the behavior of individuals and groups in organizations that face constant change and development. Specific courses, “Leadership and Teamwork,” “Leadership Development,” “Executive Power and Negotiations,” and “Organizational Change,” equip leaders for the digital economy with the cutting-edge skills, frameworks, and tools needed to effectively motivate, manage, and lead workers in a dynamic world.

Strategy: Strategy courses prepare leaders for an economy driven by globalization and technology to formulate and implement value-creating strategies in rapidly changing environments. Specific courses, “Industry and Competitor Analysis,” “Global Strategy,” and “Implementing Strategy,” provide students with state-of-the-art theory, frameworks, and tools for both creating and exploiting competitive advantage in netcentric companies and industries. Each of the courses draws from extensive case studies of firms that compete in the global economy.

e-Service: The e-Service elective was created in Fall 2001 to capture the marketing and revenue-expansion viewpoint on e-commerce, and to move e-commerce beyond e-tailing to the next phase of e-commerce: e-service. The course pays special attention to the use of the Web for cultivating ongoing customer relationships over time, and especially to the use of customer information to customize the interaction.

Customer Relationship Management: The CRM course, launched in the 2003-2004 academic year, focuses on the use of customer databases to build one-to-one marketing efforts. Moving beyond the industry focus on automated customer interaction systems, the course takes an expanded view of how to successfully manage customer relationships. The relationship marketing literature, in particular, is an important source of theory about how to build, cultivate, and prolong customer relationships.

Marketing Analysis: More and more companies have extensive databases that include information on the firm’s customers and their behavior. While the marketing research course emphasizes primary data collection and analysis, the marketing analysis course emphasizes the sophisticated analysis of secondary data. Students get hands-on practice in the analysis of real data sets and learn to convert the results of those analyses to strategic marketing recommendations.

Service Marketing: The service economy is now about 70% of the GDP in the U.S. and provides about 85% of MBA jobs. In addition, as service becomes an increasingly important part of the goods sector, companies are using it to differentiate themselves from their competitors. The expansion of the service economy is the other face of the information revolution, which has resulted in new possibilities for service. The service marketing course represents a paradigm shift, in which students learn to look at business from the customer’s point of view and to organize marketing strategy from the outside in. Students also learn technologies for managing customer satisfaction and retention.

Electronic Commerce: Business Models and Technologies: This course covers strategic and technical essentials of what a manager needs to know in order to manage and lead an electronic commerce initiative. Topics covered include: EC business models, economics of information goods, virtual value chain, impact of EC on organizational strategy and industry structure, in-depth assessment of successful EC strategies, and emerging issues related to electronic communities and virtual organizations.

Telecommunications Technology and Competitive Strategy: This course gives a broad summary-level overview of telecommunications and implications for competitive strategy, both within and outside the telecommunications industry. The course is recommended for students with strong interest in strategic management for high-technology firms or the telecommunications industry.

Data Mining: Transactional data from point-of-sale scanners provide just one example of the explosion in the quantity of data routinely available to businesses in the digital age. Data from direct marketing are growing exponentially, and e-commerce and Web-browsing/click-stream data have recently become available. Data mining and data-warehousing technologies are used to extract value from the data to support tactical and strategic business decisions. In this course, students work with datasets and commercial data-mining software to gain direct experience. While the enabling technologies and algorithmic techniques are studied, the focus of the course is learning when and how to apply the technologies in such areas as retailing, e-commerce, direct marketing, customer relationship management, and finance.

Management of Technology: The innovator’s dilemma is one example of an issue that CEOs redesigning their businesses for the Internet must contend with. This course exposes students to many strategic and operational issues that arise when managing in the presence of technological innovation. Case studies of best and worst practices are analyzed, and the research underlying recent best­selling books on innovation are discussed. We examine the formulation of innovation strategies, the role of supply chains on innovation, the process of developing new products and services, and the implementation of process technologies aimed at improving productivity (manufacturing and services).

Economics of the Global and Digital Economy: The economics of new technology-based global industries is often very different from that of older "smokestack" industries. In particular, high-tech businesses are suffused with positive-feedback processes that tend to reinforce dominant products and services as "standards" due to network externalities and customer lock-in. The core economics curriculum provides our MBA students with a foundation in the economics that drives these processes. In addition, these economic considerations are a significant component of a number of electives, such as “Competing in Global High-Tech Industries and Telecommunications” and “Technology Policy: Internet Economics.”

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