Today’s business environment is characterized through hyper‐competitive markets that constantly challenge an organization’s functioning. Within the past two decades, firms twice experienced conditions of turbulent market environments indicated through the bursting of the dot‐com bubble in 2000‐01 and the sub‐prime crisis in late 2008. These economic conditions have increased the complexity of today’s business environment and unambiguously underline the importance of knowing how to deal with environmental changes, difficult business situations, and corporate growth. Managing such conditions consists of multiple organizational challenges and implies that firms must constantly adapt to evolving market environment. This course aims at developing an understanding on how to behave and manage such situations. It familiarizes participants with how to manage change under situations of corporate crisis, global competition and environmental change.

Increasing interdependence within and between societies inevitably leads to conflicts of interest. A dominant way to overcome these obstacles is the new disciplines of conflict resolution and negotiation. After setting the stage with theories of conflict and cooperation, this course covers structural and dynamic issues of negotiation processes. It combines analytical and practical techniques with discussion of real-world examples from business and political conflicts at international level.

Cross-sector partnerships are increasingly becoming mainstream in areas where societal actors detect own boundaries, sense efficiency gains through collaboration, or recognize opportunities behind interdependencies. This course explains the global evolution of partnerships and the manifold types that emerged, it zooms-in on the management of partnerships, and provides guidelines as to when partnerships can and should be utilized. At the heart of the course, study-groups together with the actual partnership managers critically study, analyze, and compare a suite of globally successful partnerships.

This course provides an overview of the international development landscape and how different approaches to delivering development assistance have evolved through time while combining theoretical knowledge with practical hands-on training. Using detailed case studies of existing and hypothetical projects, the course explores essential tools for planning and implementing development projects.

Organizations – for-profit or non-for-profit ones – need to develop strategies on how to act in the global environment. This course aims at developing strategic thinking in a global context. We introduce you to the domain of global strategy, gain understanding of the processes of strategy analysis and formulation, and then apply them in a global setting.

The course blends input sessions with tools and frameworks as well as interactive discussions and assignments. We will work on a case study in real-time and interact with the organization’s management

Learnt concepts are applied in a simulation scenario about strategic decisions taking for several markets.

The course provides a conceptual framework and an empirical basis for examining governance and management practices in the UN system. The course focuses both on the specific characteristics of intergovernmental decision making and on the practical aspects of management. The method of work will focus on group work and case studies.

This course module complements academic work on non-profit organizations (NPOs). It aims at providing students with a practical understanding of how international NPOs are set up, governed, led and managed based on some defining factors such as their mission, guiding principles, history and stakeholders, as well as the environment they are operating in. It will walk students through some of the key features of leadership and management of NPOs, both in terms of management frameworks and of leadership and management practices.

This ‘practitioner course’ takes the students in six thematic sessions through the resource management functions in Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs). The course examines the constituent elements and boundaries of NPOs, their embedded incentive systems, and challenges to manage NPOs for results. It also provides the students the tools and analytical framework for an assessment of a NPO of their choice. 

The growing intensity, and velocity of global interactions requires new approaches to studying the practice of international relations. This course combines theory and case study practice to make sense of an increasingly complex global actor and issue landscape. The course is based on highly interactive and participatory group learning and puts an emphasis on presentation and discussion skills.

Social entrepreneurship refers to the practice of combining innovation, opportunity and resourcefulness to address some of our most challenging social, economic and environmental problems. While social entrepreneurship is generally focused on the creation and growth of new ventures, social innovation is a broader concept that applies these same principles wherever our career paths take us, in the public, commercial, academic or citizen sector. This course will examine the evolution of the practice of entrepreneurship that focuses on transforming systems and practices that affect communities and ecosystems and the growing number of entities that are supporting its disruptive potential.