Courses

An introduction to legal options available to protect intellectual property, including international aspects of intellectual property law.

Continuing a Legacy: Leading a Family Business --- This course explores the strategic, operating, financial, legal, family, career and business issues found in family-owned and managed companies or privately-held firms. The challenge of the course is to provide the tools to be successful, whether as part of a family business, work for one, or want to be a consultant to a family business.

This course covers venture capital market structure and institutional arrangements and the application of financial theory and methods in a venture capital finance setting. It presents and applies the fundamentals of venture capital finance, employing "live" case studies to focus on financing startup and early stage, technology-based firms.

This live broadcast of a 7-week seminar speaker series hosted by the Haas School of Business University of California explores why and how microfinance operations have grown to proved financial services to poor and low-income people on a sustainable basis. The class brings together advice and best practices from successful practitioners and institutions around the world as well as new technology startups targeting the industry.

Entrepreneurial Management --- Entrepreneurship is about overcoming ambiguity, risk and failure, embracing it, and learning from it. This course will explore entrepreneurship and identify and many contexts in which entrepreneurship manifests, including start-up, corporate, social, and public sector. It will prepare students for starting and succeeding in an entrepreneurial venture. The main course deliverable is a complete business plan and a presentation to an outside group of investors. This course will enable participants to sharpen their ability to find and evaluate opportunities for a new venture, as well as to think creatively and solve problems in highly unstructured situations. A broad range of topics essential to entrepreneurial ventures will be covered, including idea generation, feasibility analysis, raising capital, marketing strategies, financial modeling, attracting a capable team, creating a culture, and preparing for growth. In addition, the course will cover buying a business, franchising, and family business.

Mobile Innovation Development --- Mobile platforms have emerged as the preferred vehicle for delivering business innovation to consumers. BBA students specifically those with interests in entrepreneurship or career interests in mobile businesses, need to understand the unique requirements of mobile businesses to successfully design, develop, deploy and manage business innovations. This course is designed to help students conceptualizing, designing, developing, delivering and managing technology solutions by taking them through the application (app) development process covering the full spectrum from identifying customer needs to prototyping/simulating a mobile innovation solution. Students will learn business issues related to mobile businesses including business and revenue models, customer engagement through gamification and personalization, security and privacy challenges, role of big data and mobile analytics, and integration of emerging technology directions such as wearables, smart devices, loT, location based features and Social Media Integration. The course will seek to organize students in project groups with a combination of business, design and technology expertise. Project groups will then conceptualize, design and prototype/simulate a mobile business innovation throughout the course.

Corporate Financing Decisions --- This course develops the conceptual foundation for making corporate financing decisions. Capital structure theory is explained in detail with an in-depth analysis of market imperfections such as taxes, cost of financial distress, agency and informational issues. The next portion of the course covers different securities used to raise external capital with an emphasis on the institutional aspects of acquiring capital (Initial public offerings, seasoned equity offerings, public debt, convertible debt, private equity & venture capital). The causes and effects of financial distress and the bankruptcy process are explained. Payout policy and different payout strategies (dividends versus stock repurchase) are discussed. The course ends with a brief discussion of risk management. Throughout the course, financial theory will be integrated with the use of specific case studies.

Base of the Pyramid: Business Innovation and Social Impact --- Business can, and indeed must, play a greater role in responding to society's grand challenges. The deep poverty faced by the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) - the 4-5 billion poorest people on this planet and constituting approximately two-thirds of humanity - presents a challenge on the grandest scale. While donation-based approaches have their place, the promise of achieving both profits and social impact through market-based approaches offers an exciting alternative. Business opportunities in health care, energy, agriculture, sanitation, housing, education, consumer goods, clean water and other impact areas can lead to a more inclusive capitalism. The challenge is to build enterprises that are sustainable at scale in an impoverished and unfamiliar market context. The course integrates concepts of strategy, international business, entrepreneurship, non-profit management, and development to stimulate the leadership skills and competitive imagination needed to design, pilot, and scale BoP enterprises. Emphasizing action-based learning and using carefully selected cases, readings, videos, and outside guests, class sessions focus on: 1)identifying the opportunities and challenges associated with serving BoP markets; and 2) developing a toolkit of strategies, frameworks, and processes for building sustainable, scalable enterprises that create economic and social value.

Entrepreneurial Turnaround Management --- Turnaround management techniques will be examined in this course, led by an experienced practitioner. This "hands on" course evaluates analysis techniques, prioritization of tasks, communication strategies, strategic repositioning, financial restructuring, and the psychological aspects of troubled situations.

Financing Research Commercialization --- This course is a practicum, offering an opportunity to apply collective team work of a student/mentor alliance to building a launch pad for a technology-based venture. This course is open to Ross School MBA and BBA students as well as all UM graduate students. Student teams will work with mentors and principal investigators (PI) from UM faculty in the Medical School, College of Engineering and other divisions to build a business and marketing plan for a new technology or invention. Projects are based upon disclosures made to UM Office of Technology Transfer, other universities and industrial companies.

Independent Study Project --- Independent study projects, supervised by faculty, are available to graduate business students in good academic standing. To select a project, students should consult the appropriate professor about the nature of the project and the number of credit hours the work would earn. Students earn one to three credit hours per project and may elect only one study project in a term. Graduate business students should consult their program bulletins for information regarding total number of projects and credits that can be applied to their degree. To register for a project students must submit an approved Independent Study Project application, available online.