Supercars, Superbikes and Motorsports

This course is aimed at introducing students to the practice of business consulting to make them learn how they can formulate precise recommendations for action, grounded in solid logical arguments, supported by reliable evidence, reinforced by indications for practical implementation, and justified by clear implications for company profitability and financials. The sessions will make students acquire core concepts associated with problem-solving, problem analysis, recommendation formulation, study design and analysis, presentation delivery, and client relationship management. The sessions will engage students with a set of exercises to practice and reflect on the acquired business consulting skills.

The goal of this course is to set the basis and prepare the audience for this class to be effective leaders in a business landscape that involves data and analytics in different areas of management. The course will introduce a broad range of mathematical and statistical methods that are used to solve data problems. Participants will gain hands-on practice gathering and analyzing data sets and cases in dedicated lab sessions. The course is organized in three sub-sessions to set the bases of analytics into different key business areas: accounting, finance, and statistics for marketing. In the end, the student will have gain greater analytical and statistical skills for data analysis in the areas of cost management, financial analysis, and marketing analytics, and will be ready to face advance courses in each discipline. cs.

The course, whose nature is predominantly applicative, aims to develop a practical orientation towards entrepreneurship, providing the strategic and operational tools for the creation of new ventures and their subsequent development.

Lectures and readings provide an introduction to the topics to be covered in a business plan:

• business idea evaluation
• market and industry analysis
• product/service and intellectual property protection
• business model and operations
• financials in the new venture creation process
• engaging investors
• art of pitching

The course provides a framework for understanding and analyzing investment and financial decisions of corporations. Lectures and readings provide an introduction to present value techniques, capital budgeting, capital structure decisions, corporate cost of capital, initial and seasoned equity offerings and an introduction to corporate risk management. Most of the topics presented during the course will also be analyzed and studied using a case study approach.

The objective of this course is to provide BBS students a comprehensive introduction to strategy in today’s networked economy.

The course will cover three major topics:

1. Classic Industry Based Strategy and Business Ecosystems Based Strategy – the former industry focused strategy and its evolution into the broader view of business ecosystems consisting of several industries;
2. Emerging technologies – coming from fields as different as biotech, nanotech, robotics, artificial intelligence, they have the potential to change current industry boundaries and disrupt business models and leading firms;
3. Scenario planning – preparing companies to deal with major uncertainties and different futures.

Doing business across borders is more complicated, dangerous and prone to near-instant change than any time since World War II and business leaders need help understanding how to adapt. The course will examine the economic and political forces that brought us to where we are today and look at the trends shaping the decade to come. The course will appraise the implications of these changes balanced between businesses, citizens, and public officials and help students understand how to work on our 196 country chessboard. The course will be enhanced by guest engagements with some of the globe’s leading analysts working at the intersection of markets and geopolitics.

Marketing activity is the core of operating business. It provides the managerial focus for interfacing with customers and the source of intelligence about customers, competitors, and general environment.
In order to make effective strategic decisions, managers must identify and measure consumers’ needs and wants, assess the competitive environment, select the most appropriate customer targets and then develop marketing programs that satisfy consumers’ needs better than the competition. Further, marketing focuses on the long-run relationship of a company to its customers as well as short-run
sales and profits.
The second part of the course focuses on the decisions that managers make and the tools that they use to support an effective marketing strategy. The attraction and retention of profitable customers must involve consideration of the product or service being offered, the way in which the product is sold and distributed, how pricing is set and structured, and how the value of the offering is communicated.

Operations management involves all the functions necessary to design, operate and improve the systems that create and deliver products and services. In this course, our focus will be on various production and operations functions, decisions and trade-offs that are necessary to create value for an organization. In order to reflect today’s work environment half of the course will be focusing on boundary spanning activities like supply chain management and sourcing as significant opportunities and challenges for operations management emerge from globalization.

This course aims at:

1. helping students to further develop a thorough understanding of corporate external and internal reporting practices;
2. providing students with tools to use financial statement information in analysing a firm’s performance and financial position;
3. providing students with tools to use cost and segment information in operational and strategic decision making contexts.

On completion of the course, students should:

1. be familiar with the technical terminology used in accounting;
2. be able to asses a company’s financial and operating performance using its financial statements;
3. be able to critically analyse a company’s financial report;
4. understand the features and organizational implication of a company’s information and performance management system.

This course’s central focus is the managing of the most valued organizational resource, “People.  Therefore it will address human behavior in organizations and those practices and systems within organizations that facilitate or potentially hinder effective behavior.

Conceptual frameworks, case discussions, and skill-oriented activities are utilized to effectively address each topic/issue.  Topics included in this course are:

• motivation
• communications
• group dynamics
• power/politics
• conflict resolution
• human resource development

Class sessions and assignments are structured and implemented to help students acquire the skills that managers and leaders need to improve performance and organizational relationships in a global setting.  “Managing people is learning to manage relationships”.

The course lays out strategies and business models for competing successfully in the supercars sector, a sector where continuous innovation and visioning are necessary to anticipate and dictate future trends.

As in all sectors of luxury, the supply is able to create demand on its own, and this requires the ability to design disruptive strategies in an iterative manner and above all, to have the ability to change the business model.

For these reasons, this strategy course starts from positioning and the business model, and then subsequently indicates which resources and choices are necessary to guide change in the market. The strategies are then declared in the face of the ongoing digital transformation and are integrated and connected to the different business activities from marketing to research and development, from production to sourcing, from go-to-market to financing, and finally to the consumer.

The course will examine concrete cases as evidence, exercise and comparison.

Nicola Boari, Head of Product Marketing – Ferrari

The development of new products in the automotive industry is a complex activity, especially for the interdisciplinary nature of the processes, the demand of a higher performances and the existence of more demanding targets.

The course analyses the process of developing new products, starting from the direct innovation to the leadership and the processes that could lead to develop brand new innovations, according to the strategic choices.

New Technologies in simulation allow an integration of design, technology and planning with unprecedented ways that transform the traditional approach to the product development and allow to experiment combining low costs to a high level quality. The course analyses the process that from the simulation leads to the prototyping and to the consequent industrialization, production and commercialization.

Maurizio Reggiani

The course has the objective, through the development of concrete business cases, to gain familiarity with the development a customer experience with specific regards to the supercars, superbikes and motorsport brand.

Leveraging theories from CRM, marketing and digital world, to develop the skills to apply them to the business goals that are common to organizations.

May they be made of a few executives (as in minor series) or hundreds of people (like in Formula 1) racing teams remain highly complex and competitive organizations which require specific understanding, tools and practices. Racing teams’ performance is influenced by a significant number of technical and management variables, and competition is exacerbated by tight time-frames and limited resources. Courses and programs tailored to managing racing teams are rather uncommon and executives usually learn the job on the field. Yet, in recent years the racing domain has emerged as a viable setting for management research and education. This course thus leverages timely research and practice to formalize and acquire all the competences necessary to managers working in racing team. The learning revolves around four key topics: (1) leadership and management; (2) financial performance and business modeling; (3) technology management and strategic innovation; (4) marketing and public relations.
The course is led by academics who are experts in the field, but it includes direct engagement with managers of racing teams.

The Capstone Project (CP) is the final and unique project that Global MBA students will complete in each track as the culminating experience of their academic year. The CP distinctive feature is that students will work as a consulting team on real-world projects that companies are working on and/or want to implement. The “client” companies participate in the CP not only to contribute to the GMBA educational journey and let students improve their professional competence in a real “industrial project”, but also because they see real value in the work of our students, who will serve as real consultant and will apply the knowledge, theories and tools acquired during the year.

The objective of this course is that students, through their own work on a company-based authentic project, will synthesize and develop their knowledge as well as their skills in their chosen sector. The students will work with a real problem within an established organization or start-up. By working on problem identification, collecting data, analyzing, drawing conclusions, and presenting a thoroughly elaborated plan for the implementation of the project, students will draw upon their knowledge at the same time as they train their skills in central areas, such as leadership and project management.

Highlights:

• Work on real project in an existing company or start-up
• Students work in teams
• Students work on-site, for some days, at their project companies
• Each team gets a company advisor
• Confidentiality agreement signed to kick off the project

To complete their study plan, GMBA students will need to choose an elective course.

This course can be chosen from any of the track-specific courses from other tracks, or from a selection of courses offered by BBS’ partner school IESEG School of Management as part of the Global MBA program.

The clinics are interactive sessions with the presence of experts business leaders who will share with the students their knowledge and experience on the topic in an informal atmosphere. Through the clinics students will have the opportunity to reflect with business leaders on cutting-edge themes – namely business ethics, digital technologies and AI, diversity and inclusion, and leadership – that characterise the activity of contemporary global organisations. Each clinic, coordinated by an academic professor or a manager will challenge students with the most relevant knowledge and trends on the specific topic of interest.

Various ethical issues are encountered during any business leader professional life. This fact brought Business Ethics as a subject to become popular in MBA curriculum. The approach generally adopted is to import one or several ethical theories into the world of business and commerce in order to form moral judgments about business practices, or to train business leaders to be more efficient decision makers. While such goals are important this clinic, coordinated by Prof. Alessandro Pastore through the interaction with global leaders and their stories and actions has the ambition to develop a more fundamental practice: to help future business leaders to identify and navigate ethical dilemmas that arise in business and making think ethically a way to recognize, articulate, and evaluate the challenges that often place the actions of individual entities at odds with global coexistence with particular reference to Sustainability.

Topic 1: Corporate culture and individual responsibility

Topic 2: Ethical Decision Making

Topic 3: Giving Voice to Values.

Topic 4: Sustainability paradox: “in order to sustain, we must transform”

Topic 5: Ethics of Sustainability

The clinics are interactive sessions with the presence of experts business leaders who will share with the students their knowledge and experience on the topic in an informal atmosphere. Through the clinics students will have the opportunity to reflect with business leaders on cutting-edge themes – namely business ethics, digital technologies and AI, diversity and inclusion, and leadership – that characterise the activity of contemporary global organisations. Each clinic, coordinated by an academic professor or a manager will challenge students with the most relevant knowledge and trends on the specific topic of interest. 

Creating inclusive organizations is widely accepted to be not only a social imperative but also a key to business success. Companies with diverse employees and an inclusive culture have potential to be more innovative, closer to their customers and more attractive to talent than monocultural ones. A range of dimensions need to be considered including ethnicity, cognitive diversity, gender, age as well as national and professional cultures. 

This clinic, coordinated by Robert Gibson, provides a forum for students to reflect on and exchange their experience with each other and invited practitioners on a range of diversity and inclusion issues. It aims to increase awareness of the importance of cultural diversity and the impact of bias as well as fostering understanding of ways of mitigating bias, creating inclusive workplaces and leveraging difference for mutual benefit. 

Topic 1: Impact of diversity and inclusion 

Topic 2: Dimensions of cultural diversity 

Topic 3: Barriers to inclusion 

Topic 4: Creating inclusive organizations 

The clinics are interactive sessions with the presence of experts business leaders who will share with the students their knowledge and experience on the topic in an informal atmosphere. Through the clinics students will have the opportunity to reflect with business leaders on cutting-edge themes – namely business ethics, digital technologies and AI, diversity and inclusion, and leadership – that characterise the activity of contemporary global organisations. Each clinic, coordinated by an academic professor or a manager will challenge students with the most relevant knowledge and trends on the specific topic of interest.

This clinic aims at enabling students to evaluate the likely impact of future IT innovations on their firm and industry. This requires a correct understanding of the key drivers of technology’s impact on the business ecosystem. It also aims at enabling students to understand and experience the design process.
This clinic will tackle the key IT domain that have the potential to transform firms’ actions and industries. We will touch topics such as: open-source design, chatbot, Big Data, simulation, augmented reality, digital twins, Smart Industry and robotics. We will also tackle the needed process to end up with a product.
During this clinic, participants will be expected to engage in both the technical and the managerial dimensions of digital challenges.

The clinics are interactive sessions with the presence of experts business leaders who will share with the students their knowledge and experience on the topic in an informal atmosphere. Through the clinics students will have the opportunity to reflect with business leaders on cutting-edge themes – namely business ethics, digital technologies and AI, diversity and inclusion, and leadership – that characterise the activity of contemporary global organisations. Each clinic, coordinated by an academic professor or a manager will challenge students with the most relevant knowledge and trends on the specific topic of interest.

Society has high expectations towards MBA graduated students. A big one concerns the leadership of GMBA graduates who are expected to have a proactive and constructive role in modern organizations and societies. However, the literature suggests that GMBA graduates often perform below expectations on this important dimension – despite being one of the most critical for a successful life and career. In this clinic, coordinated by professor Marcello Russo, students will have a chance to interact with global leaders who can inspire them with their stories, actions and daily operations.

Topic 1: Leading self: Discovering one’s strengths and future possible self

Topic 2: Leading change

Topic 3: Leading the team

Topic 4: Leading the C-suite

Topic 5: Leading the organizational culture

International students enrolled in the Global MBA program can immerse themselves in the Italian language, culture, and business customs through a personalized Italian language course. This non-compulsory activity will enrich the student MBA experience with essential language skills and cultural insights.