Open Courses

Professor: Vivek Pandey
Schedule: Evenings
Registration Deadline: January 5

Corporate financial accounting is concerned with the form and content of the information firms disclose to external parties (e.g., shareholders). In the United States, financial reporting is based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). GAAP define the accounting methods and disclosure practices that firms select from when providing financial statements to external parties. This course covers these principles and other important financial reporting practices. The primary focus of the course is developing the skills required to interpret and analyze financial information, rather than the skills required to prepare financial statements. Upon completion of the course, students will appreciate how financial accounting information is used in contracts between parties (e.g., lenders and the firm) and to evaluate a firm’s past performance and potential future performance.

Key Takeaways:

• Develop skills to interpret and critically evaluate a company’s financial statements
• Advance your understanding of the principles and procedures employed in the financial reporting process

Professor: Roberto Colangelo 
Schedule: Evenings
Registration Deadline: January 5

This course deals with the fundamental concepts, principles, and tools of strategy formulation and competitive analysis. The course revolves around analyzing and developing vision, strategy, and business models and how modern enterprises use them to create and sustain competitive advantage and above-normal economic value. Two fundamental questions motivate STR 421:

• Why do certain firms in a given industry earn a positive economic profit while others fail?
• Why do certain firms sustain their economic profits over time while others cannot?

We will develop concepts and frameworks grounded in economic principles throughout the course to address these questions. This course enables you to critique a firm’s competitive strategy – the firm's set of actions to maximize its long-run economic profits.

Key Takeaways:
 

• Implicit assumptions in and critical components of a strategic plan
• Cost, value, and niche-based strategies
• Industry-level profitability shifters and their implication for firm outcomes and strategy
• Firm strategies to create and sustain a competitive advantage and the role of resources and capabilities
• Product-market positioning strategies
• Strategies for growth: organic, acquisition, product innovation, synergistic investments, and international expansion
• Market-disruption strategies – the impact of technology
• Ethical implications of strategies

Professor: Ron Goettler
Registration Deadline: January 5

Description: Marketing management is a complex business function that requires managers to apply diverse skills to formulate a marketing strategy and to implement it via a marketing plan. This course introduces a series of frameworks and tools that can be used to develop and implement marketing strategies. The analytic part of the course moves from the general to the specific. We first focus on understanding how managers analyze the “three C’s” — customers, the company, and competitors to develop a Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning strategy (STP) for our product(s). We then discuss how the marketing strategy can be implemented through the “four P” elements of the marketing mix — product, price, place/channels of distribution, and promotion. More precisely, the objective of the course is to develop frameworks and tools to answer the following questions: Which customers should be served? Does the company have a competitive advantage in serving these customers? How can the firm achieve the goal of profitably serving its target customers? In short, we apply the 3C-STP-4P framework of marketing strategy to understand and develop strategies that enable firms to create value and earn profits. We focus on choices related to (1) new product development, by both existing firms and startup ventures, (2) pricing tactics and alternative revenue models, and (3) establishing and managing distribution channels. We also present methods for marketing research and marketing analytics and demonstrate how these tools contribute to effective management. The course draws on foundations established in the pre-requisite economics and statistics courses. 

Key Takeaways:
 

• Develop a practical understanding of marketing strategy and its role in the overall corporate strategy for creating value and earning profits, using the 3C – STP – 4P marketing framework

• Learn to appreciate that all good marketing starts with segmentation and will become proficient at segmenting consumers to guide marketing strategy

• Become proficient in applying tools such as Perceptual Maps and the Multi-attribute Model for developing and supporting marketing strategy

• Understand the importance and difficulty of measuring the impact of marketing actions, and gain awareness of strategies for doing so.

• Understand the essence of branding and how to develop strong brands

• Explore alternative revenue models and advanced topics in pricing

• Understand alternative distribution strategies and challenges in managing channels

• Develop the ability to be clear and concise in business communications by succinctly identifying problems, providing clear recommendations, and supporting recommendations with compelling analyses

Professor: Roy Jones and Jack Bramley
Schedule:  Evenings
Registration Deadline: January 5

Gain hands-on experience with Tableau, real-world healthcare datasets, and data storytelling techniques in this introductory course from Simon Business School and the University of Rochester Medicine Quality Institute. Designed for those ready to analyze real-world data, this course teaches you how to use Tableau to uncover insights, create interactive dashboards, and work through a culminating team project. Topics include data literacy, pivot tables, and choosing key process indicators—essential skills for impactful healthcare decision-making.

Professor: Dan Keating
Schedule: Evenings
Registration Deadline: March 2

GBA478 covers the application of generative AI technologies across diverse business contexts. The course will help you understand how to integrate Generative AI into today’s business workflows, providing frameworks to decide when and how to use it effectively. You’ll gain hands-on experience designing Generative AI tools to create business value and programming basic LLM-driven applications in Python. Finally, the course will ask you to become conversant with the big questions about Generative AI, to debate the moral, philosophical, and ethical challenges inherent in these systems and technologies.

Professor: Andras Miklos
Schedule: Evenings
Registration Deadline: March 2

This course has two major objectives: to develop your ability to frame business decision problems in a way that makes them amenable to quantitative analysis, and to train you in some fundamental techniques useful for analyzing and solving these problems. The course draws on three toolkits: 1. Spreadsheets to model business problems. 2. Optimization techniques to solve complex decision problems involving many variables and constraints. 3. Monte Carlo simulation for understanding and analyzing uncertainty. Examples from different functional areas will demonstrate how the techniques taught can be applied in a practical way to a variety of settings.

Professor: Jeff Sokol
Schedule: Evenings
Registration Deadline: March 2

The topics treated in this course span a wide spectrum of issues, concepts, systems, and techniques for managing projects effectively in today’s complex business environment. Students are led through a complete project life cycle, from requirements analysis and project definition to start-up, re­views, and phaseout. Important techniques for controlling project costs, schedules, and performance are studied. The course employs a combination of lectures, case analyses, business/project simulations, videos, Internet resources, and group discussions to develop the conceptual understanding and operational skills needed for effective managerial role performance.