The Study Modules

E-Business Management
E-business is rapidly growing in significance and is having a direct impact upon traditional ways of doing business. It requires planning and innovation to make it work, implying planning, commitment and management, supported by technology, process and structure. This module introduces the students to the fundamentals of e-business, highlighting such important issues as the new business environment, business models, Internet marketing and implementation.

Entrepreneurship
The Entrepreneurship module provides a sound academic base for the understanding and practice of new venture creation, growth and innovation, entrepreneurial behaviour and policy relating to larger companies and to small and medium sized enterprises. The module is an innovative academic response to the growing importance of entrepreneurship in both its corporate and SME forms to economic development across the world.

Executive Development Project
Excellent leaders exhibit self-awareness and engage in decision making with an understanding of their own and others’ capabilities. These abilities enable visionary approaches to problem solving and effective development of others. This module provides an opportunity for participants to reflect upon their personal models of leadership in terms of their individual competence areas. Critical evaluation and reflective observation skills are developed in the context of personal effectiveness that will facilitate critique across a range of leadership issues in business environments.

Financial Markets
A financial market is a forum whereby the activities of lending and borrowing, buying and selling, physical and financial assets, and the alteration or transformation of risk takes place.  Throughout this module, students are introduced to the nature of international financial markets, the activities undertaken by economic agents and also the response of the market to these actions.

Leadership Project
Leadership is often the main difference between success and failure for organisations but it is not only the CEO who needs to lead. Indeed good leaders are vital at all levels in the organisation to act as the link between planning and implementation. But while everyone recognises the need for leadership, prescriptions for leadership success are as many as theories. This module recognises the theoretical underpinnings of leadership but engages with leadership development in a more practical way through a sequence of group and individual activities that build into a portfolio that will form the basis for future executive development.

Leading and Managing People
Effective management of human resources has always been important, but recent changes in the structure of enterprise, employment and organisational form has led to new expectations and new pressures, all of them changing more rapidly than ever before. Managers have to support their staff and colleagues in ways that ensure that the appropriate skills, knowledge, and behaviour are available as environmental demands change and the organisation adjusts to those demands. An understanding of the basic principles of employee behaviour, an informed appreciation of the value of the human resource, and the ability to draw on the former to add to the latter, can optimise employee performance within the organisation

Marketing Management
This module is about how organisations attempt to survive and prosper in the long term by making attractive offerings - products, services, ideas - to individuals and organisations who are willing to pay for them.  For organisations some of the key questions are: whom shall I sell my services to; how do potential and actual customers view my offering; how do I make my product or service different; how much shall I charge for it and where/how do I promote it and make it available?  All of the above strategic questions are posed in a context of competition and in a political, economic, socio-cultural and technological framework that is constantly evolving. In summary, the Marketing Management module is about 'satisfying customer needs profitably in a dynamic environment’.

Operations Management
The new global environment for operations demands new ways of thinking about the way we approach the management of our own organization and those we network with. Global

sourcing and relocation are now commonplace for manufacturing and service organisations; public sector organisations are also now contracting on a global scale. The module seeks to provide a fundamental understanding of operations management and procurement. This is then developed into the new ways in which organisations should be managed in the global context.

Strategic Finance
Financial management is fundamental to the success of any business. Choosing the appropriate financial strategy underpins strategic success and value creation. This module will provide students with an insight into the strategic importance and relevance of financial management. They will become familiar with some of the latest and most important techniques in financial analysis and planning. The focus will be at the corporate level and will involve an integrative viewpoint for assessing financial issues rather than a functional one.

Strategy
Strategy forms the spine of the MBA programme: it is the framework on which the other disciplines hang and it also provides a distinctive set of theoretically grounded tools and techniques. Strategy is concerned with understanding why some organisations and industries prosper while others do not as a result of decisions taken or not taken by management.  It is also concerned with the role and function of general management, including ethics, as well as the decision making and implementation process.

Further Details
For further details of the University of Luton Masters in Business Administration by Supported e-Learning write to: emba@in.britishcouncil.org