Postgraduate MBA

Module Description
This advanced 10 credit module provides students with the frameworks and the skills to lead innovative projects and ventures within an organisational setting and a critical understanding of economic, sociological, psychological and managerial theories of enterprise creation and development and their application in the world of business and in the wider economy. The focus is on the formation of new ventures, product/process/service/business model innovation, and their impact on economic and social development in different environments. 

Aims

This module provides the necessary theoretical framework for the study and the practice of entrepreneurship, defined as new venture creation and innovative growth relating to different types of organisations and environments. The module will provide the critical, theoretical underpinning for the study and investigation of enterprise development and the three critical components of entrepreneurship:

Entrepreneurial People.

Entrepreneurial Organisations.

Entrepreneurial Environments.

It will also provide insights into and models for the practice of entrepreneurship and innovation in different organisational and economic environments, much of which is concerned with the process of entrepreneurship and the development of appropriate business models.

On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:

 1. Demonstrate a critical understanding of different theoretical approaches to business and new venture creation, growth and maturity in different spatial contexts.

2. Explain conceptual issues on entrepreneurship and its links with innovation clearly and concisely and how these concepts help us better understand economic and social development.

3. Evaluate and explain the relationship between different types of new ventures, as in new small firms, corporate entrepreneurship, new ventures within public and not-for-profit organisations in different countries and develop relevant business models for their growth.

4. Develop realistic ideas for engaging with new business creation and growth in different environments.

5. Identify opportunities for and develop an innovative venture or project within an organisational setting’.

6. Be familiar with synchronous and asynchronous forms of online and face to face (in campus ) learning and communication together with techniques for research-based business report and academic essay writing .

Module Description
This module is designed to encourage students to reflect on a variety of issues relating to business strategy, such as: the nature of business strategy; the approaches to strategy development; the implications of strategic choices; stakeholder interests and the wider context of strategy. In particular, the module encourages students to evaluate many of the aspects of strategy and strategic thinking that are not usually reflected upon. This module provides students with an insight into the nature of business strategy and its implications which go beyond what might be expected in the standard text book. Consequently, the module offers an insight into a range of current business issues, management dilemmas, ethical considerations, and general governance issues relating to the strategic direction of organizations. Overall, the module provides an introduction to strategy and a critical examination of its application in practice.

Module Aims
The main aim of the module is to enable students to have an understanding of the nature of business strategy and to evaluate its meaning and implications in practice

Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of the module, students will be able to:
1.Recognise and understand the many varied principles, practices and perspectives involved in business strategy making;
2.Demonstrate advanced knowledge and understanding in relation to issues underlying mainstream interpretations of strategic processes;
3.Understand the importance of ideological positions and ethical principles in relation to strategic aspirations and to demonstrate an understanding of the complicated governance issues involved in strategic decision making
4.Critically evaluate the different tools and techniques used in strategy making

Skills for Your Professional Life (Transferable Skills)
As part of this module you will be able to gain the following transferable skills:
1.Enhance your written communication skills through a written assignment
2.Improve your oral communication through a formal presentation as part of group work and further informal in-class discussions
3.Develop your research and critical thinking skills by researching a current business case and applying strategy models to make recommendations to a company. This will also greatly develop your commercial awareness
4.Enhance your teamwork and collaboration experience through extensive group work

Module Description
This module is designed to encourage students to think and reflect upon the nature of managing people and organisations. In particular, the module encourages students to consider many of the key human aspects of management that are, so often, taken for granted and in so doing provides students with an understanding of core issues that shape the management of organisational performance. Building upon an awareness of these key debates, the module invites participants to analyse workforce issues that shape their management practice.

Module Aims
The main aims of the module are:
1.To enable students to appreciate and analyse the role of people in shaping organisational performance;
2.To enhance in-depth understanding and awareness of own behaviour and small group dynamics in a variety of work settings;
3.To enhance in-depth understanding of the process of change and the management of change in organisations.

Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of the module, students will be able to:
1.Analyse the assumptions that shape our appreciation of workers and the human issues of work;
2.Discuss the role of people and managerial work from a variety of perspectives;
3.Reconsider their managerial practice in the light of critical research on behaviour in organisations;
4.Acknowledge and reflect critically upon those aspects of organisational life that are central to management practices with particular regard to contemporary business practice;
5.Reflect critically on management practices and people in different types of organisations.

Skills for Your Professional Life (Transferable Skills)
By the end of the module, students should be able to:
*Think critically by discussing case studies and articles
*Develop reflective and analytical skills via group exercises
*Work effectively and efficiently in small teams
*Solve problems creatively and collaboratively
*Reflect on their own managerial practice in relation to people behaviours

Leadership with its impact on businesses performance and organisational culture is often understood to be a critical factor in creating value and sustainability for modern organisations, regardless of their size or the sector they operate within. This module will enable you to gain knowledge on and insights into leadership, ways of leading and the ways they matter in organisations and beyond them. You will gain an understanding of what leadership is and how thinking about it has developed over time as well as how leadership relates to business performance and how leadership itself is performed. You will also encounter ways of thinking about, and rethinking what leadership is and what it should and could be. We will examine leadership in the context of organisations and nations as well as globally. The module will help you reflect on leadership as a role, a process, a practice and a skill.

Module Description
The managerial economics module covers two important aspects of organisations: the economics of corporate architectures as well as their governance and control. We apply economic-contracting and transactions-cost approaches to the study of these two aspects of organising.
Though the range of questions that can be covered is broad, we focus on three topical ones: Can we design the contracts of employees, managers, shareholders and bondholders to reduce the disparate tensions that are forever threatening to pull an organization apart without straight-jacketing them? Are expansion phases merely manifestations of empire-building by top managers or offer real gains in innovation and in human capital? Can we identify excessive risk taking while ensuring suitable risks are not avoided? These merely serve to illustrate but three of a myriad of tradeoffs that managers of successful organizations need to make: concepts and tools from economics can provide one guide, and we study these guides.
Organisations operate amongst forces that confine their structures, rules, norms, habits, inertia and momentum. Corporate architecture is an umbrella term for all these forces. The architecture provides guidance, at the same time as imposing restrictions, on how the corporation can be governed. The primary focus, of this course, is on applying the concepts, tools and methods developed within economics towards the coordination and administration of an organisation's activities.
The three-part approach to the economic analysis of architecture is: first, decide who should decide, second, decide the rewards for deciding 'well' and third, decide who has decided 'well'. We have enclosed the word 'well' in quotes – determining what it means to decide 'well' requires agreement on the objective of corporations. I will assume the agreed objective is to maximise the value to the shareholders of the corporation. Nevertheless, deciding a suitable objective for an organisation is a role for political economy and then for corporate law, which brings us naturally to the second important aspect we shall cover - systems of corporate governance.
The notion of governance and control in an organisation is best illustrated by an array of events that occur infrequently in the life of organisations but with large consequences when they do. The topics cover the entire cycle from birth to death. Events such as incorporating a firm (birth), an entrepreneur seeking external capital from banks or venture capitalists (growth), conducting an initial public request for resources and listing on public exchanges (premier league), engaging in mergers and acquisitions (expansion), performing restructuring activities (redirection), and experiencing distress or even ending it all, via liquidation (death). We study the latter three in this module and examine them from the perspectives of contracts and transactions costs.

Aims
We seek to describe and explain the transaction cost approach to understanding the coordination and administration of organised activities. The aims are two-fold. Firstly, we aim to describe the perspectives of contracting (explicit, implicit or incomplete), agency costs and asymmetric information, which are core devices developed in economics, that help garner insights into important resource choices that senior managers cannot but confront if they are to suitably govern their organizations. The larger framework for these choices is the corporate governance system in which the choices are embedded and it is the second aim to describe the political economy associated with the risk distributions among stakeholders of corporations in such systems.

The course has four outcomes:

First, you should be able to employ economic concepts to describe the conflicts of interest inherent in corporations and explain how, in resolving such conflicts, the administration that minimises transactions costs gains competitive advantage.

Second, you should be able to describe the control mechanisms that can reduce such conflicts and explain the complementarities among these mechanisms.

Third, you should be able to describe the concepts of agency and signalling, as well as, explain how these two concepts help analyse important events in corporate governance and control, such as executive compensation, mergers and acquisitions, reorganisations and liquidations.

Finally, you should be able to describe the different corporate governance systems prevalent globally and the political economy associated with the different risk distributions among the stakeholders in these broad macroeconomic settings.

Operations Management is the management of the resources and processes that create and supply the services and/or products of an organization or function. As such Operations Management is relevant to all sectors and most functions within an organization. This module will equip students with the skills to manage operations in a sustainable way that helps deliver the triple bottom line or people, planet and profit.

The module introduces a range of models that help students manage a range of operations from high volume batch processing to low volume bespoke businesses. It considers both production and service organizations and address the increasing blurring of the distinction between the two.


Aims

To develop an understanding of how to design, manage, measure and improve the operations of an organization in a sustainable manner

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of the module, students will be able to:

Determine the effect that operations can have on the sustainability of an organization

Critically examine the main performance objectives of operations as they apply to all organizations

Design processes appropriate for the product or service being delivered

Critically assess and select appropriate planning and control tools for an organization

Assess and select appropriate process improvement methods for organizations

Module Description
This module introduces key aspects of accounting and finance, and some of its main applications in contemporary management and decision making. The central consideration of this module is that managers need to be aware of, and be able to critically evaluate, the informational outputs of accounting systems and financial management techniques, and how their application underpins managerial, financing and investment decisions, and contemporary issues of relevance to these techniques. This module also provides a foundation for the study of optional modules in accounting and/or finance.

Module Aims
1.to provide students with sufficient background understanding of accounting and finance principles and their role in the business decision-making process;
2.to enable students to understand selected accounting and finance techniques, their application in organisations and contemporary issues related to these techniques;
3.to support and encourage education and learning, and to foster the capacity for individual study; and
4.to facilitate development of critical and analytical thinking for further academic study, employment and personal development.

Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of the module, students will be able to:
1.Explain and apply the accounting principles and concepts underlying the preparation of financial statements, including notions of cash flow vs. accounting profit and concepts of assets, liabilities, and equity.
2.Be conversant with the form and content of company financial statements (e.g. income statement, cash flow statement, statement of financial position).
3.Apply financial analysis techniques to make informed decisions/recommendations/projections and be aware of selected earnings management practices and controversies associated with meeting analysts' earnings forecasts.
4.Gain clear conceptual understanding of managerial and cost accounting, cost elements and classification, cost behaviours and costing methods and short-term decision-making.
5.Evaluate investments employing standard criteria, such as Net Present Value, and explain their shortcomings.
6.Evaluate investments while employing models that match risk and return as well as describe the conditions in which the models can be reliably deployed.
7.Describe the irreversibility and flexibility of capital investments and illustrate the use of real options.
8.Describe the ways of raising finance and discuss the factors to be considered when deciding on a suitable balance between debt and equity capital.

Skills for Your Professional Life (Transferable Skills)
The module, class activities and coursework will help you to develop the following transferable skills:
a) Ability to develop critical and practical problem-solving skills.
b) Ability to develop interpersonal communication skills through debate and team presentations in class.
d) Ability to identify relevant information from case evidence and financial reports
c) Interpretation of accounting and financial information for decision-making