VALLENDAR: KELLOGG-WHU
Leveraging Collaboration for Innovation
Academics, policy makers and innovation gurus all agree that companies need to engage in collaboration with external actors to generate new growth opportunities and to survive in increasingly volatile environments. In this course, we provide participants a rich set of concepts, frameworks and tools to improve their ability to build, manage and profit from different modes of inter-organizational collaboration. We will focus on three particular manifestations of collaboration, which have become increasingly important: (i) alliances between start-ups and established organizations, (ii) innovation ecosystems and (iii) digital platforms. We will discuss crucial questions such as: (i) what is the importance of trust and contracts in managing inter-organizational relationships, (ii) what is the optimal ownership structure for governing alliances, (iii) how should companies orchestrate innovation ecosystems, (iv) how can companies monetize digital platforms? In the sessions, participants will get advanced and state-of-the-art knowledge on these issues. Moreover, participants will be challenged to apply these insights by engaging in real-life cases from different industries.
Managing People for Competitive Advantage
People clearly are an organization’s most critical resource. Their knowledge and skills along with their commitment, creativity, and effort are the basis for competitive advantage. It is people that have creative ideas for new products or for process improvements that devise marketing strategy or take technologies to the next level. This course focuses on the people side of business from a general management perspective. In taking this generalist approach, we integrate concepts from organizational behavior, human resource management, strategy, and organizational design.
Business Tax Strategy
Business goes global, but taxes stay local. This provides opportunities as well as challenges for firms. For example, firms can avoid taxes by exploiting differences in tax rates around the world and shifting profits and business to low tax countries. At the same time, firms have to deal with potential double taxation on cross-border investments. In addition, many countries implement complex regulations to fight tax avoidance.
This course is designed to sharpen the understanding of how taxes affect business decisions and how recent trends in tax regulation change challenges and opportunities firms face in the globalized world. The focus is on tax planning, tax strategy, and the effect of taxes on location decisions, investment decisions, and corporate structure. Importantly, the course does not require any prior tax knowledge. The course provides the participants with the necessary concepts that can be applied around the world.
Entrepreneurial Finance
We are living the golden age of entrepreneurship. Thousands of new ventures are started every month around the world. And never before are so many people enamored with the idea of launching their own business as they are nowadays. Yet, about three-quarter of start-ups do not return investors’ capital, and a good portion of survivors limp along without access to more capital. While these failures can stem from dramatic shifts in markets and technology, poor financial management of the venture is no less responsible for them. In this course, we focus on financial economic foundations of a new venture. We examine a new venture’s financing options, appropriate capital and governance structures, and risk management tools at each stage of its lifetime, from idea to exit. These choices are complex in nature, create path dependency (i.e. have long-term repercussions for future financial decisions), and substantially influence the magnitude of economic value created and captured by the start-up, and how this value is distributed among its shareholders.
