The Carthage Master of Science program in Business Design and Innovation consists of foundational courses, design and innovation courses, experiential learning, workshops, and a capstone project.

Innovative Leadership

MGT 5010 / 3 credits
This course addresses the skills, concepts, and mindset that support leadership in complex, innovative organizations. Topics include self-leadership, critiquing diverse models of leadership, creating vision and strategy, understanding people, power and influence, motivation, and organizational culture. The course begins with creative exercises in leadership style self-assessment and extrapolates these results to leadership in new, innovative organizational structures.

Business Metrics

MGT 5020 / 3 credits
In this course, students will learn principles of financial accounting, managerial accounting, financial analysis, statistics, and quantitative methods used for short and long-term decisions. An emphasis will be placed on the use of financial information for decisions and performance measurement.

Strategic Market Analysis

MGT 5030 / 3 credits
This leverages core competencies developed throughout the program to formulate and implement global marketing strategies. A focus on strategic and competitive advantage in managing the global value chain will allow students to promote a unified marketing and management vision. Students will additionally develop an organizational infrastructure capable of solving problems and achieving operational synergies.

Nonprofit Administration, Design, and Development

MGT 5040 / 3 credits
This course explores the administration and leadership of nonprofit organizations including arts management, fundraising, and financial management, performance measurement, strategic planning, governance and the respective roles of board, staff, and volunteers. Students will utilize techniques associated with design thinking, integrative thinking, sustainability and the management of complexity for nonprofit organizations.

Financial Analysis for Decision Making

MGT 5050 / 3 credits
In this course, students integrate principles of financial accounting and managerial accounting. The financial accounting portion covers the interpretation of financial statements and the basics of transaction analysis. The managerial accounting component covers cost-volume-profit analysis, job costing, activity-based costing, economic value-added, capital budgeting, the balanced scorecard, strategic cost analysis and the potential contribution of these advancements to organizational effectiveness.

Designing and Developing High-Impact Teams

MGT 5060 / 3 credits
In this course, students develop skills pertaining to team assessment, team development, team leadership, team coaching, facilitation of diverse teams, and project management skills. The course includes team project work, group decision-making exercises, learning situations, conflict resolution, and strengths and weaknesses of working in teams. Students will learn how to enhance the collective experience of teams to achieve greater levels of performance, productivity, flexibility, and innovation.

Experiential Learning

MGT 5100 / 3 credits
Placements in private, nonprofit, and government sectors. Continued experiential/action learning over the spring semester.

Design, Innovation, and Sustainability

MGT 5110 / 3 credits
This course focuses on the intersection between design thinking methodologies and opportunity-finding for strategy development. It covers theory and practice related to innovation, complexity, emergence, and principles of systems thinking to address the potential of strategy to drive organizational change and new value propositions. It begins with a review of frameworks for strategy development and explores approaches to engaging stakeholders in that development. Students use logic models and redesign an existing organizational strategy and develop actionable and sustainable plans and strategies.

Disruptive Innovation

MGT 5120 / 3 credits
This course teaches students how to develop, design and create ideas. Students explore the entrepreneurial mindset, creativity and idea generation, assessing entrepreneurial opportunities. This course focuses on creative and innovative solutions to both business problems and business opportunities.

Designing for Logistical Optimization

MGT 5130 / 3 credits
This course examines the path from creation to delivery for a product or service emphasizing the relationship of operations to the vision, mission, and goals of the organization. In addition to learning traditional operational concepts, such as operational strategy, process and supply chain management, and production, students will utilize principles, tools, and techniques associated with design thinking, integrative thinking, sustainability, and the management of complexity in order to effectively execute strategy.

Change Management

MGT 5140 / 3 credits
Students develop skills as diagnosticians and designers of unique interventions. Students learn strategies, tactics, and issues relevant to successful organizational change. They learn how to select the most appropriate change-management intervention, modify a pre-existing intervention strategy to address a specific project, assign roles for consultants and clients, and assess outcomes. Students will also learn negotiation skills and strategies.

Ethical Decision-Making

MGT 5150 / 3 credits
This course examines ethical issues and dilemmas facing managers in most business organizations. Students will learn about ethical dilemmas at work, place ethical issues within a management context subject to analysis and decision-making action, and enhance and improve the ability of students to reason toward a satisfactory resolution of an ethical dilemma. Students will explore information ethics, ethics and diversity, organizational ethics and global ethics. Students will also learn about discrimination, equal employment opportunity (EEO), business law, and understand the distinction between law and ethics.

BDI Capstone

MGT 5160 / 3 credits
As a cohort, students connect with an organization from the private, nonprofit/non-governmental, or government sector with an innovative business design and development challenge.