MSc International Management (January)

This class develops your awareness and capabilities as a manager. It utilises a Personal Development Plan (PDP) process to help you critically evaluate how your skills and attributes are needed to be effective and, over the course of the year, provides workshops and exercises to help you identify and move towards fulfilling your potential.

Designed to highlight the importance of entrepreneurship in the international arena, this class will enable you to use your learning from their other classes in a context relating to the practical application of the business-related theory covered.

The class also highlights the importance of the practical testing of business ideas to see if they are viable business opportunities within international contexts as well as the shaping of business ideas in relation to cross-cultural differences.

The importance of business idea generation, opportunity evaluation and the entrepreneurial mindset is addressed as is the importance of the market context.

This class will introduce you to the principles needed to understand the nature of financial markets and institutions, corporate financial theory and financial decision making. It examines the core concepts and valuation models involved in pricing securities, the choices firms make over how to fund themselves and the techniques used to evaluate internal investment proposals.

This class is aimed at developing effective and reflective practitioners/managers. It'll provide you with the opportunity to deploy many aspects of your learning by engaging with a live issue provided by a client company.

It begins with a review of key theories and tools that you'll have studied as part of your degree, with consideration given on how to use these in this exercise. This is followed by analysis of material provided by the client which describes the issue to be addressed and the outcome expected by the client. This then leads into a group activity which applies particular techniques for addressing aspects of the client’s issue. More detailed client input is provided at certain points in the process often through direct interface with the client. This allows you to gain a more in-depth understanding of the issue and to try out various solutions. Further analysis is carried out by the groups and the class concludes with you presenting your thinking to their client. The client presentations are then followed by a reflective session where the tutor, client and students are encouraged to explore the process of the class and develop the learning gained.

Business organisations and management decisions and actions exist in a complex, dynamic and often turbulent environment. This class will develop your understanding of the many dimensions and layers of the global business environment. It'll encourage you to recognise, understand and reflect upon the challenges and opportunities that various aspects of the business environment present to businesses, organisations and managers operating in an international context. The class will also introduce you to a range of useful theories, concepts and tools for analysing the business environment and give them an opportunity to apply these to ‘real world’ and hypothetical management scenarios.

The nature of how we think about ‘markets’, and the activities involved in trying to understand and communicate with customers, is changing rapidly. This class examines contemporary international practice, exploring the major concepts and techniques involved in the marketing planning process. It will help you analyse what companies are offering, how customers behave, and ultimately identify what they need to do next to deliver on their objectives.

In New Venture Creation, students will learn to develop and validate winning business models. Students will cover a broad range of topics that critically examine various approaches to establishing and operating a venture, supported by frequent guest lectures from successful entrepreneurs.

In this class you will gain an understanding of the essential economic issues in international trade, market structure, and the role of international institutions in promoting trade liberalisation and disciplining international commercial interaction. You will analyse the distribution of the gains from trade, identifying the circumstances where trade liberalisation is mutually beneficial and those where there are winners and losers at the international or national level. The class will also address current issues facing the world trading system – such as Brexit – and how these might be resolved.

This module aims to provide students with skills and knowledge relating to the use of practices in Project Management with particular respect to the project triple constraint: time, cost and quality.

The mission of this elective is to provide a solid understanding and application in the strategies of global brand management. Key skills and theories of brand management will be presented and discussed in order to equip the learner to operate effectively in a global brand management environment. Students will gain a clear appreciation of the role of brand strategy within the corporation’s operating plan.  This will entail consideration of environmental factors causing changes to the structure and composition of the brand portfolio as well as discussion of conceptual issues surrounding the strategic roles of brand management.

The class will consider a number of financial decisions of strategic importance, ranging from capital expenditure decisions to those concerned with the evaluation of the terms of a merger. These decisions will be explored through lectures, exercises and most importantly, case studies. The preparation of the case studies and the discussion of the analysis will provide the focus of the class.

This class provides MSc students with insights into ‘Service’ Operations Management, an area of study that is increasingly relevant to our graduates as compared with traditional/manufacturing operations management. Emerging concepts such as ‘services science’ emphasize the need to understand operations management within the service sector as a whole, while providing specific examples from different service sectors to illustrate the wide range of challenges within service industries. Aiming to be as practically useful as possible, the class provides both conceptual and technical perspectives on services. The technical perspective utilises discrete event simulation (DES) as a powerful tool to analyse service operations and facilitate decision making for service operations managers.

In this class, participants explore aspects of governance, work ethics and succession as well as family dynamics, conflict on gender issues. The class gives students insights into effective and professional work with and within family firms.

The aim of this module is to:

• sensitize students to the basic skills involved in managing people in Europe with a focus on cultural and knowledge issues as well as managing cross-cultural differences
• understand the European context in terms of HRM and employment relations and manage effectively in this context
• be able to adapt to different cultural environments and to manage effectively in an intercultural European context as well as a global context

Games of strategy are ubiquitous throughout the corporate world, political environments, and in everyday life. Game theory provides a framework within which such strategic situations can be modelled and analysed. Through studying game theory and learning how to think strategically you can better optimize your well-being by trying to outmanoeuvre your adversaries by recognizing the fact that they are trying to outmanoeuvre you. A world of strategic thinking awaits that will transform the way you think about making decisions!

The module starts by looking at the main types of business vehicle that are used in the modern commercial environment. It goes on to explore how commercial contracts are formed and how the concept of agency can affect contracts. An exploration of common contractual problems follows.

The module then turns to examine practical skills: goal setting, time management and risk management (all of which are set in a theoretical context for participants). Finally, participants learn about the theory of negotiation and have the opportunity to bring all of their theoretical legal knowledge and practical skills to bear during a negotiation simulation.

The mega-trend of digital transformation is first examined to familiarise the student with the environmental drivers – social and technological – behind the rise of digital transformation.

Key technological advances powering digital transformation as a global phenomenon are introduced, including:

• elastic cloud computing
• big data & analytics
• the internet of things (IoT)
• artificial intelligence (AI)
• machine learning

Social implications for work and life are examined, and examples explored as to how digital transformation is already reshaping nations, sectors, organisations and individuals.

The principal aim of this course is to provide students with the ability to understand how changes in the global economic environment could impact upon future business models – and to gain experience in identifying the strategies that best respond to different situations. Learn about major ‘grand challenges’ and how they might impact upon your business model.

To provide students with a strong understanding of how an economy operates (and can impact upon individual businesses), and the role of policy in shaping economic outcomes, and in turn inform business strategy.

This elective provides an understanding of how sports management practice can help any type of organisation. This is very different from other classes that we currently have for electives offerings. The key objective of MBA and MSc education to develop effective business leaders.

The aim of this class is to introduce the strategies, tools and techniques utilised by organisations in business and sport who not only improved performance over a sustained period of time – they changed the rules of the game in their industry or sector.

This class will develop the awareness, skills and knowledge required by managers seeking to work abroad as international executives. It'll help you develop an awareness, knowledge and understanding of the importance of the often overlooked 'soft skills' of management, particularly as concerns cross-cultural variations and their impact on the practices and processes of management. It'll examine the main concepts currently employed to understand the complexity presented to managers in their process of managing people across national and cultural borders, addressing the issues of the impact of culture on management structures and processes. It will then provide understanding of the role which cross-cultural management can play in achieving competitive advantage in international business.

With organisations increasingly becoming global in scale and ever more interconnected, understanding the challenges this presents for managing those employed by firms is vitally important. This class provides insight into how organizations function and how this influences individual behaviour. It will also help you understand the key theories that will make you a more effective manager and leader.

This class provides opportunities to explore, understand and apply the language of strategy and strategic management. By examining real-life organizations, you'll develop your understanding of the forces within their contextual and transactional environments that influence their strategy, and by applying different strategic frameworks, develop the ability to critically analyse the strategic direction being adopted.

The MSc in International Management project gives you the opportunity to engage with a topic of interest in depth and over an extended period of time. Preparation for the project is provided via a course in project methodology training. At this stage of the programme, you may be interested in aligning career aspirations with project work.