In the competitive world of informational efficiency, how do financial markets value bond and stock prices? You will explore accounting conceptual frameworks, financial reporting, and investment appraisals for using financial data to improve decision-making and interpretation. This course curriculum is designed to give non-specialists a solid grasp of theoretical and practical financial concerns and provide them with the tools they need to make sound financial decisions.

This finance module uses an integrative assessment approach to teach you how to estimate cash flows and rates in order to evaluate investment opportunities. Non-traded factors that are sustainable are also taken into account.

Groupwork presentational pitches, individual formative quiz tests, and a final summative exam quiz are all part of the learning process. Practice provides the required preparation for discussion and pitching to investors. It equips future managers with sufficient financial knowledge, helping managers understand how to 'read' accounts and make profit and value accounting judgments. Among the other things learned are processes for analysing investment opportunities, the impact of diversity on an investment portfolio, systematic hazards, and strategies for obtaining funds to compute expenses.

You will finish with an understanding and appreciation of accounting and finance in order to sustain organisational strategy, governance challenges in business, and the fundamental characteristics of stocks and bonds.

Business Economics introduces a framework for beginning to understand some of the behaviour observed in firms, markets, and industries. A range of models and concepts, both at the micro and macro level, for the analysis of business activity are introduced.

The first of the four ‘Challenges’ on the Lancaster MBA, the Business Management Challenge is a multi-day simulation in which, working in small teams, you manage a business through an eighteen-month period. It addresses the complex organisational issues involved in developing and deploying a ‘go-to-market’ strategy. As in the real world, each team is given the initial investment capital required, which you can use, for example, to build a factory. At the end of your ‘simulated’ first year of trading, your team prepares an investment pitch to present a convincing case to the holding company board to acquire further funding to grow the business. You then continue trading for two further quarters, giving you time to act upon the funding decisions and make any additional changes. This learning experience is invaluable as you can apply what you have learned from the programme to a ‘real life’ situation of business management in an integrative way. This action-learning challenge stress tests your cognitive and collaborative conduct, requires you to use many of the skills you have already acquired and generates a substantial opportunity for powerful experiential learning.

The Corporate Challenge is the fourth of the Lancaster MBA’s action-learning challenges and builds on the Business Management Challenge, the Entrepreneurial Challenge, and the Consultancy Challenge. The Corporate Challenge gives you the chance to undertake a consultancy assignment for a global company.

Students can also choose other forms of final projects such as an internship.

The Consultancy Challenge is the third challenge on the Lancaster MBA, designed to increase your effectiveness in a consultancy context. The module particularly helps you to understand consultancy as a process of influence, oriented towards exploring opportunities, solving problems and implementing action. You begin training in the classroom with a 'consultancy toolkit', a set of tools and skills that will enable you to address the complexity and deliver targeted outcomes. We focus on consultant mindset and consulting skills by examining the principles of effective consultancy, the barriers to successful intervention and how consultants manage risk. Subsequently, students work as teams of consultants to analyse a problem or situation for a client organisation and develop implementable recommendations. Previously, students have typically worked with various organisations such as Microsoft, Kellogg's, Hendelsbanken, BAE Systems and the NHS based in the North of England, looking for support to address a wide range of business issues.

The Core Capabilities module is designed to help you develop the skills vital for effective management and leadership. We focus on developing key mindsets around critical thinking, reflectivity, decision-making and collaboration. The module provides an intense experiential learning process and will underpin your work throughout the year.

As the digitally-enabled economy has become dominant and pervasive, the importance and necessity of understanding how businesses can adapt digital innovation to stay competitive has been heightened. This module will develop a narrative for how digital innovations have, and will continue, to transform business enterprises and organisations. The focus will be the trifecta of technology, strategy, and innovation, and the aim is to develop an understanding of the strategic role of information systems and digital technologies in product, service, and process innovation, business integration, new business models, and industry transformation.

Drawing on a collection of both theories and cases, Digital Innovation in Business focuses on how the deployment of information technology influences and transforms interactions and processes within and between organisations.

The Entrepreneurial Challenge is one of the action-learning challenges within the Lancaster MBA. This module allows you to apply your learning in the context of a business start-up. Working in teams, you are required to produce a business development plan for a potential new company.

You must research the market, develop a market strategy, and specify how the business will be organised and financed in the future. This challenging process requires you to take an integrated view of all aspects of a business. The challenge goes beyond traditional orientations to business models focusing only on profit. The entrepreneurial challenge requires the development of a business plan that provides a plausible explanation of two aligned objectives: profitable growth integrated with positive social and environmental impact. In this way, the challenge provides the opportunity to think anew about ideas regarding the purpose of business.

Leading Responsibly will help you explore your understanding of leading and will develop your capability to lead others. Taking a practical approach to the subject of leadership, this module will encourage you to become mindful of what you believe good leadership is. It will ask you to explore your values and the responsibilities of a leader and challenge you to find ways to lead others responsibly.

The module uses practical exercises, talks and discussion groups, skills development, self-awareness questionnaires, and reflective practices to help you develop your leadership capability.

Marketing is a crucial knowledge area for aspiring management executives. It is not simply a promotional arts and crafts toolbox but is rather the whole business as seen from the customer’s point of view. As we say here at Lancaster, marketing is the ‘business of business’ - the core commercial process of ‘going to market’. This module enables an appreciation and understanding of the conceptual, descriptive language of marketing. Such learning will enable you to understand both your marketing colleagues and the experts of the consultancy world. Consequently, you will be able to insightfully and confidently critique their arguments and add to the dialogue.

Sound operations management is essential to ensure that day-to-day operations run smoothly and deliver value to customers and the business as a whole within its overall strategy. To deliver value, operations must identify and work to appropriate success criteria, drive continuous improvement and be capable of delivering the changes required to develop performance for the future. This module develops your understanding of operations and supply chain management, using a series of cases to explore various aspects of operations management within companies. The focus will be on ensuring that customers’ current requirements and expectations are met or exceeded and that the operations function works in an integrated way.

Organising Behaviour offers a broad theoretical and practical understanding of some key concepts and issues in the areas of organisational politics, culture and structure, and addresses their implications for managing the human resources of organisations at a time of disruptive change and the globalisation of business. The module develops important knowledge and crucial skills of analysis and critical reflection.

Management approaches have significant implications in the contemporary world; socially, ethically and ecologically. In a sense, all of management is about choice - what factors to take into consideration in the making of a decision, and what future we should seek,

Responsible Management and Ethics is, therefore, an essential component of the MBA as it seeks to equip students with the ability to integrate this into their management strategies and practices.

Strategic Management is both a ‘science’ and an ‘art’, and this module enables you to gain an understanding of both. On the one hand, you will be taking an essentially analytical perspective, studying the traditional ‘toolbox’ of strategy as a business discipline. On the other, you will gain practical exposure to strategy development by engaging in strategy-making and reflection. The module will explore various subjects within the umbrella of strategic management, such as the nature of strategy, the roles and implications of governance, stakeholders, corporate parenting and strategic purpose, as well as the important issue of good relationships in theory and in practice. Crucially, you will develop your capacity to assess, evaluate and research strategic positions, and develop strategy itself.

This highly interactive module complements your study of strategic management. It particularly addresses the strategic questions that face large multi-business groups and how these differ from the issues faced by single-business firms. This module further addresses diversification strategies' reasons, benefits and boundaries and critically evaluates approaches to managing the group's portfolio. An important focus will also be on the role of the corporate centre for value creation, as well as the organisation design choices of large corporations. You will have the opportunity to work in groups to explore case studies of large multi-business firms.

This module explores change management and implementation, including understanding the need for change, individual responses to change, planned versus emergent change, and tools for change. These are specifically addressed through case study examples and relevant change management theory. This module can assist you in your preparation for your final challenge, focused on consultancy, where you undertake a consultancy report with recommendations for a real business and must understand how implementation might follow.

Managing Strategic Change consequently provides an excellent opportunity to move beyond analysis to explore implementation and the consequential human issues evoked through change and can help you prepare for the concluding part of the programme.

This module addresses issues specific to mergers and acquisitions, such as deal structure, deal financing, and target valuation. It also introduces topics such as leveraged buyouts and the role of private equity in the corporate control market. At the end of the module, you will understand the motivations behind mergers and acquisitions. You will also have knowledge of the financing of merger and acquisition transactions, the choice of deal structure and the valuation of target companies. Finally, you will understand the role of various parties in the mergers and acquisitions market.

Building on the earlier core Marketing module, this module is designed to develop a critical understanding of brand management as a major issue in strategic marketing. The module moves away from the traditional classical model of branding, which emphasises the consumer, and instead addresses the new, more balanced perspective which recognises the importance of staff and other stakeholders as brand builders. The latter necessitates an integrated communications approach, as successful corporate brands result from coordinated pan-company actions involving stakeholders to create coherent brand promise. No longer is it viable to claim long-term competitive advantage from functional benefits; instead, corporations recognise the importance of emotional differentiation driven by their organisational culture.

The module opens by discussing the nature of brands, the concept of the brand as a promise, and mechanisms to encourage a coherent brand strategy. It then explores the attributes associated with powerful brands and techniques to ensure effective brand differentiation. You will be exposed to diverse managerial interpretations of the brand concept and see how models enable brand evolution to be anticipated. It also describes a typology of added values. Finally, a significant amount of time will be devoted to a strategic framework that enables the development of a coherent brand.