2021 Spring Semester New Elective Course Introduction
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Platform Strategy 平臺策略(Course ID: 749 M1480)
Instructor: Ling-Chieh Kung 孔令傑 Please check out his profile here
Syllabus
Have you ever wondered how did any of the “Unicorn” start-ups such as Uber, Airbnb, WeWork, JUUL, Ant Financial, Alibaba, DiDi, etc. initially launch, getting funded, and developed and pivoted their ideas into a market desirable products and/or services with market valuations more than $1 Billion USD?
Modern information technology, especially the Internet, has revolutionized many industries. Amazon, eBay, and Taobao changed how people buy and sell goods; Google, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia changed how people acquire information; YouTube, Netflix, and iTunes Stores changed how people enjoy movies and music, Uber, Airbnb, and Instacart changed how idle resources (sometimes human resources) are utilized. Even education is changed: Coursera and Edx are trying to take away professors' jobs!
Interestingly, many of the above companies do their business by running platforms to connect supplies and demands. More interestingly, not all of them are doing this. What is a platform? What is the economic theory underlying platforms? When is running a platform a good idea? How to price and govern a platform? How to deal with competition? In this course, we give students some tools to address these questions.
This is a two-credit elective course offered in the GMBA program at National Taiwan University. All students who want to enroll in this course are welcome. If there is no enough space, priority will be given to GMBA students. Auditing is welcome but subject to the standard rule set by the GMBA office (i.e., opening to at most five GMBA alumni).
Game Theory and Business 賽局理論與商業決策(Course ID: 749 M1490)
Instructor: Po Han Fong 馮勃翰 Please check out his profile here
Syllabus
ESG Investing ESG投資 (Course ID: 749 M1500)
Instructor: Leon van Jaarsveldt 堯里昂 Please check out his profile here
Instructor: Gideon Loewy 路威 Please check out his profile here
Syllabus
We’ve invited our new instructors, Prof. Loewy and Prof. van Jaarsveldt, to deliver this course.
Driven in part by a call from the United Nations, international funds and institutions have assigned increased importance to ESG factors when making investment decisions. To date, over 200 institutions, accounting for over $45 trillion in investment funds, have adopted ESG investing principles. Businesses and investors are faced with a growing number of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors when weighing decisions. These decisions are increasingly characterized by national and international environmental and climate issues, population displacement, cyberattacks, social issues of inequality, and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Working together in project teams on practical projects that draw on your intercultural and interdisciplinary strengths, this intensive course will guide you to discover how a new generation of businesses creates profit from delivering the ‘Dream of Better Futures – Today’. Good examples of visionary business leadership with a societal mission would be entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Elon Musk (Tesla).
We will introduce you to such initiatives as the United Nation’s ‘Green Economy’, ‘Triple Bottom Line Accounting’ and ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ projects, as well as projects such as ‘Doughnut Economics’, ‘The Circular Economy’, ‘Industry 4.0’, ‘Circular Supply Chains’, The Index Award’s ‘Design to Improve Life’ and the professor’s ‘Future Design Toolset’ and work concretely with how they connect to ESG Investment and lead to Sustainable Futures Management.
Through a combination of cases and lectures by Prof Leon van Jaarsveldt, workshops led by Prof Loewy and team projects we will challenge you to 1) explore the concepts of global stewardship, environmental sustainability, strategic governance and social responsibility and 2) to identify, plan and develop emerging business opportunities that provide the market with an Environmentally Sustainable promise of ‘A Better Life in A Better World’ through Positive Change Management.
Prof Loewy is an alumnus of the College of Architecture and Design at The Royal Academy of the Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is CEO of Scandinavian Design Consultant Co., Ltd. His research interests include Future Studies; Societal and Economic Development; Innovation, Creativity, & Entrepreneurship (iCE); Philosophy of Science, Ethics and Ethos.
Prof van Jaarsveldt is an alumnus of the College of Social Sciences at National Chengchi University. His research interests include corporate responses to CSR and ESG issues, Climate Change and Crisis Management and Communication.
Crisis Management 危機處理 (Course ID: 749 M1510)
Instructor: Leon van Jaarsveldt 堯里昂 Please check out his profile here
Syllabus
Globalization and the advent of the Internet have brought with it many economic advantages. However, it has also linked global economies and supply chains more tightly together and has left companies more exposed to an array of rapid, often unpredictable, national policy changes, international political incidents, natural disasters, terror and cyber-attacks, and global pandemics that require quick, effective crisis responses.
Crisis management is concerned with preparing effective leaders and crisis management teams to have: a) the pre-crisis skills to identify approaching crises and an understanding of the factors, including political and policy, that affect its formation; b) effective crisis response skills, including effective and decisive communication skills that engage all stakeholders ethically and effectively; c) post-crisis skills needed to help companies not only recover their reputation but also to learn from the experience so that lasting responses and adaptations may be developed that help avoid recurrence.
If you have an interest in developing effective crisis management skills or wish to advance your existing expertise, this course is for you. This course will introduce students to the components of an effective crisis management strategy for the business context. This includes identifying the indicators of a crisis, the typical stages through which a crisis progresses, and performing vulnerability assessments and crisis preparedness plans. In addition, students will become familiar with some of the various related ethical considerations and attitudinal factors and understand more about how crises are shaped by national and international political institutions. At the end of the semester, students will be able to write a crisis communication plan with a set of strategic messages for affected stakeholders and a post-crisis plan to aid in corrective actions and organizations learn for future adaptions and preventions.
