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 contemporary challenges in business and management such as aging populations, climate change, poverty and migration.

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 relevant terms and theories such as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Business Ethics and Stakeholder Theory.
• Students understand how strong legal pressure explains the importance of diversity management in the US and industrial relations in Austria. They will get an understanding of how this affects management and gives the stakeholders - employees and unions - a special role.
• Students understand the strategic importance of CSR and Sustainability for business. They will learn how this is expressed in sustainability reporting and how this differs according to country and industry.
• Students learn about alternative business models that focus on these grand challenges.

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%)
• Take-home team based exam on part 1 (essay) (30%)
• The final grade is calculated as 0.3*grade of essay + 0.2*quizz + 0.5* written exam

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