Gateway Courses The MBA offers participants the opportunity to specialize their MBA through “gateway courses”.   Participants may choose one of the three pre-defined specializations composed of 3 pre-selected gateway courses or choose to create a customized specialisation by choosing any three gateway courses.

 The International Business Strategy Specialisation

Today few companies escape the pressures of internationalisation. This field builds on this social reality and reflects the profound changes affecting businesses worldwide.  It deals with the human and strategic issues of understanding changing international institutions, cultures and laws, integrating globalisation and international competition into corporate strategy managing complex business alliances across different countries and continents.

Participants choosing to specialize in International Business must take the following three courses :

 International Institutions, Cultures and Law  
The purpose of this course is to help students understand the major institutional, cultural and legal factors that shape international competition. This course is focused on a general introduction into various theories about the "social embeddedness" of business and into tools and methods enabling managers to analyse and to compare different systems. It is not designed to give an in-depth analysis of specific countries or regions. This can be found in elective courses.

 Implementing International Strategies  
It is the purpose of this course to help students understand major design elements and parameters crucial to the effective implementation of international strategies. Particular focus will be given to the following topics:  designing global, transnational and multi-domestic organizational structures, designing managerial systems and processes, implementing regional and country strategy, integrating diverse international operations, solving conflicts between expatriate and local managers, building transnational teams.

 Understanding and Designing International Strategies
The goal of this course is to help students understand how market and industry characteristics shape international strategy the geographical scope of competition, to help students familiarize themselves with various generic international strategies and the key decisions associated with each of them.

Particular focus will be given to the following topics:
understanding the context (shaping forces, industry characteristics, geographical scope) and identifying generic international strategies, global strategies, optimizing the value chain on a global scale, multidomestic strategies, selecting entry modes and configuring international alliances

 

 The Corporate Finance Specialisation

This field exposes you to one of the crucial challenges facing companies today : understanding and dealing with financial stakeholders. Grounded on research material and practical experiences, these courses add an original vision to classical corporate finance. You will be confronted with private and public companies' financial issues such as M&A, IPO's, LBO's or spin-off decisions, and be trained to implement up-to-date value-analysis methods.

Participants choosing to specialize in Corporate Restructuring must take the following three courses.

 Financial Strategy and Corporate Control
This course provides participants with a general framework to deal with this issue, starting from business to explore investors expectations, the way to raise fresh funds, and the critical control aspect. We will first analyse business strategy from a financial viewpoint, revisiting the basics discovered in the Financial Analysis and Planning core course, but also using the value analysis, trying to answer the straightforward question “does your strategy create value for shareholders”. Then we will consider financial backers: starting from the classical WACC approach, we will extend our vision to specific categories, shareholders, lenders, bond holders, private versus public equity, to build up the financial territory of the firm. Then we will discuss the way to effectively raise money, from plain vanilla share issue, to more sophisticated solutions (convertibles high yield bonds) and finally discuss the financial structure of the firm, the way markets are questioning traditional strategic moves, forcing from time to time top managers to de-merge, split their businesses, or even sell them in order to reach the Holy Grail - the shareholder blessing.

 Shareholder Value Analysis and Company Valuation  
The first part of the course is dedicated to a thorough analysis of the value mechanisms and value drivers. We will build on the basics discovered in the Financial Analysis and Planning core course. We will use again ROCE, sustainable growth, key value drivers such as cost structure, growth in volumes and prices, productivity, to build up comprehensive business models. And we will also use what you know of discounting techniques to assess the value of a firm, on the basis of these business models and your sets of hypothesis. During this part of the course several examples of day to day decisions will be used to show the relevance of value creation as a decision tool.

 Securities Valuation and Financial Theory
The aim of this course is to give participants a good understanding of all principal assets listed on financial markets. The foundations of classical financial theory are needed to get this understanding. Consequently first and second lessons are dedicated to financial theory and short illustrations on its key concepts and tools. From lesson three to lesson six, most well known financial assets will be presented and valued. Additional theoretical background will be presented and used for these valuations. Nevertheless, these lessons are focused more on practices than on theory.

 The Managing Market Driven Companies Specialisation

This field concentrates on the marketing of products, services and projects sold to organisational clients as opposed to end-consumers. EM LYON was one of the three founders of the IMP Group (International Marketing & Purchasing) in 1975, the main European research network in B2B. Our distinctive B2B knowledge also results from joint operation al research with leading European industrial companies, a wide range of tailor-made training programmes and personal consultancy. Participants wishing to gain a full professional perspective on the state of the art in B2B will be motivated by this unique programme.

Participants choosing to specialize in Business-to-Business Marketing must take the following three courses

 Business to Business Marketing
The primary objective of this course is to enable those students with a keen interest in business -to-business marketing to be able to manage these relationships, or enable their clients to manage these relationships, more effectively. The course will build on ideas that would have been presented in earlier core marketing courses and go further into subjects such as  : the risk approach, conjoint analysis, multi-criteria decision making, segmentation, networking and B2B marketing research.

 Managing Marketing Innovation
The objective of this course is to provide an overview of innovation management. Innovation will be considered as a new product (in contrast to a technological breakthrough) launched by a company in established markets. Each session copes with a different stage in the innovation process, from the initial idea to the market and its growth. Specific themes include : strategic perspectives on the management of innovation, managing the innovation flow and a consultancy approach of Innovation Management.

 Services Marketing
Service companies account for 70% of the GNP in most European countries. What's more, services related to products, be it in B to B or B to C markets, take an increasing part in the turnover of manufacturers. Consequently, the service perspective is becoming a key issue to many companies. Implementing a service perspective means understanding the nature of services and discovering the concepts, methods and tools entirely specific to services marketing.

The nature of services has led to the development of concepts, methods and tools entirely specific to services marketing. The objectives of this course are: to share a common understanding of the nature of services, to develop the consequences of the nature of services for the services marketing-mix and for service quality and satisfaction, and to present the specific tools, methods and concepts of this field.

 Creating your own customized specialisation

As previously indicated, participants may create their own specialization by taking credits of the gateway courses.  The diploma will indicate the General Management specialization.