Students are exposed to various perspectives of business thinking with a focus on integrating various stakeholder perspectives and critical thinking about business issues.

Part 1 focuses on principles of economic thinking, contemporary challenges in business and management and people in organisations

Part 2 focuses on key business concepts and business decisions in Entrepreneurship, Finance/Accounting, Marketing, Management/HR, and Operations Management.

Part 1 (Fuhrmann):

Students get an understanding about grand challenges facing business and how management can deal with them. More specifically:

• Students understand basic principles of economic thinking as well as relevant concepts and theories for managing organisations.
• Students understand the importance of HRM.
• Students understand how managing people in organisations contributes to the success of a business.

Part 2 (Speckbacher):

Students understand key business concepts, major types of business decisions and how these decisions affect a company’s value as well as the company’s various stakeholders. More specifically:

• Students understand entrepreneurship and innovation as a dynamic perspective of doing business.
• Students understand the importance of “measuring financial performance/income/company value” as a main challenge of doing business. They understand basic financial concepts such as income and cash flow statement, balance sheet, financial ratios, break-even analysis, capital budgeting/investment decisions and are able to apply such concepts to very simple cases. Students also get a first introduction into the functioning and roles of capital markets.
• Students understand the relevance of business strategies as well as the link between competitive advantage and company performance.
• Students understand the links between customer-related decisions (such as distribution or pricing decisions), strategic decisions and finance.
• Students understand the importance of employee management and leadership perspectives and how behavioral and sociological perspectives relate to perspectives of operations management and production processes.

In order to successfully pass this course, your absence is limited to 20 % of our sessions.

We use a problem-based learning approach in the sense that new topics are introduced by confronting students with stories or cases to motivate a fundamental problem from the business world. As far as possible, students use their own resources to understand and solve the problem. Theory is presented in a structured way to understand and solve problems.

• Written exam on part 2 (focus on Multiple Choice and simple calculations) (50%)
• Quizz (Multiple Choice) (20%)
• Written essay in the third session of the course (essay) (30%)
• The final grade is calculated as 0.3*percent of essay + 0.2*quiz + 0.5* written exam

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