Courses & Electives

This course kicks off the program’s overarching purpose: to enable students to lead into the future with vision, heart, and purpose. All aspects of the course will be applied to each students’ career objectives, infusing foundational knowledge with applied skills and strategies to navigate and lead in the digital age. In Digital Strategy and Leadership, students will learn key concepts and apply them to a Real-time, Real-world case study. Innovation is both associative and cumulative. We’ll race through tech history, the major innovation themes and land it in today’s world, all from a fresh perspective.

An exploration of the central concepts of corporate finance for those who already have some basic knowledge of finance and accounting. This case-based course considers project valuation; cost of capital; capital structure; firm valuation; the interplay between financial decisions, strategic consideration, and economic analyses; and the provision and acquisition of funds. These concepts are analyzed in relation to agency problems: market domination, risk profile, and risk resolution; and market efficiency or the lack thereof. The validity of analytic tools is tested on issues such as highly leveraged transactions, hybrid securities, volatility in initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, acquisition and control premiums, corporate restructurings, and market inefficiencies.

TMGT’s flagship Executive Seminar, a three-semester course that introduces and develops students’ ability to conceive of, develop, and advocate for the creation of a user-centered product innovation. This discipline is foundational for anyone seeking to create growth for a positive social and/or economic impact. In this first executive seminar, you will explore how to define, design, and develop a major new technology-based product/service, whether for external or internal markets, as a startup or within an established company. User-centered, product-based innovation is a foundational skill that can be applied broadly, with products, organizations and for personal development. This and each subsequent Executive Seminar will culminate in a Presentation Day in front your peers, faculty and special guests.

All students are required to attend and participate in a residency. The five-day residencies consist of seminars, oral defenses of students’ Master’s Projects and activities and discussions among students, guest speakers and select mentors. Through the exchange of diverse perspectives and ideas, students are challenged to assess their own views and develop new perspectives on their own leadership style. In addition, students hear senior technology executives’ insights on contemporary issues in the profession.

Today, leaders must confront a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. It demands that we strengthen how we lead change. We are all being stretched to learn, unlearn, relearn, and this is especially true for technology leaders – who operate in the ‘eye of the storm’ of relentless change. In this context, strategic advocacy -- achieving support for change to address the challenges that confront an organization and the opportunities they provide – requires knowing and applying useful skills, behavior and practices to win commitment to new, even unanticipated directions. 
This is a full-semester core course in the MS in Technology Management executive program designed to expose students to practices, tools, frameworks, concepts, and real-world examples that will help you move from a technical/functional role to a senior executive orientation. Everyone’s journey is unique. As you apply the course content in real life you will be expected to choose, experiment with and adapt the relevant approaches most meaningful to your situation.

This course provides a broad overview of applied analytics frameworks and methods to help organizations turn data into informative insights. The chain of inferences leading from data collection to utilization for decision-making represents a comprehensive and coherent validation framework for the use of data to inform real-life problems. The course covers tools for addressing a set of claims about a problem based on data: exploratory data analysis, multivariate regression, causal inference, network analysis, and predictive analytics. It also introduces computational methods in natural language processing and machine learning and how these methods are integrated and deployed within modern database frameworks to turn organizations in data-savvy organizations.

AAM helps students to recognize which applied analytic frameworks and methods to use to make smarter and better decisions and producing better results for their organizations. Students learn how different analytic methods are used to address critical data issues facing an organization and how best to apply those methods. Students learn how to conduct in-depth strategic analytic analysis of business problems and communicate those results to all levels of an organization — both technical and non-technical audiences. Students will have the opportunity to apply these analytic methods to real problems in specific industries associated with their area of interest.

In this second Executive Seminar, the focus is on functional learning: You will do the hard work of discovering if this is truly a “real” opportunity. Your new business idea is rife with assumptions, some of which (if untrue) have the potential to radically alter your vision, your potential for success and impact, and your fundability. 

All students are required to attend and participate in a residency. The five-day residencies consist of seminars, oral defenses of students’ Master’s Projects and activities and discussions among students, guest speakers and select mentors. Through the exchange of diverse perspectives and ideas, students are challenged to assess their own views and develop new perspectives on their own leadership style. In addition, students hear senior technology executives’ insights on contemporary issues in the profession.

This course is the third and final seminar of TMGT’s flagship Executive Seminar. This course takes your product from testing to a business, with the essential elements of a pitch to potential funders and investors, including competitive market analysis, unit economic analysis and financial modeling, team/cap table, and growth strategy. 

All students are required to attend and participate in a residency. The five-day residencies consist of seminars, oral defenses of students’ Master’s Projects and activities and discussions among students, guest speakers and select mentors. Through the exchange of diverse perspectives and ideas, students are challenged to assess their own views and develop new perspectives on their own leadership style. In addition, students hear senior technology executives’ insights on contemporary issues in the profession.

Law is infused into every part of business, especially through the lens of technology. Fluency in business and legal frameworks, risk/benefit principles, from idea to exit, is essential for any innovation leader. This course offers a deep dive into the critical phases of technology companies and their journey through growth, scaling, and eventual market exit. Topics include capital formation, contracts, intellectual property, human capital, and business transactions.

This course provides an examination of the role the technology leader plays in the daily operations and performance management of an organization. The course focuses on how tech leaders can manage both up and down within their organizations through critical examination of current IT topics such as Outsourcing, Cloud Computing, Enterprise Architecture (as a strategy), Information Security, Risk Management, IT Governance, and determining/communicating the business value of IT. Students leave the course with a deep understanding of the dramatically different priorities, skills, and actions required to succeed as an IT leader.

All students are required to attend and participate in a residency. The five-day residencies consist of seminars, oral defenses of students’ Master’s Projects and activities and discussions among students, guest speakers and select mentors. Through the exchange of diverse perspectives and ideas, students are challenged to assess their own views and develop new perspectives on their own leadership style. In addition, students hear senior technology executives’ insights on contemporary issues in the profession.

This course provides coverage of modern database architecture and how organizations extract, transform, and load data to set the foundation for deep analytics within their organization. Students will develop a broad understanding of cloud-based computing environments such as Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, MapReduce and data parallel applications using Hadoop, noSQL databases such as MongoDB. Students will learn how to develop a strong working knowledge of relational and non-relational databases, structured and unstructured data, as well as scalability and performance issues as they relate to modern applied analytics. Students will cover different types and scales of data and how to apply the best database framework for their organization’s analytic needs. The course will provide case studies from industry and students will apply their knowledge to architect real business solutions, not only the optimal architectural framework but the total costs, including hardware, software and human costs, to implement such a solution.

This course provides education at the executive level on the technology and design of Blockchains and their business implications. Technology executives need to understand the disruption and opportunities that decentralized ledgers (i.e., Blockchains) will create in the coming years. Indeed, the business impact of Blockchain technologies will likely be much larger than that which the internet itself has had because Blockchain will fundamentally change the power dynamic of data ownership. Blockchain is already impacting a variety of industries, and in this class we will look specifically at its analytical implications.

This course is designed to provide a fundamental understanding of the capital raise process for early-stage founders and technology leaders who are seeking seed and growth capital for their innovative solutions. The course will begin with a survey of the state of current fund-raising market and the types of capital available in market along with their relevant terms. The course will then dive deeper into the various aspects of the fund-raising process including 1) fund-raising strategy development, 2) engagement tactics with the fund-raising community, and 3) understanding term sheets and financing agreements Students will also develop their pitch materials as they progress through the course and be expected to present or submit their pitch materials along the way.

With the advent of generative AI and the impending arrival of quantum computing, risks to organizations and individuals have grown exponentially. Innovation in offensive and defensive tools and technologies continue to increase. How does a leader keep up? Leaders must know how to work with internal experts and to manage these issues internally, with Boards and for the public. Proficiency in strategies and principles, some of which date back to the ancient Greeks and Chinese, prevail over tools.