Entrepreneurship

Survey of financial, managerial, and tax accounting concepts and methods techniques relevant in planning and controlling typical decisions that entrepreneurs make when launching and running successful new ventures. Topics include ways of starting a business, choice of accounting software, profit planning, assessing uncertainty, self-employment taxes, costing and pricing products, assessing financial needs, financing through equity and nonequity sources, preparing budgets and financial statements, ratio analysis, managing working capital, real option analysis, valuation, bankruptcy, and exiting a business.

The course is designed as a workshop in which law students and business students work together to structure and negotiate varying aspects of a private equity deal, from the initial term sheet stages, through execution of the purchase agreement, to completion of the financing and closing. Private equity deals that are economically justified sometimes fail in the transaction negotiation and documentation phase. This course will seek to provide students with the tools necessary to understand and resolve difficult issues and complete successful transactions.

The course surveys the private equity industry, with an emphasis on the financial and economic tools useful for leveraged buyout and venture capital investing. The primary audience for this course is finance majors interested in careers at private equity funds. The secondary audience is students planning careers that have significant interaction with private equity funds, either as providers of these funds (pension fund managers, institutional investors, investment advisors) or as consumers of them (managers/owners of startups or buyout candidates). More information at www.emoryprof.com.

This course is designed for students interested in better understanding (i) how the private equity industry works, (ii) how to structure the acquisition of a business and (iii) how to make money by leveraging key value drivers in a business. Unlike traditional courses, this course takes a unique approach by bringing in leading experts and practitioners to provide industry perspectives for almost every class. More information at www.emoryprof.com.

The course is designed for both marketing specialists and generalists. The course exposes students to the contemporary challenges faced by a broad variety of firms in developing and launching new products, creating and maintaining brand equity, and managing products and product lines.

This course surveys the complex and evolving relationship between corporations and society. This course adopts a broad theoretical perspective on the challenges and opportunities that corporations confront in their interactions with society, such as struggles to maintain legitimacy, acquire resources, build partnerships, and solve complex global problems.

This course discusses in the depth all facets of operating and financing an entrepreneurial venture. The class structure is unconventional. The core of the course consists of students applying their knowledge at actual entrepreneurial ventures (practicum) and be actively involved in a commercialization forum (RAISE). The class room time supplements and is secondary to the core experience of working with entrepreneurial ventures. The primary audience for this course are (i) students interested in starting their own company or joining an entrepreneurial venture and (ii) students interested in joining firms that capitalize entrepreneurial ventures (angels, venture capital firms, private equity firms, family offices, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, etc.). More information at www.emoryprof.com.

Offers students an opportunity to develop negotiation skills for a global business environment. Students learn to manage conflicts with competence, fairness, and sensitivity. The course relies heavily on simulations to promote learning by doing. It provides a low-risk setting with individual feedback to help students evolve an effective negotiating style that feels natural.

This course will address the forces that drive organizations to change; examines impediments to organizational change as well as those strategies for making organizational change more effective. The emphasis will be on planning, managing, evaluating, and surviving organizational change, with application to emerging business issues, including: knowledge management, "learning organizations," network management and organizational implications of new technologies and the internet.

Multinational Firms examines strategy and organization of business in the global economy. The course considers international competitive forces and national/regional contexts as determinants of strategic challenges and options for managers. We employ a cross-functional approach, drawing from strategic management, microeconomics, political science, and regional studies.

This course is designed to endow you with an entrepreneurial perspective, enhance your ability to use functional knowledge in an applied setting, and familiarize you with the skills and resources necessary for starting a new venture. By the end of the class you will be able to:

• Identify trends and opportunities in the marketplace
• Formulate new venture ideas
• Analyze your market and validate your customer base
• Present a competitive analysis of a specific industry
• Create a revenue model, forecast costs and demand, and assess potential profitability
• Understand how financing, venture capital and valuation work
• Utilize a business model canvas
• Put together and present a business plan and pitch
• Analyze ventures, both inside and outside of corporations

In the last few decades, the business world has been engulfed in what Shumpeter aptly called the "gales of creative destruction." Rates of new product development - where innovation has historically resided - have accelerated and changed with the advent of new approaches like Open Innovation. And Open Innovation itself has been enabled by new technology platforms. But technology has played an even more disruptive role in undergirding the development of radical new business models that are reshaping entire industries, such as Uber in Automotive and AirBnB in hospitality.
Incumbent companies are right to wonder what they can do to prevent their becoming "Amazoned." In this course, we will learn and apply a comprehensive framework that large corporations can use to effectively manage innovation. This framework can be critical to companies' resilience and continued success within a rapidly changing and often threatening market environment of profound technological and business model innovation.

Class focuses on the following essential business and entrepreneurial concepts, and learn how to:

• Determine if a business opportunity is worth pursuing;
• Find the next big opportunity;
• Understand how buyers really make decisions;
• Design products the market ""really"" wants, quicker, less expensively and with lower risk;
• Generate significant market interest for your products and services on a small budget;
• Create tactics that are high impact, and easy to implement;
• Develop strategies that have a significantly greater likelihood for success;
• Improve your management skills to increase your odds of achieving your business objectives;
• Leverage the effectiveness of working with partners and minimize the risks associated with partnering;
• Negotiate more effectively with an investor (or as an investor);
• Deal with the reality of business when it deviates from your business plan (as it inevitably will);
• Create a business environment second to none;
• Buy a business without over paying; and
• Recognize if and when to sell your business and how much it's really worth

This course focuses on building corporate advantage -- the problem of how multi-business firms can create value. Accordingly, we first explore sources of complementarities or synergy among businesses and how to manage them. We then examine how firms acquire new capabilities with a special emphasis on M&A, alliances, and internal development. Finally, we examine strategy analysis and formulation in uncertain and turbulent environments. This course may be useful for those who seek careers in consulting, general management, and investment banking where multi-business firms play an especially critical role.