Thayer School of Engineering At Dartmouth logo
home > graduate > mem >

Tuck School Electives

The following Tuck courses are available to M.E.M. students as free electives. All courses require permission from the instructor and prior approval of the M.E.M. program director.

Included in the M.E.M. tuition are up to 2 Tuck School electives. Students may opt to take more than 2, but this requires additional fees.

Corporate Valuation

Offered: W10

Students will have an opportunity to estimate cash flows and discount rates in order to establish values for projects and firms. In addition to traditional discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, the course explores alternative valuation methods, such as real option valuation and comparable company analysis. The contribution of corporate financial decisions regarding capital structure, cash distribution policies, and performance evaluation schemes to value creation and destruction are also investigated. The course will use a mixture of lectures, cases, projects, and guest speakers.

Prerequisite: ENGM 180
Instructor: Sundaram
Course syllabus

Advanced Competitive Strategy

Offered: F09

This course is designed to analyze the strategic lessons learned from the fields of military science, political science, international relations, and history, especially of the history of world empires from Ancient Rome to the British and even modern America. Applying these lessons to business, this course examines when and where to use guerilla versus traditional war fighting strategies, defensive versus offensive strategic postures, brinkmanship versus cooperative strategies, and revolutionary versus counterrevolutionary strategies. Part of the course is devoted to the use of portfolio strategy as a competitive weapon to create mutual assured destruction, to shift the balance of market power between competitors, and to create the conditions for profitability and stability by guiding the evolution of industry structure. To apply these concepts to business, the course develops visual tools such as price-quality analysis, stronghold analysis, know-how and smart-bombing analysis, as well as competitive pressure mapping and sphere-of-influence analysis. The course is designed to provide an alternative to traditional economic and strategic planning frameworks, sometimes presenting a contradictory viewpoint.

Instructor: D'Aveni
Course syllabus

Medical Care and the Corporation

Offered: F09

Employer-sponsored healthcare plays a significant role in the US health system. From the standpoint of business leaders, healthcare plays a critical role in the viability and success of a business. This course will focus on the structure and dynamics of the healthcare system from the perspective of corporate leaders as both payors of care and trustees of healthcare organizations. Through the course, students will understand the importance of business executive's role in improving healthcare as a business and social imperative. The course is intended to 1) demonstrate how all corporate leaders can exercise judgment and control over expenditures for healthcare benefits while protecting the health of their employees 2) enhance the ability of all Tuck graduates to serve as Trustees of healthcare organizations, e.g., hospitals, physician group networks, insurers and purchasing collaboratives and 3) reinforce the applicability of core management concepts and techniques when serving in either of these capacities: employer/payor or healthcare organization trustee.

Instructors: Zubkoff, Gardent
Course syllabus

Private Equity Finance

Offered: W10

The purpose of this course is to examine the financial perspective on decisions in entrepreneurial settings. While focusing on financial decisions, the course is integrative in looking at entrepreneurial financial decisions from the perspectives of the business opportunity, the goals of the participants, and the context, as well as looking at the "deal" and the resources employed. The course also offers a close examination of the investor's role and the expanding institutional environment of private equity financing.

Prerequisite: ENGM 180
Instructor: Blaydon, Wainwright
Course syllabus

Strategic Management of Innovation

Offered: W10

This course provides a framework for managing innovations in businesses. The emphasis throughout is on the development and application of models and analytical tools that clarify the interactions between competition, new ideas, patterns of technological and market change, and the structure and development of internal capabilities. The course also examines the challenge to building and maintaining an innovative organization, and how individuals can successfully innovate in organizations. These tools can provide the framework for insightful planning when deciding how to structure your organization to innovate, how to manage groups that are innovating, which initiatives to invest in, how to structure your resources to gain competitive advantage over other industry participants, and how to use you capabilities to exploit innovative activities. The course should be of particular interest to those interested in managing a business where external or internal innovation is a necessity for competition, those interested in new business ventures, and consulting.

Instructor: A. Taylor

Management of Service Operations

Offered: S10

This course develops a business process view of service delivery and focuses on the analysis and design of processes to achieve organizational goals. The notion of services is broadly construed to include both "pure" services, such as banking and healthcare, and the service components of manufacturing, such as after-sales support and product design. Course content will include a mix of case discussions and lectures.

Prerequisite: ENGS 103
Instructor: Shumsky
Course syllabus

Managerial Decision Making

Offered: S10

The course Managerial Decision Making differs from most MBA courses in that instead of proceeding normatively (i.e., how people and managers ought to make decisions), it focuses on providing descriptive insights of how people and hence managers actually do process information and make decisions, often inaccurately. That is, it studies the judgment and decision-making heuristics and biases that are profoundly wired in the human mind. In a fast-changing corporate world, managers are constantly faced with making risky decisions under tremendous uncertainly. This course, while developing a sharper probabilistic and Bayesian mindset in students, sheds light on why inferior managerial decisions are repeatedly made in various contexts—budgeting, project finance, and marketing, etc. and offers prescriptive insights. Though built on a rigorous academic literature, the teaching method of this course is interactive and intuitive. Throughout the course, we will conduct short surveys to help students examine their own judgment and decision-making heuristics and biases.

Prerequisites: ENGS 103, ENGM 180
Instructor: Womack
Course syllabus

Marketing Research

Offered: S10

This course is designed to give students an appreciation of the scope of marketing research and the nature of marketing research techniques. The goal of the course is to make students knowledgeable users of marketing research information. The first part of the course considers the acquisition of data. Research design, sampling procedures, and questionnaire design are discussed in the context of both traditional and online market research. The second part of the course introduces students to multivariate data analysis techniques, including cross-tabulations, factor analysis, discriminant analysis, and conjoint analysis. The course uses readings, case studies, and hands-on business projects.

Prerequisites: ENGS 103, ENGM 181
Instructor: Ailawadi
Course syllabus

Pricing Strategy and Tactics

Offered: S10

Following the marketing framework, this course considers strategic as well as the tactical aspects of pricing decisions using qualitative (consumer behavior and psychology) and quantitative (economics and statistics) analyses. Pricing theory is then linked to the practice of pricing; in this regard, we invite guest speakers who are pricing experts in their respective industries. This course examines how pricing policies should be set and compares them with what happens in the real world. It deals with various levels of competition with differentiated and undifferentiated products and concentrates on pricing structure through time, across a product line, and over customer segments.

Prerequisites: ENGS 103, ENGM 180
Instructor: Kopalle
Course syllabus