MIT Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership

Examines advanced topics in corporate finance, including complex valuations, static and dynamic capital structure, risk management, and real options. Subject considers the asymmetric information and incentive problems, security design, restructuring, bankruptcy, and corporate control and governance issues.

Presents a framework for business analysis and provides students with tools for financial statement analysis, including strategic, accounting, financial, and prospective analysis. Concepts are then applied to a number of decision-making contexts, such as credit analysis, investor communications, merger analysis, financial policy decisions, and securities analysis.

Studies managerial power and responsibility. Examines conflicts between power and moral responsibility and the contexts for choice in dealing with a number of such problems. Readings are principally classics used to illustrate several enduring issues.

Explores strategic and organizational issues in the development of new technologies and new business areas for existing firms. Issues are examined from the perspectives of both large corporations and emerging technology-based enterprises. Examines the linkages between internal and external sources of technology in major new business development, as well as internal entrepreneurial ventures, alliances (especially between large and new companies), joint ventures, acquisitions, corporate venture capital investments, and licensing as alternative business development approaches. Covers aspects of corporate business development other than merger-and-acquisition (M&A) activities. Outside speakers supplement faculty lectures. Student teams prepare term reports on a competitive analysis of some aspect of corporate business development. Half-term subject.

Examines the elements of entrepreneurial finance, focusing on technology-based startup ventures, and the early stages of company development. Subject addresses the key questions that challenge all entrepreneurs: How much money can and should be raised? When should it be raised and from whom? What is a reasonable valuation of the company? How should funding be structured? Subject aims to prepare students for these decisions, as both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

Explores the fundamentals of digital business strategy with an emphasis on Internet technology and its use in business and commerce. Topics include the economics of digital goods, including text, music, software, video, and other types of content; pricing, bundling, subscription, and advertising-based models; and software agents, auctions, and implications for consumer search and competition. Examines personalization, security, encryption, and targeted communications; privacy and intellectual property; principles of information-based organization and e-business; and tools and techniques for managing business transformation. Features guest speakers, lectures, cases, and projects.

Enables teams of engineering, science, and management students to work with the top management of international high-tech startups and gain hands-on experience in starting and running a new enterprise outside the United States. Lectures expose students to the issues and policies that affect the climate for innovation and startup success around the world. Subject begins in the second half of the fall semester. Continues for two to three weeks during IAP, when students spend time at company sites. Subject concludes in the first half of the spring semester. Students must complete all three components to receive credit.

Focuses on a “live” project during which students work in groups of three or four people with an organization that has requested MIT Sloan’s help in thinking through an issue related to sustainability. Prior projects have included work with large companies like Disney, Intel, and Nike; with smaller companies like Good Energies, GoLoCo, and Green Fuel Technologies; and with NGOs like the Clinton Climate Initiative, the U.S. Business Council for Sustainable Development, and Mibanco. Past projects have developed new tools or approaches, structured new strategies for organizational sustainability, and assessed market opportunities.

Provides a basic understanding of legal issues that corporations meet during their existence. Follows one firm throughout its life from birth to bankruptcy—as a breakaway from an established high-tech firm, proceeding through initial funding efforts, establishment of its capital and corporate structure, and through problems in labor, trade secrets, contracts and antitrust, product liability, and resolution of transnational and domestic business disputes.

Tackles the critical issues of global business sustainability. L-Lab combines an overarching way to think about systemic change, an on-site field project experience with leading-edge sustainability initiatives, and personal work in individual leadership capacities. Provides the opportunity to influence complex global sustainability efforts that require both new ways of sense making and new ways of collaborating across boundaries. Field projects include major organizations at the forefront of today’s thinking about systemic change and sustainable systems, located locally, nationally, and internationally. Previous years’ classes included projects with such organizations as Nike, Starbucks, BP India, PepsiCo, Oxfam, WWF, and the Cambridge Energy Alliance.

Examines the most dramatic events in a corporation’s history¬—the decision to acquire another firm, to be acquired, or to oppose being acquired. Mergers and acquisitions is an area of management that has been thoroughly documented in the financial press and in academic literature. Explores three aspects of the M&A process: the strategic decision to acquire, the valuation decision on how much to pay, and the financing decision on how to fund the acquisition. Class sessions alternate between discussions of academic readings and applied cases.

Covers the process of identifying and quantifying market opportunities, then conceptualizing, planning, and starting a new, technology-based enterprise. Topics include: opportunity assessment, the value proposition, the entrepreneur, legal issues, entrepreneurial ethics, the business plan, the founding team, seeking customers and raising funds. Students develop detailed business plans for a startup. Intended for students who want to start their own business, further develop an existing business, be a member of a management team in a new enterprise, or better understand the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial process.

Provides a unifying framework for analyzing strategic issues in operations and manufacturing companies. Analyzes relationships between manufacturing companies and their suppliers, customers, and competitors. Also covers decisions in technology, facilities, vertical integration, human resources, and other strategic areas. Explores means of competition such as cost, quality, and innovativeness, as well as emerging topics such as outsourcing, globalization, and the effects of the Internet.

Provides an understanding of the theory and processes of negotiation as practiced in a variety of settings. Designed for relevance to the broad spectrum of bargaining problems faced by the manager and professional. Allows students an opportunity to develop negotiation skills experientially and to understand negotiation in useful analytical frameworks. Emphasizes simulations, exercises, role playing, and cases. Undergraduates may register for this subject provided they are ready to participate with the intensity expected for a graduate H-level subject.

Provides frameworks for understanding the structure and dynamics of the energy sector and the strategic opportunities available within it. Opportunities (in sources, uses, and interfaces) resulting from emerging technologies, market dynamics, and changing policies are analyzed using these frameworks, and are addressed from the perspectives of established energy companies, technology developers, equipment and service suppliers, financial players, and entrepreneurs.

Outlines tools for formulating and evaluating technology strategy, including an introduction to the economics of technical change, models of technological evolution, and models of organizational dynamics and innovation. Topics covered include: making money from innovation; competition between technologies and the selection of standards; optimal licensing policies; joint ventures; organization of R&D; and theories of diffusion and adoption. Taught using a combination of readings and case studies.

Focuses on the strategy as well as the tactics involved in negotiating and building effective, long-term relationships with investors, including VCs, angels and others. Other topics include the legal framework of the investment process; its related jargon; market practice and standards; and strategies in identifying the optimal form of early stage capital. Coursework is team-centered: in two rounds of simulations, student teams assume the roles of founders of a startup and first meet with practicing lawyers to gain advice and practical experience working with professional advisers. In final round, teams negotiate with leading local VCs at their offices to hammer out favorable terms of investment for their company.

Innovation Teams of science, engineering and management students participate in a hands-on experience evaluating commercial feasibility of innovative research emerging out of grants to School of Engineering faculty from the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. Projects cover critical aspects of commercialization such as developing an intellectual property strategy, performing competitive analysis, selecting the target application and market for the technology, identifying the appropriate business model for commercialization, designing a go-to-market-plan, and choosing the sales approach to garner initial customers. Lectures address key issues of technology transfer, new venture creation, and commercialization and develop strong skills in communication and working in teams. Resume and application including brief statement of objectives is required in advance of registration to enable best match of students with projects.

Provides the skills required for a CEO to deal with complex problems under highly adverse conditions. Cases and guest CEO speakers present real-life, high adversity situations that students then deal with through role play. The emphasis is on how to quickly define the issues at stake and take critical and precipitous actions to address them.

This is an exploratory elective Action Lab on founding, financing, and building entrepreneurial ventures targeting developing countries, emerging markets, and underserved consumers everywhere. Particularly emphasizes broad sectors of Health, Financial Services, Education, Urbanization, ICT, Basic Services, and those transformative innovations and exponentially scalable business models which can enable or accelerate major positive social change throughout the world.