Study programme Master's Business Administration: Responsible Digitalisation

Core courses

The following course form the backbone of our master specialisation:

Digital Transformation

In this course, we will bring you up to speed regarding how digitalization in organisations has both positive and negative transformative characteristics. Organisations play an important role in responsible digital transformation, meaning:  how are data and related technology continuously collected, designed and eventually used in practices, in terms of the ethical, legal, societal and sustainable aspects? 

This course first offers you some basic understanding with crucial concepts in digital transformation, such as types of data, data roles and governance, related infrastructural aspects, data analytics including the use of algorithms and AI, responsible digital strategizing. Next to that, we provide a short introduction into legal (e.g., privacy, autonomy) and ethical (e.g., inclusive) issues regarding the use of digital technology. After having been familiarized with these basic understandings, we will introduce you to different ways of approaching or making sense of digital transformation along the lines of four (theoretical) perspectives. Throughout the course, you will discuss with guest lecturers from industry their ‘digital dilemma’s’, offering you insights into both the opportunities and the dilemmas that digital transformation in practice create for organisations.  

Organisations in the Digital Economy

Digitalisation – understood as the transformation of analogue data into digital data in order to use the latter for artificial intelligence algorithms, big data analyses, and platform exchange – is deeply transforming the economy. Accordingly, digitalisation also substantially shapes how organisations in general, and companies in particular, innovate and reach their corporate aims. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified and accelerated these digital transformations as it facilitated and forced organisations to engage with digital formats of running their business. While digitalisation offers many opportunities to firms, such as analysing vast amounts of data, for accessing resources digitally, and even for building digital businesses, it also poses threats, including issues of data ownership, unfair competition, the exploitation of digitally accessible resources (e.g. online workers), or loss of intellectual property rights. By providing a systematic understanding of how the digital economy influences organisations, the course will empower students to provide responsible leadership in digital innovation and managing organisations in an increasingly digital economy. Thereby, the course will focus on the latest developments brought about by digital platforms, so that the course participants will learn to develop a responsible business strategy to use digital opportunities for the benefit of their organisation.

Digitalisation @ Work

The aim of the course is to offer students ways to critically evaluate the influence of digital technology at work from the perspectives of the employee, the organisation (including management) and society at large. With digital technology, we refer to all electronic tools, devices, systems and resources which generate, store or process (including AI) (big) data.  
By contrasting the different interests of all stakeholders, we look at why and how digital technology is implemented, what it means for jobs (and skills) and its sustainable effects on labor markets and welfare. 
Specific topics we address include: digital technology acceptance, required work arounds, resistance or ‘responses’ to digital technology, labor market shortages, skills shortages (including need for reskilling), determinism versus voluntarism (organisational choice), work organisation and job design, worker participation, and surveillance. At the end of the course, we try to look into the future (use AI to develop scenarios). Basic questions we try to find an answer to incorporate: 
•    Why do organisations make particular choices for implementing digital technology?  
•    Why do workers respond in particular ways to digital technology? 
•    What are the effects of digital technology for organisations, workers and society (labor markets, welfare)?

Data Analytics for Responsible Business Solutions (DARBS )

In an era in which (big) data and new methods such as machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques seems to be the resources no organisations can do without anymore, making good use of such data and turning them into responsible business solutions and insights becomes a core competence for organisation’s viability. These developments require different skills from future business analysts, advisors and managers such as a basic understanding of what (big) data is, what data structures are and the different algorithms that suite each data type. However, big data and data analytics also raise a whole series of ethical questions with respect to their use in ‘dataveillance’ (surveillance through data records), social sorting (differential treatment to services), anticipatory governance (predictive profiling), control creep (data generated for one purpose being used for another) and the extent to which their systems make an organisation hackable, to name just a few This course will address all these issues in order to better prepare you for working in contemporary organisations. This course is not designed to turn you into a data analyst. However, we start you off with a crash course ‘big picture’ view of data and algorithms after which we take you through weekly ‘hands on’ assignments in a lab setting giving you a chance to take a stab at working with data and analytics algorithms yourself.

Digital Marketing

We highly recommend this course as an elective for those who would like to pursue a business oriented responsible digitalisation career profile. In this course, The course offers students an integrative, strategic perspective on prominent issues in Digital Marketing. It helps students to understand and deal with the Internet (r)evolution that impacts marketing manager’s decision-making and provides a general strategic approach of using the Internet as a two-way medium: (1) to get attention, (2) attract customers and build sales, (3) communicate with customers in a digital manner and (4) (post) service customers. The idea behind the course is to allow students to merge theoretical insights and to apply these to complex practical cases. It integrates relevant literature on digital vs. traditional media, multi-channel environments, online relationship marketing, and social media (applications).  
The course not only aims to introduce students to these issues, but also to train them to discuss, evaluate and use the related approaches. The course implements theory and action-based learning by using state-of-the-art academic articles and applying them to real-life cases and assignments. It will also provide guest lectures from practitioners in the field.