Summer 2022
Ethics in AI Product Design
Investment in AI has been increasing exponentially over the last 5 years. However, the industry is facing significant pushback from lawmakers, community activists, and ethicists. The business case has also proven murky with the vast majority of AI projects failing before deployment, at a tremendous cost to organizations.
Whether you are an experienced business leader or just beginning your journey, this course
will show you how to design effective and ethical AI products. You will learn the history of AI and be able to identify the core components of an AI system and explain their importance. Using that foundation, you will be able to critically consider the current and impending constraints on AI systems. Finally, you will gain practical experience in utilizing the FBPML Technical Best Practices through designing an innovative AI product that aligns with course‐level and lesson‐level learning objectives and a specified AI constraint.
Networks Platforms and Ecosystems in Business Strategy
As computing and communication have grown in power and pervasiveness, leading up to today’s Internet-connected world, digital intermediation of multi-sided transactions has become the key context for strategic decisions about how to compete and cooperate in order to flourish. The famous stars of today – Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon – and their many would-be imitators and successors, as well as the companies adapting in their shadow, all must cope with the realities of a world in which controlling interfaces and interactions may be more valuable than any specific product or service that gets transacted. Or perhaps a new age of decentralized, common interaction protocols will replace today’s proprietary interaction hubs.
This course provides a rigorous, economics-based and real-world-grounded development of the theory of network effects and standards competition, platform economics and tactics, ecosystems management, and regulatory impacts. Students learn models and tools for analyzing and synthesizing strategies in these networks, platform, and ecosystem contexts, including relevant parts of economics, game theory, network theory, and political science. They apply these tools to contemporary and historical situations via class discussions, problems, and write-ups.
Fall 2022
Competitive Intelligence
In a world increasingly defined by the exponential growth in computing power, students learn how to design, build, and operate a competitive intelligence program. A competitive intelligence program assesses a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses across products, advertising, and brand platforms upon which digitally-driven strategies and execution tactics are developed, assessed, and modified.
Through a combination of case studies, guest speakers and live working examples of how companies are increasingly using this process, students learn to utilize tools and practical examples to define, gather, analyze, and distribute actionable intelligence about products, customers, competitors, and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in strategic and tactical decision making for an organization. With these tools, students will be able to assess a company’s external environment, including the industry and relevant competitors, using traditional as well as the technically advanced AI/ML tools to discern elements key to establishing trends and appropriate responses for companies in a variety of industries. The class draws on the students’ experiences as well as information from strategy and related digitally driven disciplines. The class concludes with the schools globally renowned “War Game.”
Managing Performance in the 21st Century
The key to sustained competitive advantage in a 21st century, knowledge-based, digital economy is people—and performance management is all about aligning employee attitudes and behaviors with firm goals and performance. Although performance management is a fundamental and important management system, it is often misunderstood and ineffectively implemented. The purpose of this course is to help you design, implement and evaluate successful performance management systems in a digital world. For instance, we will discuss the digitization of performance appraisals, and how to evaluate performance of globally dispersed teams. There will be opportunities to develop awareness of your strengths and weaknesses related to managing employee performance through self-assessments and discussion of the latest evidence-based findings related to each of the topics covered in the course. The course will emphasize application of concepts to real-world situations through demonstrations, case studies, and role plays: each session will give you tools that you can use to help you become a better manager. For instance, you will develop skills in areas such as evaluating employee performance, giving feedback effectively, employee coaching, and managing performance in highly diverse organizations. These are key areas of the instructor’s expertise, and he has published, given workshops and consulted extensively on these topics.
