Skip to main content

Master Programmes

Close
women in higher education

Master in Business Administration

Designed for early to mid-career professionals, this programme will develop your full potential and open doors to global career opportunities.

At a Glance
Full-time
10 Months
Two Intakes
January and August
Home Campus
France or Singapore

Elective Courses

From Period 3 onwards, students can tailor their programme to suit their individual needs, choosing from a wide selection of over 75 elective courses in 10 different academic areas. During the elective periods, you also have the opportunity to exchange campuses. 

In addition to electives on campus, the Entrepreneurship area has developed a range of popular courses that take learning out of the classroom. In courses such as “Building Business in China” or “Building Business in Silicon Valley” students travel to meet a variety of local alumni, entrepreneurs and executive for a unique hands-on learning experience. Selected students of the July classes also have the opportunity to complete hands-on consulting projects and explore career opportunities in the Middle East as part of the Abu Dhabi Module.

🍃 INSEAD's faculty is actively researching sustainable development issues. Sustainability considerations are embedded in all MBA core courses, and Electives covering related topics are indicated with this icon.

Accounting and Control

Corporate Governance

Corporate governance is the set of control mechanisms to enable achievement of organizational objectives and dissuade potentially self-interested managers from activities detrimental to the welfare of owners and stakeholders. Good corporate governance is therefore a key element of corporations’ desire to create value. Time and again corporate governance has been on the forefront of public and political debate.

While many critics argue the ineffectiveness of current corporate governance practices, due to factors such as dispersed ownership, detrimental activism by active investors, management entrenchment and short termism, or narrowly focused corporate objectives; there is also an absence of fundamental frameworks in this discourse to understand effective corporate governance and evidence-based logics that can inform best practices.

In this course, we introduce these frameworks and provide evidence-based best practices that can be implemented across all types of organizations, operating in all types of institutional settings. 

Financial Statement Analysis

Creating value is the objective of every business. The objective of Financial Statement Analysis is to provide you with the ability to use financial statements to evaluate value creation.

Financial statements are the primary source of information about business performance. Hence, if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, executive, director, etc., you need to know how to use financial statements to assess business performance and link your assessment to value.

This course teaches you how to do that. In particular, we develop a framework that links financial statements to value. This framework has two important features. First, it is intuitive, so it is easy to understand, remember, use and explain to others. Second, it is rigorous; hence, when applied correctly, it leads to good decisions.

Strategic Cost Management & Control

This course builds on material covered in the Managerial Accounting course by bringing into focus the practice of management accounting. It looks at the information typically provided by companies and the way it is used by executives. Both are flawed, resulting in ‘unforced errors’. The problem facing MBAs is that companies and executives are unaware of this, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

The course identifies the ‘red flags’ that indicate things are wrong and the questions to ask to get the right information. The elective is not for those who are certain that they would not make such ‘unforced errors’.

Decision Sciences

Data Science for Business

The abundance of data revolutionises many industries, and creates new, data-intensive business models. Today’s MBAs need to be more comfortable with “data science” – an emerging discipline that combines data analytics and business.

In this course, students will build their capability in data science so as to effectively add value through the intelligent management and use of data in organisations. The course combines three key elements: analytical techniques, business applications, and basic coding and programming.

Negotiations

This course explores the ways that people negotiate, to create value and overcome common as well as complex negotiation obstacles such as the tension between substance and relationship, and value distribution. It aims to enable you to become a more effective and reflective negotiator through a series of hands-on simulations building from simple two-party encounters to complex multiparty scenarios.

Some of the exercises emphasise psychological aspects of bargaining, value creation and distribution, and coalition dynamics, with a special focus on organised preparation and process analysis. Participants will finish the programme having acquired a clear conceptual framework to diagnose problems and promote agreement.

Pricing Analytics

Pricing is the single most important lever of profits. Yet many companies still take an ad hoc approach to pricing decisions.

This pricing analytics course provides a systematic process and tools to sell the right product to the right customer at the right time – at the right price. The focus is on the tactical (rather than strategic) management of pricing, using quantitative models of demand/consumer behavior and constrained optimisation tools – the two main building blocks of revenue optimisation.

Understanding and Managing Risk

Business, investments and personal decisions are all about taking calculated risks. There is rarely an important decision where uncertainty and risk are not a key determining factor. This course is about helping participants better understand, assess, and manage risk in a wide cross-section of scenarios.

The course provides students with a framework to assess and manage risk in a variety of professional settings and generates a critical discussion of the present best practices.

Storytelling Workshop

This workshop is a place where you can practice and refine your storytelling. It’s not as much of a how-to course as it is a safe space to explore how you can develop your own storytelling approach. You will learn by doing and by observing others.

Making Authentic Decisions

What makes a conscious, authentic decision? Authenticity is an art, not a science.

This course offers an experimental platform for students to explore the forces that motivate and limit their individual choices. They will be relying on creative expression and personal evidence, rather than general frameworks and theory, as primary material for the course. All sessions are experiential, delivered in a workshop style format, in the spirit of self-discovery, non-judgement and reflection.

Management Decision Making

This course focuses on the behavioural aspects of judgment and decision making.  How do people make decisions?  What are the common pitfalls of managerial decisions? Research shows that people rely on a small number of heuristics in making decisions. These heuristics are extremely useful: they are fast, easy and they get us close to the right answer most of the time. However, they can also lead to serious mistakes. While intuition often serves us well, there are many decision traps that we tend to fall into on a repeated basis.

The objective of the course is to improve your decision making skills by illustrating these traps and suggesting how to avoid them: Knowing what can go wrong and knowing the right questions to ask will help a decision maker or a manager think smarter, and maybe only a little harder.

Decision Models

With the help of spreadsheet models, students will develop conceptual skills, such as framing a complex managerial decision problem in the form of a model and technical skills like how to build, use, and derive insights from decision models. The focus is for students to apply decision technology and interpret the results for guiding management, as well as individual, action.

Economics & Political Science

This intensive core curriculum gives you a foundation in the fundamental practices of business including finance, accounting, marketing, economics, leadership, strategy, business ethics, and broad management skills essential to succeed in any career.

Agile Bootcamp

This mini-elective takes place over two days where we will use simulations and role plays to experience Agile. It will include discussions with guest speakers with knowledge of Agile organisations. The purpose is to better understand what Agile is, how it works and how we can make it work in different kinds of environments.

Financial Crisis and Crisis Management

Deep financial crises are among the most traumatic experiences for societies and businesses. Understanding and anticipating such a macroeconomic accident is essential for both for policy makers and for business leaders.

The objective of this course is to understand how countries get into financial crisis and what are the trade-offs that decision makers face in crisis: bail out, austerity, conditionality, debt restructuring, and contagion.

Using case studies to examine why the crisis occurred, how it was managed and how it changed the global monetary system, students can conclude with analysing the strength of the global financial safety net and its increasing regionalisation and fragmentation.

Advanced Game Theory

This class shows students how to use game theory to give an analytic treatment of business problems. The target audience is those who are intrigued by the game theory presented in the core class and would like to gain a deeper understanding of such analytic methods. We will touch on issues such as: How can you affect your rival's actions? How can you signal your talent to potential employers? We will include applications to financial markets and the financial crisis.

Economics and Management in Developing Countries 🍃

To be an effective manager in emerging country markets, it is essential to understand the opportunities these countries offer and the constraints that managers and businesses face in such countries. In this course, students will tackle current issues such as: the debate on the failure of aid, the telecom revolution in the creation of new markets and services, the role of foreign direct Investment, the role of the new emerging economic powers, attempts of multinationals to innovate in emerging markets and their varying success record and strategies to deal with corruption.

Healthcare Markets and Policy 🍃

For students planning a career in the health care sector, or with innovative organisations that interact with the health care sector, having a comprehensive understanding of the growing role of the health and health care sectors in the economy is essential. This course examines the role of government in the financing and delivery of health care, and how government decisions affect firm strategy and behaviour. It will also provide context and analysis on health care cost growth and containment strategies.

Income Inequality & the Future of Business 🍃

Growing inequality is one of the biggest social, economic and political challenges of our time. The concentration of wealth at the very top is part of a much broader rise in disparities all along the income distribution. While people at the top enjoy increasing income and employment opportunities, the middle-class face narrowing employment options and stagnating incomes. In this course, students will gain an understanding of the causes and implications of these changes for both society and for business, and explore in greater detail one of the major issues facing businesses and governments today. 

Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise

Building Businesses in China (field trip)

China has emerged as an economic superpower and dynamic entrepreneurial force. It has made the entire world wake up to new economic models. On this field trip you will see these new models in action and learn about the unique opportunities and obstacles faced by entrepreneurs in China. Even for those who are not planning to start a company in China, the course will help them understand investment opportunities and the future of Chinese business in the global economy. Students will meet – and learn from – a wide variety of entrepreneurs, executives and INSEAD alumni who are living, working and building companies in China.

Building Businesses in India (field trip)

What opportunities and obstacles face those who build a company in the hot-bed of growth entrepreneurship that is India? How does the Indian context and rich entrepreneurial tradition shape the country’s growth ventures? What ideas can you borrow from India’s dynamic entrepreneurs to help build a company elsewhere? The best way to answer these questions is to go there in person, meet members of the Indian entrepreneurial community and learn through asking further questions. With two days in New Delhi and three in Mumbai, this field trip will expose students to a whole new world of entrepreneurial opportunity.

Building Businesses in Silicon Valley (field trip)

The only way to understand Silicon Valley fully is to be there. And so this entire one-week mini-elective takes place in Silicon Valley itself. It will enable you to meet key Valley players – entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and executives in large companies – some of whom will host sessions. Above all, it will teach you how to break into the world entrepreneurship – and succeed – in Silicon Valley or anywhere else in the world.

Corporate Entrepreneurship

Building new businesses inside established firms presents very special challenges. Whether you are starting a new line, setting up a new practice, opening an office in a new geography, managing a spin-off or creating a new joint venture, you have to be entrepreneurial yet follow internal processes to be successful. Through case studies, guest speakers and a final project, this course addresses issues such as: getting the resources you need; preventing the old business from holding back the new; deciding how far to integrate with the rest of the firm; and selecting, managing and motivating the right employees.

Crypto Entrepreneurship

Since the development of Bitcoin and Ethereum, there has been an explosion of decentralized venture formation and a democratization of participation in blockchains more generally. Tremendous value has been created through the entrepreneurial activities of individuals and teams who have discovered new opportunities that leverage crypto-blockchain technologies in what some are calling the “Web3” ecosystem.  The course will cover new developments and hot topics in Crypto Entrepreneurship such as liquidity pooling and yield farming in decentralized finance (“DeFi”), digital asset ownership through non-fungible-tokens (“NFTs”), smart contracts using Ethereum and other infrastructure, and decentralized autonomous organizations (“DAOs”) that can be used to govern ventures without centralized leadership. 

Digital Entrepreneurship

Companies like Amazon, Airbnb, Zillow, and Uber are creating new ventures or corporate ventures that leverage digital technologies to create and exploit new markets. Although digital entrepreneurship shares some features of traditional new venture management – forming founding teams, business model analysis, board management – it also differs in important ways because of the accelerated growth potential of these technologies. This course provides a series of frameworks for innovating and managing ventures founded around digital technologies.

Entrepreneurship in Action: Scaling Start-ups

This dynamic business simulation puts participants in the shoes of an entrepreneurial team competing in a consumer-durable market. The aim is to simulate the pressure-cooker environment of managing a new venture in the critical second-round financing stage. The highlight is the relentless focus on action and the realism – as you take dozens of strategic and tactical decisions under enormous time pressure, significant uncertainty and intense competition. Prepare for long hours and late nights!

Family Businesses and Enterprises

Research shows that family-controlled firms outperform publicly owned companies – and that they are also the most prevalent form of business in the world. This course therefore has a wide appeal. Whether students are part of a business family, whether they intend to work for, advise or buy/sell family firms, they will gain important insights about what makes family businesses so different from other organisations, yet so similar across geographies. In particular, the elective covers the main recurring themes of family business: relationships, values, communication, strategy, governance, ownership, succession, conflict and stewardship.

Leveraged Buy-Outs

This course teaches the principles of buying into entrepreneurship. Students will explore the main value-creation strategies involved in successful leveraged buy-outs and evaluate the respective risks and rewards. There is a strong practical focus: analysis of real-life case studies and practitioner guest speakers. The class will also cover leveraged buy-outs from all perspectives: the equity provider, the management team, the banks and the vendor. The course concludes with a practical team assignment in which students have to submit a recommendation for a buy-out – including a 100-day plan and post-buy-out value creation plan – to private equity investors.

Managing Corporate Turnarounds

When times are good, anyone can lead a business. But turning around a failing business requires special skills – which are relevant to regular business practice as well as the turnaround industry. This course addresses the reasons why companies slide into decline and the mechanics of executing a successful turnaround in such a way that shareholder value can be preserved through the ups and downs of the business cycle. Using case studies and guest speakers, the course covers: the turnaround profession; typical stages of a turnaround; “special situations” investment vehicles; legal and financial issues; marketing and operational issues; change management and HR; and communication with stakeholders.

New Business Ventures

How can an entrepreneurial idea be converted into an up-and-running, revenue-generating business? This course is for anyone interested in the answer to this question, regardless of whether or not they have a definite plan to build a business from scratch. It draws on case studies, experiences of guest-speakers and a final group project – complete with a pitch to a real panel of angel investors–to give students a blueprint for starting a new venture. By the end, students will be able to develop a concept, design a compelling business model, recruit a team and embark with confidence on their entrepreneurial journey.

Private Equity

Even though the course was originally motivated by the phenomenal growth of the private equity industry over the past two decades, the recent financial turmoil has given it additional relevance: will the private equity industry become a role model for the "new" financial markets of tomorrow or will it face dramatic changes as well? The course attempts to provide a balanced overview of the private equity landscape and covers the entire spectrum from early to late stage investing, with a focus on recent developments and industry specific discussions. Using mainly the case method and industry speakers, it addresses the mechanisms and principles of private equity deals that are common across the various private equity types and highlights the most important differences.

Realising Entrepreneurial Potential

If you think that someday you would like to buy a company for yourself and will be involved in the acquisition process as a private equity professional, an investment banker or a consultant, this course is for you. Using cases and class discussion, students will learn how to find a company, acquire it, manage it, add value to it, turn it around and ultimately sell it. Class discussions will be enhanced by examples from real business situations and guests will bring cases to life with added insight. The course involves a project whereby participants will search for a suitable company to buy, analyse the opportunity, value it, develop a business plan and seek backing through a final presentation to a panel of seasoned private equity professionals.

Social Entrepreneurship 🍃

In this course, we will explore the drivers of strategic and operational challenges specific to the field of social entrepreneurship. This course has a particular focus on enterprises whose businesses concentrate on improving the lives of people living at the bottom of the wealth pyramid in emerging markets. This course will be built around a field trip to an emerging market economy. During the field trip, we will engage with not-for-profit and for-profit institutions and enterprises with a social mission or 'bottom of the pyramid' strategy. By taking this course, people will also acquire practical insight into the dynamics of planning, implementing and scaling social enterprises. At the end of this course, students will be equipped to address some of the key practical issues that would confront someone who wishes to establish or contribute to the development of a social enterprise initiative.

Start-Up Booster for Entrepreneurs

This is an experiential module designed for students who have already started a venture or would want to start a venture or joining one as an early team member. This is an opportunity for students, working alone or in teams, to immerse in a high-impact entrepreneurial venture during three periods (P3-P5) and develop business ideas through teambuilding, customer development, prototyping and networking.

Core Curriculum Capstone – Scenario 1: Accelerating Growth

This Capstone is designed to bring together everything students have learnt during the MBA year into an integrative, immersive, and inspirational experience. This course is meant to provide a stimulating experience where students will work as a team to confront the real-life challenge of the first two years after taking over a healthy growth venture.

Core Curriculum Capstone – Scenario 2: New Ventures

This Capstone is designed to bring together everything students have learnt during the MBA year into an integrative, immersive, and inspirational experience. This course is meant to provide a stimulating experience where students will work as a team to confront the real-life challenge of the first two years after taking over a healthy growth venture

Finance

Advanced Applied Corporate Finance

Why do corporations issue increasingly complex securities? How can the success or failure of financial securities be explained? A complement to the Applied Corporate Finance course, this elective will answer such questions and bring students right up to date with new issues in the field.  These include: the pricing of convertibles, warrants and PERCS; the use of option contracts in mergers and acquisitions; the protection of minority shareholders with option-like contracts; and the valuation of natural resources with option-pricing models.

Applied Corporate Finance

Put your insights from the core finance classes into action with this practical, hands-on course. You will apply the concepts and tools of capital structure, valuation, capital asset pricing and option pricing (among others) to a series of real-life business cases – and discover not only their benefits but also their limitations.

Bank Management and FinTech

The banking industry is facing several challenges: Digital disruption and competition from ‘Fintechs’, Basel 4 regulations that follow the global financial crisis, ultra-low interest rates and globalisation vs balkanisation. Students will learn about bank valuation and strategic restructuring, drivers of value creation and economic profit, the control of liquidity and market risks, as well as competition from fintechs.

China’s Capital Market

In the last 30 years, China’s capital market has evolved from non-existence to become one of the most dynamic, if not efficient, in the world. It will undoubtedly play an important role, positive or negative, in the transition of the Chinese economy. Yet China’s capital market is not well understood, and there is an obvious gap in most people’s insights. This elective attempts to fill the gap by helping participants discover the most important aspects of this market. Specific topics include: the architecture of the market, the Renminbi, the equity market, as well as the role of banks and the private capital market.

Corporate Restructuring

In this course, students will acquire a variety of value creation techniques involving restructuring and reorganisation for non-distressed corporations. The emphasis will be on understanding restructuring tools and the reasons behind their potential success or failure, and how to implement these schemes to maximise shareholder value.

Creating Value: the International Dimension

Companies are nowadays becoming more international. How can we create value going abroad? How do we account for country and currency risk? How do we choose our shareholders when we go international? Which market should we tap into to raise new capital?

Providing students with a broad and integrated framework, this course allows them to master the complexity of the problems facing a firm that is exposed to international markets, with an emphasis on global perspective and integrated problem solving.

Entrepreneurial Finance (EF)

This course emphasises the financing of growth firms, and of innovative firms (e.g. in the healthcare and technology sectors). There is also a focus on the unique role that private equity can play in the financing and growth of family, or other closely held firms.

Ethical Decision-making in Business 🍃

Relations between stakeholders in firms (managers, workers, shareholders, creditors) are governed by explicit contracts as well as implicit contracts. While ideally, we would like to eliminate ambiguity through explicit contracts, many of these contracts are imperfect and often create negative side-effects. Hence, ethical behaviour is not so much about promoting highly subjective “values” but about building a more efficient organisation, where ethics can replace costly explicit contracts. This course gives students a view on ethics, which is not based on subjective values (often based on politics and religion) but finds its roots in economic theory.

FinTechs

Digital disruption is receiving great attention around the world. New players, FinTechs, are challenging incumbent financial institutions. In this course, students will analyse digital disruption in the financial sector and present several dimensions of the FinTech world: payments, digital currency, P2P and marketplace funding, blockchain technology, robot-advisors in asset management, and strategic dimensions of digital disruption.

Fixed Income

Fixed-income markets are bigger in size than stock markets are. They represent a vitally important asset class. And, after a significant shift into equity in the 80s and 90s by pension funds and insurance companies, the tide has turned back towards fixed income. But bonds are risky. Doomsayers in the US are predicting the onset of a long-term falling market.  This elective will enable students to make their own mind up. Its goal is to cover the fixed-income markets at large.

Hedge Funds and Alternative Investments

Are hedge funds a fad or a new asset class? No longer the privilege of a small number of wealthy investors, the industry has grown spectacularly in the last five years. First, this course covers the development and the success of the hedge fund industry to date – with particular comparison to the decline of traditional fund management. Next, it teaches students about the different types of hedge funds, their style and their strategy. Finally, it offers a detailed analysis of the performance and rewards of hedge funds and their usefulness as a diversification vehicle.

Project Finance

Project finance differs from Corporate Finance in that it involves the creation of an independent project company (usually with a limited life), financed with debt and equity from the sponsoring firm(s), for the purpose of creating a single-purpose capital asset. Historically, it was used for industrial projects such as mines, pipes or oil fields, but today it is taking on a new importance, especially for infrastructure projects in the developing world. This course covers four topics: defining project finance; valuation issues and methods; financing issues; the securitisation of projects and its implications for investors.

Investments and Asset Management

Gain an understanding of the modern theory of investments and the current practice of the asset management industry. Students will gain an understanding of the fund management industry and discuss theories of investing and their practical implementation, and risk management in the fund management industry.

Behavioural Finance

Fusing psychology of human behaviour with finance and strategies, students are introduced a structural framework for analysing how human, social, cognitive and emotional factors impact financial and strategic decisions and the way they are quantified. An operating framework is developed to think critically and to lay out how to move forward and cope with these new challenges, turning them into opportunities and sources of competitive advantage.

Sustainable Finance 🍃

Sustainable investing has evolved from a niche specialisation focusing mostly on value-based exclusions to cover a wide range of value-driven strategies; from those that invest according to environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria to activist approaches. In this module, students will study Sustainable Finance (investing and financing) mostly from a capital markets perspective.

Marketing

Market Driving Strategies

The objective of this elective is to further enhance the expertise of the class in evaluating and formulating strategic marketing decisions. It looks in greater detail at the different challenges that firms face in their quest for achieving and sustaining market leadership and profitable growth in competitive, fast-changing, global markets. The course uses a mixture of cases, discussions, lectures and readings to provide integrated concepts and hands-on problem solving. Most importantly, students will have the opportunity to apply the material from the course as well as the knowledge, concepts and tools from your core courses by developing and implementing a growth strategy for your own business using the Markstrat business simulation.

Customer Insights

Gain the most important competitive advantage of them all: the ability to understand and influence your customer. This course is brief and intensive with a very practical focus. It examines cutting-edge concepts from psychology and behavioural economics to help you understand, predict and shape your customers’ preferences and behaviour. Classes are highly interactive, blending discussions, exercises, case studies, presentations and project work.

Service-as-strategy: Competing Through Services in a Digital World

Many firms move from selling products (i.e. ‘pushing boxes’) to providing service(s) across various industries. Students will explore how firms unleash growth opportunities through service(s), develop new service business models, leverage innovation for better service experiences, use new technologies for providing excellent service(s) at lower costs, and differentiate from competition through a truly customer‐centric service culture.

Discover Israel Fieldtrip

With the highest number of startups per capita of any country, and massive venture capital investments, Israel is one of the world's premier entrepreneurship hubs. In this 5-day fieldtrip, students will visit high tech and entrepreneurial firms, meet and network with remarkable Israeli professionals, and experience cultural and tourist activities.

Brand Management

The course begins with an examination of the role of brand management within the firm and the relation of brand management to product management, marketing and competitive strategy, and corporate strategy. You will learn how brand value is measured, how brands cope with competitive and environmental threats and opportunities and how brand assets are managed for the long term. This course is designed to help general managers learn the tools and rules of brand marketing, or for people interested in a career as a marketing manager or consultant in the field of marketing. The course consists of a rich mix of topical case discussions, conceptual lecture-discussions and a hands-on project.

Digital and Social Media Marketing Strategy

How can organisations and individuals create value by leveraging digital technologies in their advertising strategy and execution? By utilising both classic and contemporary advertising, with a specific focus on digital and social media, students will understand the rapidly changing advertising and media landscape, with a focus on new media channels.

Neuroscience for Marketing 🍃

Understand how neuroscience‐based AI can be leveraged to make better business decisions. This elective is for MBAs who areconsidering founding a start‐up in this new field,  work in the management (but not programming) of this cutting‐edge data science and biotech space, as well as forthose who simply want to better understand the brain, neuro-marketing and neuroscience‐driven artificial intelligence applications.

Strategic Market Intelligence

Customer intelligence is an essential part of any business (established company or start-up) that wants to offer products or services that are focused and well targeted. The last decade has seen an explosion in the quantity and quality of information available to managers and only business decisions that are based on good intelligence and good research can minimise risk and allow you to pursue lucrative growth opportunities in the future. 

Value Creation in Luxury and Fashion

Building on cutting-edge economics and marketing research, and organisational and strategic insights on the role of status and style in consumer behaviours and business decisions, this course is designed to provide and hone critical thinking and managerial skills related to planning and executing effective luxury and premium strategies. Students will gain hands-on experience and understanding on the economics of global luxury and fashion markets.

Business-to-Business (B2B): Creating and Capturing Value

Half of exchanges in the global economy are B2B transactions, and nearly 90% of global ecommerce is B2B. B2B Marketing has its own specificities (e.g. complex purchasing organisations; multiple stakeholders; or highly skilled procurement professionals). This elective helps students build and grow their B2B marketing skills through value‐based marketing concepts and frameworks.

Strategic Pricing

This marketing elective provides participants with the conceptual, analytical, and statistical tools as well as insights in consumer and competitive behaviour to design profit maximizing pricing strategies and set prices accordingly. It focuses on linking pricing to brand strategy, not to issues of capacity utilisation.

Distribution Channels and Sales Force

Who says the 4th P of the marketing mix (product, price, promotion, place) is the least glamorous? Today, product proliferation, media fragmentation, intermediary power and e-commerce have put a premium on the internal and external “channels” that transmit products and services to the points of consumption and beyond. Using mainly case studies, this course gives you not only in-depth understanding, but also a set of analytical frameworks and tools to optimise channel design, coordination and performance.

The Body Business: Understanding Food and Well-Being 🍃

This course will look into entrepreneurial opportunities not only in the food and wellness industry, but also in fitness, alternative healthcare, detoxing and mindfulness centres. Students will understand the rules of the body business and how to take better care of their bodies.

AI Strategy for Startups and C-suites

What are the differences between human and non‐human intelligence and what is the degree to which these differences matter? This course will introduce, demystify and investigate value creation strategies in eco‐systems relating to AI, machine learning, robotics, and advanced analytics, with an emphasis on value creation opportunities along the way.

Biopharmaceutical Marketing Strategy

Marketing in the biopharmaceutical industry is challenging because the industry faces high societal expectations, rapid scientific, technological and economic change, and marketing elements are heavily regulated. In this course, students will understand the key characteristics of the biopharmaceutical industry, learn how to manage market access and biopharmaceutical brand management.

Salesforce Management

For any organisation, the salesforce is a major growth engine as well as a critical source for market feedback. It is also one of the most significant capital investments for an organisation. This course provides students with an understanding of what it takes to create and manage a salesforce that generates the right balance between stimulating the salesforce and controlling its cost. More importantly, in a world where innovations in products, pricing and communications are easily copied/replicated by competitors, building an effective salesforce can be a key source of competitive advantage.

Distribution Channels and Retailing

This course is designed for students interested in understanding distribution channels and helping organisations leverage these channels for value creation, market differentiation and competitive advantage. Students will examine issues involved in managing the intra and inter‐organisational interactions in a distribution channel primarily through case studies ranging from packaged goods to services to solutions across the B2C and B2B contexts in developed and developing economies.

Organisational Behaviour

Negotiations

This course explores the components of an effective negotiation and helps students to analyse their own behaviour in negotiations, to better develop optimal solutions to problems. At the end of the course, students will recognise, understand, and analyse essential concepts and processes of negotiation as they practise the techniques in a variety of settings. 

Leadership Communication Development Workshop

Leaders need to communicate at interpersonal and public levels – especially through speaking, listening, interacting, and behaviours. To be effective communicators, leaders are aware of themselves, others and the context in which they communicate. This 2-day course further explores the relationship between effective leadership and effective communication introduced in the Foundations of Leadership Communication course in P2.

Strategic Communication and Leadership

Designed to build on your “Leadership Communication Foundations” course from P2, this course explores the relationship between effective strategic leadership and effective strategic communication, and the principles of “insightful awareness” to enact strategic leadership in organisations and teams.

Power and Politics

Power can dramatically impact the way we think, feel and behave—in ways we do not expect. This course will illuminate the intrapersonal, psychophysiological, and interpersonal effects of power. Through understanding the psychology of power, you will learn practical and useful political skills that will help you navigate and manage power dynamics in organizations. This course includes conceptual models, tactical approaches, and simulation exercises to help you understand political dynamics as they unfold around you.

Psychological Issues in Management

The Psychological Issues in Management elective focuses on the psychological forces that influence the exercise of management and leadership. Its purpose is to enhance participants’ personal and professional ability to lead mindfully, effectively and responsibly in a range of contemporary workplaces. P.I.M. incorporates a significant reflective component, both individual and with others. It is best suited for those who view professional and personal lives as deeply intertwined, who view work as a potential source of personal meaning and fulfillment, and who aspire to do work that clarifies and reflects who they are.

Embracing Complex Change: Composing a Life in a Global Context

In this module, students will acquire skills to understand and articulate their personal journeys of development, and then prepare the next steps of career and personal change. Frameworks and class exercises are used throughout the course to encourage shared dialogue and enhance personal and interpersonal skill sets. These offer the possibility to deepen the understanding of oneself, others and relationships.

Strategy

M&As, Alliances and Corporate Strategy (MAACS)

This course explores the challenges that firms face when choosing their corporate strategy to compete as multi-business units. It explores the various modes available to the firm in detail, such as M&A, alliances and joint ventures. The objective of the course is to give you a thorough understanding of corporate strategy, M&As, and alliances, and to give you a set of tools for making good corporate strategic decisions, and for using M&A and alliances.

Digital Transformation of Society, Industries and Companies (A)

How will digitisation fundamentally affect society, industry structures, business models and the way companies are managed? Based on examples of industries going through the digital transition such as travel and tourism, telecom, and media, this course explores what strategies both incumbent players and Internet companies follow to conquer or keep their place under the sun.

ORG 2.0

Digitalization is changing how we do organization design. This elective will bring you to the current frontiers of organization science and the tools used to (re)-design organizations. The tools are diverse and cover Perception (i.e. analyzing data to know what is happening in the organization now), Prediction (i.e. what is likely to happen in the future, based on predictive analytics) and Prototyping (i.e. what is likely to work based on pilot tests and experiments).

Real Estate

This course provides a general understanding of the Real Estate Industry and present a detailed analysis of the drivers behind successful Real Estate investment strategies. Students will use both a theoretical approach and case studies to explore Real Estate markets from different perspectives (investment, development, microeconomics and finance) with focuses on asset class and typology of investors.

Strategies for Asia Pacific (SAP)

Many firms see great sales potential in Asian markets, but few have come even close to realizing it.  The key challenge has been a lack of familiarity with Asian markets and appropriate strategic and managerial responses.  Managers asked to plan and run operations in Asia often lack an understanding of how these markets work, how to formulate entry strategies, and how to manage people and operations under conditions that are very different from those in the West, but also in other parts of Asia.  Objective of this course is to help participants gain a competitive advantage by addressing these challenges.

Strategy and Investing for Impact 🍃

This course focuses on employing business as a force for good. Market-driven economic growth has raised living standards worldwide. But society still faces critical challenges like climate change and rising inequality. Resolving these is a job not just for non-profits, development agencies or governments: businesses can also play a role, often by going beyond just philanthropy and standalone CSR programs to embedding impact considerations into their strategy. The overall goal of the course is to learn how to best align social and environmental goals into an organization’s strategy, and to study practical examples of how to build financially viable, effective and scalable market-based solutions to meet societal needs. 

Strategy Lab

The course provides students with a practitioner's view of how consultants tackle projects (based on Petros' 19-year experience in consulting), while at the same time honing your strategic thinking and analytical skills. This will be accomplished by tackling a business case (based on a real world project), developing a presentation for the management team and the board of the client and presenting your strategy. The course will also touch upon a number of other topics including

  • Styles of Competition – how diversified conglomerates create value
  • Beating the Unbeatable supplier – how to negotiate with challenging suppliers
  • The rule of Three and Four – an alternative perspective on industry stability

Strategy, Structure and Incentives

A skilled architect can look at a building’s blueprint and know instantly whether the building will stand or collapse. A skilled manager must be able to look at a company’s “blueprint” – its organisational structure and incentive systems – and know instantly whether the company will succeed or struggle in executing its strategy. In this course, you will gain a framework and tools for rapidly diagnosing an organisation’s key strengths and vulnerabilities, based on three key questions. First, strategy – what business should we be in? Second, structure – who should make key decisions? And third, incentives – how should we measure and reward performance?

Technology & Innovation Strategy

Technology change and innovation affect every domain of business, changing the face of industry at an accelerating pace. Yet few accurately understand these patterns, leading to failure that undermines companies, projects, and careers. In this elective we explore the fundamental questions of technology and innovation in order to provide students the foundations to think and speak intelligently in a changing technology environment. In the class we attempt to explore the puzzles of innovation, such as why great companies fail, when customers reject new innovations, why inventors create but don’t capture value, how platforms and ecosystems change the nature of competition, and other topics related to how technology changes the world.

The Art of Communication

If you want to succeed on all levels in today’s business world, excellent communication and presentation skills are absolutely vital. The GMAC Corporate Recruiters Survey 2017 once again shows Communication Skills as the number one requirement from recruiters when they look to hire you.

Whether you are delivering a key message one to one, to a team, to the board, or to stakeholders, pitching to potential clients for that crucial contract, launching a start-up, new product or service, being interviewed for a new job or a promotion, or presenting at a conference or live event, people need to be convinced by what you are saying. This is achieved by the winning combination of the right content and the right delivery.

This course provides a real opportunity to make powerful and visible changes to your style. It will provide you with the physical techniques to communicate effectively and the tools to analyse and understand the requirements of your audience. It will help you strike the right chord with maximum impact.

Blue Ocean Strategy

This course provides participants with a comprehensive understanding of Blue Ocean Strategy created by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, and an opportunity to systematically apply the fundamental methodology for creating and capturing blue oceans to simulated business settings. The course is organized in sessions that alternate between theory case discussion (using theory-based videos to introduce frameworks and tools) and computer simulation (providing an innovative, fun and effective way to apply frameworks and tools and to bridge the gap between theory and practice).

A Blue Ocean Strategy certificate will be issued by the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute for participants who have successfully completed the two dedicated Blue Ocean Strategy courses: The Blue Ocean Strategy Elective in P4 and the Blue Ocean Strategy Study Group in P5.

China Strategy

This is a course in collaboration with Chinese executives and foreign expatriates to provide first-hand experience and insights about competitive strategy, innovation and business practice in China. This course will help you understand how Chinese businesses think, behave and grow and why multinationals develop, adjust, and change their strategies and practices for China. This course will be of great interest to future global business leaders, management consultants, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs who would like to (or have to) develop business in China, assist Chinese firms to excel in national or global battles, or develop multinationals' competitive strategy for China.

Digital Transformation of Society, Industries and Companies (B)

The course is a follow on of the lecture series “Digital transformation of society, industries and companies” part A. Students will get hands on experience with real life projects for tech companies, startups or incumbent companies going through the digital transition on a variety of topics.

Industry and Competitive Analysis (ICA)

The course studies how firms can create investor value (above-normal returns) through the development and implementation of competitive strategies. To that end, we discuss and apply the key analytic concepts, models and tools so that you may develop a competitive advantage in competitive strategy analysis. The course uses cases that span a wide variety of industries and situations, including the strategic challenges of disruption, digital platforms, and eco-system dynamics. The course is recommended if you want to pursue careers requiring the analysis and determination of strategic decisions for companies and the assessment of long term profit opportunities within an industry.

Blue Ocean Strategy Study Group

In today’s overcrowded industries, competing head-on results in nothing but a bloody “red ocean” of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. While most companies compete within such red oceans, this strategy is increasingly unlikely to create profitable growth in the future. Blue Ocean Strategy argues that tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors, but by creating “blue oceans” of uncontested market space ripe for growth. Such strategic moves - termed “value innovation” - create powerful leaps in value for both the firm and its buyers, rendering rivals obsolete and unleashing new demand. In this course, groups of participants conduct independent research projects that require them to apply the ideas and analytic frameworks underlying the creation and capturing of blue oceans of new market space to strategic moves of their choice. The major objective here is to learn how to apply the theory, tools, and methodologies of blue ocean strategy to real business situations. Good examples of real-world cases resulting from this application can be found in our book Blue Ocean Shift.

A Blue Ocean Strategy certificate will be issued by the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute for those MBA participants who have successfully completed the two dedicated Blue Ocean Strategy courses: The Blue Ocean Strategy Elective in P4 and the Blue Ocean Strategy Study Group in P5.

Dean’s Innovation Projects

Sponsored by INSEAD’s Dean Ilian Mihov, Deputy Dean Peter Zemsky and Dean of Degree Programmes Urs Peyer, this course is an opportunity for students to be part of the overall INSEAD MBA experience by integrating your learning from across your MBA experience to recommend how to drive innovation and change in INSEAD. This also deepens project leadership and management skills, including interaction with key stakeholders.

Global Strategy

Companies need to manage the tension between two opposing forces in cross border strategy. On the one hand, as globalisation has increased over time, strategic opportunities and challenges are no longer isolated within national borders. On the other hand, important differences still persist across countries, both in terms of local market opportunities and in terms of locational advantages/disadvantages for competing globally. Recognising this tension, the course will focus on the geographic element of a company's strategy. The class will study multinational corporations (MNCs) in the context of both developed markets and emerging economies. The emphasis will be on understanding strategic issues that managers of MNCs face, and on applying tools and frameworks that help address these issues.

Doing Business in Middle East

Understand how businesses work in the Middle East through activities such as company visits and networking sessions with alumni. This module takes place over several days in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Students will get deeper insights on topics such as human capital policies, investment management, sovereign wealth funds, etc. in the UAE/Middle East.

Live Action Learning Projects

Student groups of five to six participants will be matched with companies active in the Middle East region. They will analyse an important strategic challenge or opportunity for their company, produce a recommendation in a presentation, and reports will be delivered at the module’s conclusion. The project will permit students to deepen their understanding of concepts and techniques acquired from the core courses in the MBA programme.

Strategy Execution

In the fast-paced environment of business today, organisations must plan for and deal with change. Ideal for students who aspire to hold leadership positions in future, this course focuses on the process of leading strategic change across a variety of organisational levels and business contexts.

Integrating Performance and Progress 🍃

Apart from competence to make good decisions, character also matters when one makes choices on strategy, operations, and governance that will drive contributions to progress. Philosophy is fundamental to notions of progress and in this course, students will understand four core principles that help them understand why and how enterprise and its leaders are implicated in progress. Building on these philosophical principles, there will be further discussions on seven specific precepts that will enable students to better integrate performance and progress.

Business as a Force for Good 🍃

The idea of business as an agent of change and a purveyor of positive values is gaining traction and legitimacy around the world. Can we use the power of business to address the world’s most pressing challenges? Can we use the wealth of knowledge and experience that has accumulated as a result of decades of research in business and management to produce positive outcomes for society?

In this practicum-style course, run entirely out of Fontainebleau, we will use the tools and insights gained in the different core classes to help Unjani Clinics NPC, a South African not-for-profit organization running a network of primary healthcare clinics that delivers accessible, affordable, high-quality services to low-income communities, grow and become more self-sustained.

Technology and Operations Management

Analytics for Real Business Impact: The Art of Why

Be it consulting, retail, travel, financial services, healthcare, or consumer goods, analytics has become a competitive necessity for businesses. This course will provide hands-on experience in the application of analytics to rich datasets. Students will learn to quantitatively identify and evaluate business opportunities that create value. Instead of delving into specific methods or statistical models, the focus is on emerging analytics tools and approaches such as A/B testing and experiments that can be implemented with trending business topics in such industries as retail, travel, and hospitality.

Video

Analytics for Responsible Management

Despite the highly sophisticated methods for mining data in recent years, integrating the insights into business processes has remained a rather ad-hoc exercise, often leading to unintended consequences that range from lost value to highly discriminatory, unfair or downright illegal actions. This course aims to teach students a few core principles and techniques for how to use analytics and go from data to decisions in a more responsible fashion.

Business Sustainability Thinking 🍃

Environmental or social challenges affect businesses at a global scale, while regulations and disparities in climate and energy risks are inducing firms to proactively rethink their business models. These challenges also represent opportunities for competing better in a possible new world order, i.e., doing well while doing good. To this end, this course answers two key questions in depth:
1- Why and how is sustainability a business problem? and
2- How should organizations build organizational and operational capabilities around it?
The course builds a simple applied framework to address these questions and studies a variety of perspectives, including those of natural resources, consumers, regulators and investors. Relevant, applicable and popular sustainability frameworks such as the Circular Economy or the UN Sustainable Development Goals are used as training grounds for the course framework.

Video

Competitive Supply Chains

In this elective, we study how to manage supply chains (end-to-end production and distribution processes) to improve a company’s competitive performance (cost, time, quality, variety, risk, sustainability) in a volatile world. Despite the traditional (and potentially misleading) view of supply chains as cost centers, we evaluate them as a source of sustainable competitive advantage and aim to provide a means for value creation through strategic supply chain design.

Video 1

Video 2

Creative Thinking

Creativity is fundamental when producing innovations, yet it is typically left unmanaged. Using key frameworks and strategies to develop innovative capabilities, this course covers key frameworks and strategies to develop innovative capabilities.

Video

Creating Value in Health 🍃

Creating Value in Health explores the complex context of health care delivery, and critical challenges with implications for the whole health care value chain and how to improve value: health outcomes that matter to patients in a financially sustainable way. Focus will be on how the care delivery system works, how efforts are being made to improve it, and how it might be changed for the better. We will be taking a business model innovation and process improvement perspective which will give key insights for those wishing to enter or go deeper into this sector, either via the entrepreneurial route or via more traditional organizations.

Video

Essentials of Technology Business

As it impacts all facets of life, technology is also enabling new business models in a vast array of industries, ranging from transportation to healthcare, from manufacturing to supply chains, and from customer relationship management to disaster recovery. It also opens up new social challenges such as the changing nature of work, privacy, and fairness.

The objective of this mini elective is to demystify some of the emerging technologies, describe their distinguishing features, and discuss potential ways they would enable new business models. Some of the topics that we will discuss, each lead by a domain expert, will be autonomous vehicles, additive manufacturing, cloud computing, blockchain and AI.

Video

Identifying New Business Models

This an experimental workshop combining three novel approaches to Innovation/Entrepreneurship: Business Model Innovation, Idea Tournaments and Lean Startups. Business Model Innovation is a technique to identify entrepreneurial opportunities through innovating the business models in existing competitive industries. Idea Tournaments is a process that leverages the wisdom of the crowd for entrepreneurial opportunity generation, selection and refinement. Lean Startup philosophy prioritizes tasks to limit entrepreneurial risk. Taken together, these approaches provide a systematic risk-limiting pathway to realizing entrepreneurial outcomes. As a class, we will follow these techniques and jointly start one or more new ventures. We will use these principles to generate about 1500 new business opportunities and through a variety of selection mechanisms; we will filter and develop these opportunities until a handful of outstanding business concepts remain. Alumni of this course have gone on to develop multiple successful businesses and have realized significant financial gains from the ideas generated and developed during this course.

Video

Learning from Games Workshop

This is a radically game-based course exploring the challenges and opportunities of Digitization that most global organizations face today, with a focus on how Global Teams operating across diversity and distance can be helped to reach higher collective intelligence and performance levels.

Management of Services

To escape commoditization, many B2C services (e.g., Starbucks, Disney, Apple stores, Cirque du Soleil) compete on delivering outstanding service experiences. Service experiences boost customer satisfaction, build customer loyalty, and may in fact transform a company’s customers into its most dedicated promoters. Operational excellence lies at the heart of service experience delivery. In this course, we will discuss how to resolve the classical trade-off in customer experiences between variability and productivity, either through uncompromised variability reduction or through low-cost variability accommodation. We will discuss the efficacy of not only classical operational strategies (e.g., buffering, batching, and focus)—this time with a novel perspective on experience management—  but also various service management innovations (theatricalization, operational transparency, automation, and self-service), and how they relate to the management fundamentals.

Video

Product Management in a Digital World

Product managers (PMs) in a digital world handle the entire product-life cycle of digital products. This course exposes, in a highly experiential way, some of the key challenges PMs face and the managerial levers PMs must master to cope with them, considering the high level of uncertainty and complexity associated with managing digital products from their genesis to their sunsetting.

Video

Social Media Analytics

Rapid growth in technology has enabled us in collecting, storing, and analysing large amounts of data with modest investments in computing power. No business, small or big, old or new, can ignore what big-data means for them today. This is a very new field --- most organisations today are “data rich” but “knowledge poor”. This course will take a first step towards understanding data generated via social media.

Video

Strategies for Product and Service Development

Product development is central to the firm and this elective is about making innovation happen in a firm. At some point in a manager’s career, they will need to deal with product and service development challenges. This course will prepare students to identify and tackle such managerial challenges. Participants will learn how to effectively integrate strategy, marketing, design, and manufacturing decisions not only by discussing state-of-the-art frameworks/tools for effective product development in large organisations, but also by developing a new product or service idea in a course project.

Video