Course Contents

This course will expose students to the strategic role human resources play in maximizing the value of the workforce. Organizations in today's economy rely not only on the knowledge and skills of their employees, but also on their engagement with the work and each other and their commitment to the organization's mission. As such, the management of human talent is a responsibility of every manager, in partnership with the HR function, and is vital to the success of any organization. The coverage of course concepts will be approached from both from a general manager's perspective as well as from an HR perspective, considering human resource systems and practices available to build a skilled and motivated workforce.

Learning Objectives

1. Understand the strategic role of human resources management in supporting the business objectives of an organization.
2. Identify human resource systems and practices available to build a skilled and motivated workforce.
3. Explain the laws and regulations affecting human resources management as well as to apply ethical decision making to situations involving human resources.
4. Critique, improve, and integrate various components of a human resources system.
5. Demonstrate skill in analyzing human resource problems and determine appropriate solutions.

Managing Growth and Innovation deals with central concepts and related applications at the intersection of technological innovation, organizational growth, and corporate entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship.
 
Technological innovation is increasingly becoming the source of sustainable competitive advantage for firms, especially in disruptive business environments. Yet,  building an organization to successfully and repeatedly bring technological innovations to market is a daunting managerial challenge. As organizations get more established, they often lose the innovative edge, finding that their very existence is threatened by their inability to innovate successfully. Leaders with a deep understanding of innovation and change management, which are central to intrapreneurship, can help organizations counteract this tendency.
 
Throughout the course, we will examine four aspects of technological innovation and their impact on organizational growth: exploring, executing, leveraging, and renewing innovation. The course will draw on rigorous theoretical understanding of innovation in disruptive environments and develop a toolbox of strategies and practices managers use to effectively manage innovation and organizational growth when operating under these operating contexts.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

With improvements in computing technology and the ability to generate/collect vast amounts of data,

many organizations are quickly finding themselves data rich yet information poor. The goal of this

course is to expose students to techniques and technologies that will enable them to become key

players in helping organizations transform unstructured and structured data from various sources

including, social media, the web, databases and archival data, into meaningful and insightful information

that facilitates effective decision making.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

By the end of this course students should have an in depth understanding of the following:

1) Data extraction and cleansing:

a) Exploring and evaluating potential sources of data

b) Extracting and cleansing unstructured and structured data

c) Preparing data for storage or analysis

2) Data visualization and presentation:

a) Creating dashboards

b) Creating standard visualizations

c) Creating interactive visualizations

3) Data modeling and storage:

a) Modeling data (conceptual, logical and physical data modeling)

b) Designing and storing data in relational databases

This is a project-driven, hands-on course that is designed to give students exposure to real world data

management challenges. Students taking the course will learn and demonstrate their skills in using to

the following technologies:MS Excel, Tableau, R and SQL.