MBA and Sloan Elective Courses: Operations, Information, and Technology
OIT 333. Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability
OIT 334. Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability
This course is a Bass Seminar. It is a two-quarter project course for graduate students to apply engineering and business skills to design comprehensive solutions for a specified challenge faced by the world?s poor. Student teams collaboratively design product prototypes, distribution systems, and business plans for entrepreneurial ventures in developing countries. Jointly offered by School of Engineering and Graduate School of Business. Topics include user empathy, design thinking, rapid prototype engineering and testing, social entrepreneurship, detailed business modeling, and project management. Students work in small teams to brainstorm, research, design, build, and field-test critical aspects of both the product and the business model. Several design reviews during quarter, final course presentation. Intensive hands-on, project-based course. Limited enrollment via application process (due November 17). Visit www.stanford.edu/class/me206 for details.
OIT 338. Environmental Science for Managers and Policy Makers
This course satisfies the MBA Management Foundations requirement in Modeling for Optimization and Decision Support (MODS), and is the primary core course for the joint professional degree programs that combine the MBA, JD or MD with the MS in Environment and Resources. Fundamental science of ecosystems, climate and energy. Spreadsheet modeling, optimization, and Monte Carlo simulation applied to resource management and environmental policy.
OIT 357. Strategy in Global Supply Networks
The course focuses on how companies can set and manage strategies in networked economies—where firms must rely on a network of suppliers and customers to provide products and services. Outsourcing and off-shoring present new problems and require new tools and concepts. This course addresses these problems taking a general management perspective and combines a study of concepts/tools with cases and guests. Issues in global supply networks and the transition from product suppliers to service suppliers will be addressed. Besides electronic and high tech industry, assigned cases also cover apparel, automobile, consumer goods, retailing, mining and natural resources. Classes involve a discussion of the concepts and tools useful for managers emphasizing issues in Supply Networks and creation of internal core capabilities that will allow firms to establish competitive positions. Guests will comment on case discussions, add info on the topic and responsibilities of general managers, and be available for questions.
OIT 361. Technology Concepts for Managers
Electronics, computing, networks and software applications have become an integral part of business, and knowledge of technology is now a prerequisite for a successful manager. This course is specifically aimed at students with liberal arts or soft science backgrounds who wish to be more technically aware as managers.and want to understand how computers, networks, and the software that runs them operate. Rapid changes in technology can quickly render today's "hot" topic discussions obsolete. The course thus stresses fundamentals and trends, rather than just a too-brief snapshot different technologies. Course activities include lectures, readings, live technology demos, field trips, guest speakers, and four homework assignments. Students investigate a particular technology in more depth with a term project. Often done by a small group, the term project report is created as an interactive Web page, training for which will be offered. The general flow of the course focuses on four areas: Fundamental Electronics and Computing, Communications including Networking and the Internet, Software and Software Development issues, and the Web.
OIT 362. Supply Chain Management and Technology
Firms in many industries are scrambling to develop innovative ways to move products from raw materials through manufacturing to customers more quickly and efficiently. Some are responding by necessity to competition, both domestically and internationally. Others are capitalizing on the continuing stream of dramatic improvements in information technology. They redesign their supply chains to gather, process, transmit, share, and exploit vast amounts of information quickly and cheaply. Still others are applying the radically different philosophy of seeking a cooperative approach among all the players in the supply chain. Huge improvements have been enjoyed by firms able to optimize over their entire supply chains and figure out how to share the resulting gains while breaking down the traditional adversarial relationships. Some redesign their chains to bypass unneeded stages. Other innovations derive from deregulation and lower tariffs. This course examines many of the recent innovations in this area with an emphasis on technologies.
OIT 364. Global Operations
Globalization of businesses has resulted in companies having to manage global networks of suppliers, integrators, contract manufacturers, logistics service providers, distributors, and service support operators in geographically dispersed locations. The customer network is also globally distributed. This course will focus on (1) how global and international companies can overcome the geographical, cultural, and organizational barriers, and leverage the strengths of the network to create values, and (2) how these companies may use different ways to manage operations in different regions to take full advantage of the local strengths and limitations. The course will be based on cases, mostly developed in the last two years, on innovative strategies and tactics used by global and international companies.
OIT 384. Biodesign Innovation: Needs Finding and Concept Creation
This is the first quarter of a two-quarter course series (OIT 384/OIT 385). The course series provides students with skills essential for the development of new biomedical technologies and enables them to take the critical first steps in invention, patenting, early prototyping and development of new concepts.The first quarter includes an introduction to needs finding methods, brainstorming and concept creation. Students learn strategies for understanding and interpreting clinical needs, researching literature and searching patents. Working in small entrepreneurial multidisciplinary teams, students gain exposure to clinical and scientific literature review, techniques of intellectual property analysis and feasibility, basic prototyping and market assessment. Students create, analyze and screen medical technology ideas, and select projects for future development.
OIT 385. Biodesign Innovation: Concept Development and Implementation
Two quarter sequence. Concept development and implementation. Early factors for success; how to prototype inventions and refine intellectual property. Lectures, guest medical pioneers, and entrepreneurs about strategic planning, ethical considerations, new venture management, and financing and licensing strategies. Cash requirements; regulatory (FDA), reimbursement, clinical, and legal strategies, and business or research plans.
OIT 542. Price and Revenue Optimization
This is the Advanced Application option in the menu of courses that satisfy the Management Foundations requirement in Modeling for Optimization and Decision Support (MODS). Three core modeling topics are covered in rapid-review fashion—model representation in a spreadsheet environment, optimization theory, and stochastic models—but primary emphasis is on the application domain described immediately below. Systems for price and revenue optimization—also called yield management, dynamic pricing, or revenue management—combine the use of information technology, statistical forecasting, and mathematical optimization to make tactical decisions about pricing and product availability. A familiar example is the passenger airline industry, where a carrier may sell seats on the same flight at many different fares, with fare availability changing as time advances and uncommitted capacity declines. Over the last 25-30 years, revenue optimization practices have transformed the transportation and hospitality industries, where fixed capacity and advance reservations by customers are important structural factors. But model-based, data-driven pricing systems are increasingly common in other industries that have different structures, such as financial services and retail clothing.In this course students learn about the model structures and modeling techniques that underlie systems for price and revenue optimization. The primary emphasis is on model-based tactical pricing, including customized pricing and retail markdown management; the secondary emphasis is on classical revenue management, where automated logic is used for booking control (that is, to make yes-or-no decisions in response to booking requests from customers), rather than to set prices explicitly.
OIT 571. Homeland Security: Operations, Strategy and Implementation
This course covers a variety of topics in homeland security: bioterrorism (attacks with contagious agents such as smallpox or non-contagious agents such as anthrax, and attacks on the food supply), pandemic influenza, nuclear security at ports and around cities, the biometric aspects of the US-VISIT Program, the intersection of homeland security and immigration, and suicide bombings. For each of these topics, students will typically read one academic paper that focuses on the operations aspects of the problem, and one reading about the strategic aspects of the problem. For each topic, the professor will spend part of the class lecturing on the problem (including how the results of the academic paper were implemented), and a student will be assigned as a discussant (in addition to a classwide discussion).
