Core courses
In their second year, Business majors enroll in core courses that provide the foundation for the Business concentrations. They also take electives from core courses offered in other majors.
Business is a powerful driver of economic growth and stability; to do well in business, you must understand consumers, products, and markets. Market Dynamics and Product Analytics is a Major Core course that provides essential foundations for business majors and is a prerequisite for all junior-level business Concentration courses. The objective of B110 is to challenge students to apply marketing methods used by businesses to create value for shareholders and selected customers and consumers. We examine the consumer behavior of individuals, learn how to run, analyze and interpret experiments, and we review business marketing strategies designed to create and capture value.
This Core course provides a foundation for all Business majors and is a prerequisite for all Business Concentration courses. Students learn about the financial and strategic tools managers use to track, evaluate, and improve their business operations for achieving business objectives. Students learn accounting terminology to read financial statements, explore tools used to develop financial models, and analyze case studies of real-world business situations. Key topics include financial and managerial accounting, present value analysis, options, capital structure, strategy, and corporate social responsibility.
This Core course provides foundations for Business majors and is a prerequisite for all junior-level Concentration courses in this major. We analyze the political, regulatory, and societal contexts in which business gets done from a global perspective. We address how organizations can create strategies that address varying cultural biases, labor market conditions, and financial regulations. Overall the goal is to examine how businesses succeed and fail when trying to expand into new markets and new geographies.
This Core course provides foundations for all Business Majors and is a prerequisite for all junior-level Concentration Courses. Students will explore the inner workings of the business enterprise in context of its environment. The focus is on how to formulate and execute organizational strategies to achieve financial and non-financial objectives. Students learn about multiple levels and factors in organizational designs and how to manage tradeoffs in strategic decision making. The role of agents, functions, structures, processes will be analyzed, as well as design, implementation, control and improvement activities. Human behavior, incentives, emergent effects, stakeholder interests and operational efficiency will be considered.
Concentrations Courses
In their third year, Business majors select a concentration, begin taking courses within it and begin work on their capstone courses. They also take electives chosen from other Minerva courses (other concentration courses in Business, core and concentration courses in other colleges). Business offers concentrations shown in the table below.
All Business majors complete a summer practicum, and, in their fourth year, Business majors enroll in additional electives chosen from Minerva’s course offerings within or outside the major. capstone courses conclude during the fourth year as well.
Study the entrepreneurial process from inception through early growth stages and the unique operational challenges of competing with highly constrained resources. Integrate financial planning, organizational design, product development, market penetration and operations management concepts while addressing risk-reward tradeoffs. The focus is on the utilization of business practices to transform inputs into goods and services as efficiently as possible to enable sustainable growth.
Learn strategic and tactical decision-making for the design and operation of product and service delivery systems. Consider strategies to increase competitiveness while managing risk. Compare approaches to business process outsourcing, quality management, partnering, and supply chain coordination and rationalization.
In this class we study ways to optimize organizational structure, processes, and systems that support key business functions in large enterprises. We learn build, buy, and partner strategies, identify the major pitfalls in systems design and management, and navigate the often conflicting requirements that drive profitability. The goal of the course is to examine how large enterprises use their operational systems to synchronize product or service availability with market potential.