[To be confirmed]

(Students are responsible for visas arrangement, if required. Students will need to pay for their own airfare, meals, accommodation and miscellaneous expenses.)

Making decision is a fundamental life skill. According to multiple sources, an adult makes about 35,000 decisions every single day. Some decisions are ‘no-brainers.’ Most decisions you’ll face are tough and complex with no easy  or obvious solutions. Such decisions affect you, your family, friends, colleagues, work teams, organizations and many other known and unknown. Winston Churchill once complained the future is one damn thing after another. An effective decision-making process may be more complicated than flipping a coin, tossing a dart or letting someone else to make a mediocre choice which depends on luck for success.

Albert Einstein said the important thing is to never stop questioning. To understand the complexity and irrationality that arise in human decision making, you are going to answer many interesting questions in this course. To name a few: In X-file, why did the vampire choose picking up sunflower seeds over killing agent Mulder? How did Charles Darwin decide on whether to marry his cousin, Emma Wedgwood? What does the white elephant in your brain do to you? When is the best time of the day to make good decisions? Why do you need an afternoon nap after coffee? How do you choose your youtube channels? Why do older people have fewer friends? Are women’s intuitive judgments better than men’s? How can you make smarter financial decisions? To what extent you can trust collective wisdom? When is ‘one good reason’ better than many? Why is the PrOACT decision-making model useful in volatile and evolving environments? Answers to these questions will shed light on your decision-making process and outcomes. Throughout the 5-day learning journey of lectures, business cases and interactive exercises, you’ll scratch your heads and learn how to critically make life and work decisions with evidence and effective process.

Social entrepreneurship requires visionary individuals to think out of the box and create new business opportunities for mission-driven ventures. Combining innovative mindset with the application of entrepreneurial principles, mission-driven ventures could bring social, environmental as well as economic benefits to the society. To support these ventures, impact investment and venture philanthropy can provide not only the resources to support such efforts, but also impact-driven accountability and results-orientated approach. This course will teach advanced knowledge and tools as well as hands-on skills, so that students can facilitate the above efforts and, specifically, to involve in a real-life social venture partner. They will need to address the challenges, capture potential opportunities and solicit support from the eco-system to make the venture real and sustainable. The best group of students will receive funding to work with the chosen venture partner.

This course is intended to equip students with the basic statistical tools required for the quantitative analysis of business problems. Topics include basic sampling and analysis of data, probability distribution functions, estimation of parameters and hypothesis testing, goodness-of-fit tests, analysis of variance, simple regression, correlation, and basic non-parametric statistical methods.

Encountering an increasingly competitive business environment, how managers interpreting and responding to it is crucial to the success of a business. This course is designed to provide students with a concept of competition and an understanding of the role of managers in the process of strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation. Major topics include organizational mission, analysis of business environment, strategic planning, formulation and implementation of strategies at both business and corporate level, strategic change, and strategic evaluation and control. Cases, in-depth readings, and contemporary issues will be discussed in the class.

The course will outline the mechanisms of venture capital (VC) investment and the financing of startups and early growth firms. As VC is a subset of private equity, the course will discuss the management, legal and marketing issues of private equity in general. Topics include raising and structuring private equity funds, the limited partnership, and fund strategies. The course will consider the investment decision of institutional investors in private equity and how funds are structured to meet their needs. It will discuss post-subscription private equity fund management – deal screening, evaluation, negotiation, disbursement, investee management, valuation and exit – and will consider specifically the perspective of the VC investee company – alternative sources of financing, how to approach a VC to maximize chances of success, and governance issues in VC financed firms. The course may also delve into public versus private equity buyouts, valuation of buyouts and corporate restructuring under private equity.