MSEM Course Outline

This course explores elements of technology strategy including portfolio management, development of product and technology roadmaps, new product development, phase gate processes, and the management of product life cycles. The focus is on disruptive, incremental, sustaining, and breakthrough innovations across multiple sectors.

This course is aimed at helping students develop themselves as individual leaders by focusing on personal growth and leadership styles.  The course will utilize assessments and other tools to explore leadership styles and techniques for leading effective teams and organizations with and without authority in a variety of settings. The focus is on techniques for developing ethical and empathetic leaders.

This course will teach students to develop, analyze, and communicate financial aspects of a company’s product or service. Students will learn to understand and evaluate the impact of decisions on the financial health and competitiveness of the firm.

This course is a human-centered customer discovery course focused on research, analysis, brainstorming, and ideation methods to inform product and business solutions. In the course you will learn about identification of target customers and discovery of solutions to unmet needs. The course involves the use of tools to systematically generate and sort diverse options to create products and solve customers’ needs.

Students learn to gather, analyze, and interpret data to drive strategic and operational success in technology-based companies. Develop skills to make data-based decisions with uncertain or ambiguous conditions, and develop models for decision-making in a business setting.

Within this course, students will learn to examine connected complex systems that impact technology projects while taking into account human, political, community, resource, environmental, and social processes. You will also leverage insights from structural influences to maximize impact and solve problems in increasingly complex and high-tech environments

In today’s unpredictable, fast-moving business environment, project management can make or break a product launch. Additionally, a program of interrelated projects can have a profound impact on the success or failure of a company. This course is a learning-in-action experience that gives you the tools, techniques, and confidence to keep large-scale programs and time-sensitive projects on track and on schedule. You also will learn how to implement agile methodologies to manage projects with complex requirements and high levels of change.

The course is designed for those students who aspire to influence the strategic decisions of an organization directly or indirectly through analytics-driven insights and imaginative reasoning. Based on a deep understanding of the emerging geo-economic, environmental, geo-political, technological, and demographic trends, the course will examine how businesses must innovate and implement strategies in the context of a globalized economy.

In this literature and film-based course, students will examine leadership and the role of future engineering leaders. Students will discuss values, moral legitimacy, professionalism, plus quiet leadership. Students are encouraged to look outward and expand their understanding of leadership, the world, and their place in it as future transformational leaders with purpose. Course elements will include formulation of leadership messages, translation of leadership messages into action and real world demonstration of those actions. Topics include: giving voice to values, taking a stand, exercising authority, and emergent leadership.

Being an effective, inclusive communicator is an essential part of being a successful scientist, engineer, or technical professional. Effective communication is the only way to share the results of your work, to collaborate, to innovate, and to meet your ethical obligations as a practicing professional. In EM 252: Business Communications, students will learn to make conscious communications decisions and to apply principles of effective written and oral communication for different purposes and different audiences in the workplace. Students practice different ways to improve their tone, focus, and organization to get better results from both day-to-day and formal communications. Students will consider both the practical and the philosophical context of communication in the modern globalized business world, including the use of AI for communication.

*This course is a required Core Course for the MSEM Full-Time program. MSEM Part-Time students are welcome to take this in-person course as an elective.

Solving real-world business challenges requires more than technical knowledge - it takes creativity, critical thinking, and the ability to translate data into action. In EM 271: Industry Consulting Project, student teams take on the role of consultants, working directly with a partner company to solve strategic or operational problems and put their learned skills to work. Through a mix of analytics-driven insights and imaginative reasoning, students learn to navigate industry, deliver impactful recommendations, and develop the problem-solving and client-facing skills essential for today’s innovation-driven workplaces.

*This course is a required Core Course for the MSEM Full-Time program. MSEM Part-Time students are welcome to take this in-person course as an elective.

Apply your learning by working in a small team to develop the business plan for a new product or service, supported by a faculty advisor. During this integrated team project, you will participate in weekly seminars to learn best practices in product development. 

This team project integrates learning from the first four core courses of the MSEM program.  The project focuses on the development of a business plan for a new product or service and is supported by milestones and deliverables. The integrated project is additionally bolstered by seminars on key topics like project management, intellectual property, and marketing.

Prerequisites: All courses in Core 1 or instructor permission

After completing MSEM Core Part 2, you will apply your learning in a project for your current employer or a client organization, supported by a faculty advisor. You'll impress your boss, and your boss's boss, by utilizing what you've learned in the classroom to complete an impactful Capstone Leadership project in your organization — showing exactly what you're capable of achieving. 

This is an individual, student-led project that demonstrates your business acumen and leadership skills in the real world.  The project must be complex and involve risk.  Capstone Leadership Project typically has a 3-6 month duration and can be done with your current employer.

Prerequisites: All courses in Core 1 and Core 2, as well as the first milestone project; or instructor permission