Course content
Purpose
Digital technologies and AI are becoming the foundation for developing elaborations of existing businesses and for completely new business models. Intersecting the domains of digital technologies and business development, this minor provides students with a unique opportunity to engage in the development of business opportunities that draw on the deeply transformative capacities of digital technology and AI. Doing so requires infusing digital thinking into engaging in business development activities and the use of digital tech that stretches beyond the support of efficient operations and business managers that can harness the unique characteristics of emerging digital technologies for the conduct of business.
The minor forms part of the MSc in Business Administration and Information Systems as a specialization into business development. For CM(it.) students, the minor implies an extension of the digital delivery as a critical partner in digital business development. Equipped with an in-depth understanding of the technological enablement of business, students are challenged to expand their ability to aid managerial aspects of digitalization. They are also encouraged to embrace perspectives on digital strategies and business models that enable the design of technical solutions fueling digital business ventures. The minor aligns with the mission of the CM(it.) program by building scientific as well as applied competencies, thus strengthening the brand of the degree as a quality signal for graduates.
The minor is also open to CBS students with a general business/management background that recognize the transformative impact on digital tech and AI and therefore wish to specialize in digital business development. For these students, the minor will present a journey into the transformative characteristics of digital technologies and how they impact the domains of strategizing, organization of work and innovation processes. Students are challenged to not black-box emergent digital technologies, but to understand their characteristics and how they incentivize different digital business development approaches.
The interdisciplinary grounding is a critical constituent of the minor and is reflected in both the content and the activities of the minor. Students pursuing the minor are expected to come from diverse backgrounds and will benefit from engaging across disciplines in a way that critically fosters digital business development.
Content
The minor comprises three elective courses that intersects business development and digitalization, with strong educational linkages between theory and practice. The courses complement each other by providing insight into current academic work and practical approach to changing rules of competition (“Building AI Business Ventures in Digital Ecosystems”), new demands on IT organizations to enable digital business strategies (“IT Management in the Age of AI and Digital Business ”) and the need to apply novel practices of business development (“Designing Digital Business”) in the era of digital competition. After completing the three courses, students will be equipped with theoretical and practical tools to explain, design, create, and assess the impact of digital technologies to a variety of problems facing organizations. The minor combines traditional modes of instruction (e.g., lectures, seminars) with hands-on sessions (e.g., workshops/tutorials) during which solutions to real-world problems are assessed.
Building AI Business Ventures in Digital Ecosystems
The course portrays the Internet as an exciting, competitive arena for AI business ventures, with global digital platforms like OpenAI, Google, Apple, and Facebook providing digital goods and services. There are numerous business opportunities to develop innovative digital products and services and in this digital battlefield. Focusing on new AI business ventures, students will be taught concepts, models, and economic principles that are useful in analyzing the digital battlefield, creating a new business venture, and developing a sustainable strategy. The special characteristics of the digital products and services in specific industries will be integrated in order to build sustainable strategies for new digital business ventures in light of competitive dynamics in the international digital arena. The course includes topics of interest for new digital business ventures resulting from and challenged by an increasingly connected business environment.
IT Management in Digital Businesses
As new business ventures increasingly draw on digital technologies for new value propositions or business models, the competetive premium on digital deliver is rapidly increasing. Yet, as business seek to deploy innovative digital technologies they are simultanously wrestling with the legacy IT landscape a face shallenges that includes instagating change and innovation, without compromising and disrupting efficient operations. In this context, the course focus holisticaly on firms digital delivery that, compromising the fundational tension of running today while building for tomorrow. In the context of a transforming role of IT departments that digital busines implies, the course aims is to train the students in coping with the challenges and opportunities confronting a company’s development of a digital business.
This course uses Harvard-style teaching cases to examine and address important issues that rise in relation to the deliver of digital solutions. Students will get the case background for a large number of realistic issues, and will be provided with different tools/methods potentially relevant for addressing the issues. The course has a orientation towards a research-based practice of solutions to real world issues aiming at education of reflective managers. Through associated readings that clearly brings forward the deep interdependence between the trials of digital ventures and the company's ability to compete on digital business innovations.
Designing Digital Business
In the fast-moving digital age, rather than competing on robust and efficient operations, firms are competing on their ability to produce digital offerings that directly attend to customer needs. While most firms pursue many digital ventures, not least in their effort to harness the technological inventions in AI, history tells that a majority of attempts never reach the state where they actually contribute business value. The fundamental problem we deal with in the course is to create digital business ideas that reflect what people really want and that can scale to produce material business value.
This course offers a series of hands-on tutorials around the implementation of digital business initiatives. While digitalization is the new reality for most organizations, implementing digital business initiatives is not straightforward. Regardless of whether a firm is established or just starting up, delivering digital products, transforming a process, or integrating skills and roles needed for digital business initiatives is hard.
The goal of this course is to equip students with the tools necessary to assess, frame, understand, evaluate, and deliver business initiatives using digital technology. The course comprises workshops with minimal lecture elements. The focus in this course is on the pragmatic approach to delivering a business solution using digital technologies. Throughout the semester, students will work in groups on a ‘proof-of-concept’ in a given problem domain. To that end, the in-class sessions will run interactive workshops during which students apply different analysis techniques and work on their suggested solution. Students are expected to actively participate in discussions and in-class activity.
