Executive Certificate in Business Administration

Identifying, defining, and solving problems is key to a thriving society and economy.

Whether working individually, within an organisation, or setting up a new business, it is your entrepreneurial skills that will enable you to establish new sources of value.

Challenges and opportunities come in many forms. Whether it is the need to develop a circular economy, expand clean technologies, enable regeneration, or ensure resource sustainability for future generations, this module gives you the opportunity to make your mark.

Using the University’s Ingenuity™ creative problem-solving model, you will work in teams, mentored by experienced entrepreneurs, to address a practical entrepreneurial challenge.

This module will integrate your thinking to build your business planning and pitching skills.

Strategy is the practice of how an organisation fits within its chosen environment to ensure sustainability, competitive advantage in the good times, and resilience in more challenging times.

You will develop strategic analyses both for the external competitive environment, and for the organisation’s internal resources and competences, establishing priorities for where and how to focus development resources.

Ever mindful of current and emerging global competition you will use creativity and nuance to make clear the organisation’s strategic purpose, giving clarity of role to key stakeholders, and ensuring transparent governance.

Experienced practitioners will share their successes and failures of developing and delivering business, societal, and international strategic interventions. You will learn from a dynamic blend of case studies, cutting-edge research insights, and guest speakers.

Designing, forming, and leading organisations provides people with essential livelihoods. Doing this with a shared sense of purpose enables the organisation to amplify its social good across many markets and countries.

Within a good governance structure, we examine what leaders do to motivate and empower employees, shape cultures, drive change, resolve conflicts and increase inclusion using power and effective decision-making.

We will explore a range of human interaction techniques including motivation and rewards, job design, teamworking, and leadership. From this you will enhance your team-working skills, leadership profile, and your interpersonal effectiveness.

You will hear from experienced and successful leaders of the challenges they faced in their careers and the lessons that were learned leading to their improved practice.

This module focuses on the key digital technologies that are producing revolutionary change in business right now. Wherever you work – finance, retail, government, manufacturing, consultancy or any service role – your industry and your job is being changed by disruptive technologies as organisations become data-driven.

New uses of data are radically changing how firms produce products and services, how they interact with customers and how they partner together. But the change has just started – this module can help you take advantage of the changes to come.

We will look at the underlying business ideas which drive and make use of technologies like big data analytics, The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, social media, Web 2.0, and cloud computing. We will discuss how they are being used by different firms to transform their capabilities, their business models and their performance. We will look at how to use these technologies in business examples, the firms that you are interested in and in your own jobs.

This module will give you a holistic and robust understanding of digital transformations, complemented with a solid technical and methodological knowledge to succeed in fast paced business environments.

We will explore a wide range of technologies and their impact upon employees and leaders in the workplace, exploring how they can become both inhibitors and enablers of strategic change.

You will learn from a wide range of contemporary cases and examples, with your learning facilitated by leaders in the field.

The aim of this module to understand the different factors that support innovative performance within firms. First, we look at innovation from an industrial perspective, showing how innovations of product, process and organisational structure can create and destroy markets. Then we consider innovation within an organisation, showing how innovation can be used to address social, environmental and governance challenges. Finally, we look at innovation from a managerial perspective, highlighting the entrepreneurial practices necessary to sustain innovation. We draw upon live cases of innovation within small, fast-growing firms and learn from approaches used to re-vitalise larger firms.

Participants choose which firm they wish to work upon and research the historical innovation performance of that firm and recommend a change programme for senior managers to act upon. This equips participants with the knowledge to manage innovation within their sector of interest and helps build their capability to respond to uncertainty and change.