MBA Elective Courses

For many entrepreneurs, the primary task is building the business rather than financing. Activities ranging from assembling the team to designing a product and understanding customer’s needs are reportedly taking the majority of entrepreneurs’ time and energy. However, raising financial capital- whether it’s a € 200,000 seed round or a multimillion-euro public offering (IPO)- is essential to building a successful business. In practice, financial decisions are closely related to the type of venture and the capital needed for a positive cash flow. While a viable financial forecast helps you to start the business, entrepreneurs shall actively review and revise their financing forecasts as a response to the dynamic environment. In this short course, we will introduce you to the essentials of entrepreneurial finance. We will explore together the various challenges faced by entrepreneurs in securing financing to support future growth and development, with an emphasis on VC financing. We shall examine these challenges in a variety of industry settings and from both the capital seeker (entrepreneur) and capital provider (investor) perspectives.

• Friday and Saturday course with Dr. Yu Liu. Begins in September.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 2 August
• View the full course outline

In a world of deep technical interdependence, competitive advantage is no longer a solo sport. This course provides a high-stakes executive playbook for navigating complex, multi-partner environments where you must collaborate to innovate without losing your strategic edge.
Designed for leaders at the intersection of operations, engineering, and strategy, this elective moves beyond traditional "Make vs. Buy" logic to master Ecosystem Architecture. Through the lens of contemporary leaders like Nvidia, Google, and ASM, we will dissect the real-world mechanics of Power and Protection. You will learn to audit platform governance, engineer "Knowledge Firewalls" to guard your IP, and solve the "Cold Start" problem to trigger network effects.
Stop reacting to the market’s shifts. Learn to design the structures that define your industry’s future.

• Weekend course with Juan Madiedo. Begins in September.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 2 August
• View the full course outline

This course will explore the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and business. We focus on how understanding the brain and behavior can be used to improve managerial decision-making regarding consumer behavior, innovation, marketing, and leadership. The course will also examine the applications, limitations, and ethical implications of the emerging field of consumer neuroscience.

• Weekday course with Alex Genevsky. Begins in September.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 2 August
• View the full course outline

Companies continually restructure their businesses via disposals, buy-outs, spin-offs, investments and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). Recent examples are Unilever’s spin off of the Magnum ice business, HSBC’s buy out the non-controlling interest in Hang Seng Bank as well as Vivendi’s sale of their investment in Telecom Italia. This coincides with an active M&A market with block buster deals such as Pfizer – Metsera and Paramount - Warner Bros. This corporate restructuring and M&A activity happens against the backdrop of ever more investor activism both in the US, Europe and Asia.

The course ‘Corporate Restructuring and Valuation’ provides students with the analytical, financial and valuation skills to assess the impact of corporate restructuring on financial performance and valuation. We will start with a review of major valuation methodologies (Discounted Cash Flow, Residual Income Model and Valuation Multiples) as well as the concept of equity and enterprise value. Next is an overview of the various forms of corporate restructuring as well as the investor landscape. We will discuss recent cases of investor activism and critically review the financial arguments used by activist investors. Examples include Thirdpoint versus Nestle, Starboard versus Pfizer as well as Elliott versus SouthWest Airlines.

The focus in the course will be on reviewing the impact of corporate restructuring on value creation notably the various ways to assess value creation in M&A. Especially of interest is the challenge of comparing the bid premium with the present value of the synergy benefits to assess value creation for the bidder company. We will discuss AstraZeneca’s acquisition of biotech company Alexion, LVMH’s purchase of Tiffany as well as recent M&A activity in the US technology and media sector. Finally, we will scrutinize the impact of corporate restructuring and M&A on financial statements.

• Weekend course with Dennis Jullens. Begins in October.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 16 August
• View the full course outline

The rise of digital technologies and state-of-the-art analytics has led to a radical shift in how marketing operations are run. The focus of companies has shifted away from product-centric approaches and mass marketing campaigns to customer-centric campaigns tailored to the needs and wants of each customer.

Customer centricity requires companies to deepen their understanding of their customers and recognize customer heterogeneity to focus their efforts on the right customers. It fundamentally changes all organizational functions – not just marketing, but also finance (corporate valuation with customer equity), research and development (investment decisions based on profit lift), salesforce, and employee evaluation.

The course explores how to create customer value effectively and discusses customer-centric tactics for (i) customer acquisition, (ii) customer spending and (iii) customer retention. The concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is at the core of the course. A unique feature of this Elective is that it combines a deep dive into the underlying psychological mechanisms of the consumer with an intuitive training of analytics tools needed to leverage customer and company data.

• Weekend course with Aurélie Lemmens & Mirjam Tuk. Begins in October.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 16 August
• View the full course outline

You may be a corporate executive, a senior manager in a consultancy, or an entrepreneur, responsible for making decisions in a complex environment. In this advanced elective, we will deepen your knowledge on corporate-startup collaboration, by discussing real-world cases on how corporates and startups can co-develop business ideas. 

• Weekend course with Vareska Van de Vrande & Christopher Sabel. Begins in October.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 16 August
• View the full course outline

This multidisciplinary elective is meant for anyone having an interest in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). The course builds upon the concepts covered in core courses, and provides practical insight into M&As. We combine insights from strategy, finance, legal, and organisation theory. Various guest speakers have been invited to bring their practical experience. The course is accessible for anyone who has successfully completed the core courses.

• Weekdays course with Arjen Mulder. Begins in October.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 16 August
• View the full course outline

Quantitative Pricing Analytics (QPA)

Pricing is one of the most powerful levers a company can use to affect profits. Pricing and Revenue Management is about “selling the right product to the right customers at the right time for the right price”. This course will go through a set of practices and tools that firms in various industries use to quantitatively determine the pricing and promotion strategies. 

• Weekday course with Yeqing Zhou. Begins in October.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 16 August
• View the full course outline

The time that the procurement function – or: purchasing and supply management – was seen as a corporate backwater is long past, for many organisations at least. Several successful CEO’s have a background in procurement, such as Apple’s Tim Cook and GM’s Mary Barra and many organisations have realized that procurement is a truly strategic business function. The most fundamental development is the growing realization that procurement can not only contribute to the ‘bottom-line’ of organizations, but also to the ‘top-line’. In other words, the buying organization does not only seek to reduce costs but also to increase the revenue-generating potential of the acquired inputs. Moreover, procurement has an important impact on the organisation’s performance in terms of sustainability, in terms of environmental, social and governance aspects (ESG).

In this course, we will focus on a number of current topics across the more strategic activities within the procurement cycle: in other words, we will focus on the “sourcing” part, as opposed to the “procure-to-pay” part – hence the name of this course.

The central argument in this course is that strategic sourcing is essential for almost any organisation - whether in manufacturing or service industries or the public sector – and we will illustrate this by using readings, cases, and guest speakers from a variety of industries.

• Weekend course with Juergen Scherer. Begins in October.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 16 August
• View the full course outline

Impact Venture Capital in Practice immerses MBA and EMBA students in the fast-evolving world of impact investing, where financial returns and measurable societal impact go hand in hand. Through a highly applied, deal-driven format, students work in groups with real early-stage ventures and conduct full investment analyses - spanning financial due diligence, business model validation, and impact assessment.
The course is led by a distinctive teaching team combining academic expertise with leading practitioners from top-tier venture capital firms. Through RSM and Maas Impact Ventures’ investor network, students gain direct exposure to industry experts - recently including Triodos Investment Management, Carbon Equity, Rabo Ventures, SHIFT Invest, Forbion, and FMO, among others.

Students culminate the course by presenting investment memos to an expert investment committee, with the opportunity to influence a real grant allocation to a high-impact startup - bridging classroom learning with real-world capital deployment.

• Weekday course with Ronald Huisman. Begins in November
• Enrolment deadline: Thursday 15 October
• View the full course outline

As future business leaders, consultants, and entrepreneurs, you will regularly face high-stakes marketing decisions that involve large-scale data, fast-changing consumer behavior, and the growing influence of artificial intelligence. Which customers should you target? How should you position your product? Can content, offers, and prices be personalized effectively—and ethically? This course explores how AI and analytics are transforming how firms think about marketing strategy and execution.

This course introduces a structured, applied approach to marketing in data-intensive environments. We begin with foundational topics such as segmentation, targeting, and positioning, and then expand toward advanced
applications, including customer journey analytics, user-generated content, personalization systems, foundation models, and business model innovation. Each session combines analytical methods with real-world decision-making, drawing on case studies, academic research, and industry experience.

We will discuss three case studies—McDonald’s, The Gap, and WeWork—each exploring different applications of AI and analytics in marketing and strategy. These cases provide a framework for evaluating when AI and analytics add value, how to implement it, and when alternative approaches may be more appropriate. A final session on the dark side of analytics encourages critical reflection on fairness, privacy, and trust in AI-driven systems.

Two guest lectures provide complementary perspectives. A senior product lead from Google discusses how Generative AI is being deployed across Google Search and advertising, illustrating how large language models are reshaping user interaction, content ranking, and ad delivery at platform scale. In a second session, the Data Science Director of a German analytics startup explains how competitive intelligence is built from digital traces and used to inform product and market strategies. These guest sessions expose students to both corporate and startup applications of AI in marketing.

To deepen your learning, the course includes two graded assignments. The first is a group-based project that challenges you to analyze how consumers generate data throughout their daily routines and how companies use these data in shaping marketing decisions. The second is an individual assignment in which you step into a strategic role and design a marketing solution that combines business goals, data sources, and machine learning capabilities. Both assignments mirror real-world decision environments, requiring you to link marketing strategy with data opportunities, assess trade-offs, and articulate clear recommendations.
By the end of the course, you will be able to evaluate and apply data-driven tools in strategic marketing contexts, translate analytical opportunities into business actions, and communicate insights clearly and responsibly.

• Weekday course with Sebastian Gabel. Begins in November.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 30 August
• View the full course outline

Entrepreneurs and business leaders are constantly exploring opportunities for new business development to secure future growth. While many operational decisions rely on established routines and past experience, developing new products, entering new markets, or launching new ventures requires a fundamentally different approach. These growth-oriented decisions—such as testing novel business models, expanding into unfamiliar customer or product segments—often shape the long-term trajectory of a company. Because these initiatives break new ground, decision-makers must act with limited or ambiguous information and without reliable historical data to guide them.

In this course, you will learn a cutting-edge decision-making framework designed specifically for new business development under uncertainty. You will apply the framework to your own entrepreneurial or new business development challenge and receive continuous feedback, enabling you to translate insights into concrete actions for building and scaling new business opportunities.

This course emphasizes an experiential learning approach: hands-on activities inside and outside the classroom have greater prominence than traditional one-way lecture time inside the classroom. Such an approach stimulates and engages student teams in defining and testing their business model outside the classroom. The main objective is to develop a theory of your new business that could create value, validating your business model by learning from and interacting with potential customers, suppliers, experts, and partners.

• Weekend course with Laura Rosendahl Huber & Luca Berchicci. Begins in November.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 30 August
• View the full course outline

As an alternative to becoming a founder/owner of an entrepreneurial start-up, one can also search for a business to acquire, run it for some years and make it grow, as an equity-owning CEO. In the case of an entrepreneurial ‘searcher’, the company to acquire has not yet been identified and a good deal of effort is devoted to the search for the ideal company to acquire with the help of a newly created search fund. Such a search fund is a pool of capital supporting the efforts of an entrepreneur in locating a private-held company for the purpose of acquiring, operating and subsequently selling it. Through the sale, the searcher and the investors will have a healthy IRR of around 30 per cent.

The entrepreneur puts together the search fund and runs the search process. In putting together an amount of money somewhere between 500k and a million euros). The entrepreneur normally brings 10-20 investors are brought on board who all commit about 25-30k each to fund the search. The search fund is a specialist vehicle in which investors back a promising individual rather than an existing start-up team. In the first stage, money is raised to pay the individual a nominal salary and expenses, sometimes for several years, while they hunt for an acquisition target in which they believe they can add value. Further funds are used to manage and grow the company.

• Weekend course with Alexander Schuil & Willem Hulsink. Begins in November.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 30 August
• View the full course outline

This course delves into the intricacies of modern financial management, emphasizing the strategic use of both financial and non-financial data in high-quality decision-making, strategy execution, and the achievement of organizational objectives. It offers students a robust foundation in the principles and practices of financial management, highlighting their relevance and application in real-world business contexts. The course is based upon problems and cases that are decision and action oriented. Participants are expected to apply appropriate analytical frameworks to diagnose and solve business problems in internal decision-making and control. The course provides a highly interactive environment that combines theory and practice with group assignments, presentations and discussions. The process is thus based upon participant-centered learning and requires engagement by all learners. Overall, the course is structured to equip students with critical skills, both analytical and practical, preparing them for complex challenges in the realm of financial management.

• Weekend course with Stephan Kramer & Marcel van Rinsum. Begins in November
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 30 August
• View the full course outline

Recent years brought an almost continuous flow of supply chain disruptions and revealed that many supply chains are vulnerable. Rising geopolitical tensions and natural and man-made disasters will put supply chains under even more pressure in the future. Making supply chains more resilient has therefore become a key priority for businesses, the general public, and even national governments. In this course, you will be introduced to the field of supply chain resilience, explore how businesses can make supply chains more resilient, and what business can learn from leading organizations – especially humanitarian organizations, which have decades of experience in preparing for and responding to low-probability, high-impact events, and “building things back better”.

• Weekday course with Harwin de Vries. Begins in November.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 30 August
• View the full course outline

There is a ruthless hunt for the next blockbuster design, awesome product, or killer service. New technologies and powerful trends (think artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, blockchain) and humanity’s grand challenges (e.g. climate change, pandemics, mass immigration) put immense pressure on organizations for constant adaptation and change. Clearly, innovation is no longer a choice but has become an imperative. This imperative demands a clear understanding of how organizations can manage their innovation activities.
In a business environment that is disturbingly in motion, innovation management translates into developing the right processes, structures, and strategies for continuous successful innovation. Once an organization builds its innovation management system, that magic blend will guarantee survival and increase the chances of industry leadership.

• Weekday course with Chandrika Rathee. Begins in November
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 30 August
• View the full course outline

People are at the heart of every organisation. They are a key determinant in translating business strategy to business value. Yet effectively managing people remains one of the most complex challenges for leaders at all levels. Aligning people’s strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and interests with the business strategy is no easy feat. In most cases, managers and leaders learn this the hard way, even though there are clear evidence-based guidelines to follow and build upon.

This course helps you on your journey of finding a professional, structured, and evidence-based approach to managing people. Whether it concerns your direct colleagues, your direct reports, or your organisation, this course equips you with the strategic insight, interpersonal skills, and tools necessary to navigate today’s evolving workplace. Through six interactive sessions, you will explore the interdependence between people management, business strategy, and leadership effectiveness. You will develop critical interpersonal skills for managing difficult conversations and building inclusive and high-trust organisations, while learning how leaders align talent, motivation, and organisational systems with strategic goals. Whether you are a manager, consultant, or executive, this course will provide you with the frameworks and skills to align people management with organisational success. 

• Weekdays course with Madleen Meier-Barthold. Begins in November.
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 30 August
• View the full course outline

This MBA elective, Sustainable Supply Chains, is designed to provide students with an in-depth understanding of how sustainability is reshaping global supply chain strategies. In this course, students will explore key concepts such as the environmental, economic, and social pillars of sustainability, and how evolving regulations are influencing supply chain practices worldwide. The course covers practical tools for sustainability measurement, including Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and carbon foot-printing, alongside cutting-edge strategies for creating circular supply chains. Through case studies and simulations, students will learn how businesses are integrating sustainability into product design, adopting circular business models, and implementing reverse logistics.

• Weekday course with Morteza Pourakbar. Begins in November
• Enrolment deadline: Sunday 30 August
• View the full course outline