Marketing & General Management

Business Communication and Storytelling: Building Narratives that Resonate: Laura Saez Ortuño
“The Art of Storytelling in Business: Communication and Connection”
Participants will discover the power of storytelling and effective communication in the business world. We will focus on using narratives to engage audiences, influence brand perception, and communicate corporate values. Through practical workshops, attendees will practice creating impactful stories and learn techniques to improve their communication skills both internally and client-facing. We will also explore how body language and emotional intelligence play a key role in effective storytelling.

Management Strategies in the Global Environment: Towards a Sustainable and Competitive Model: Elio Shijaku 
The course will explore how businesses can combine sustainability, social responsibility, and competitiveness in the global market. The session will be highly dynamic, combining theoretical aspects with case studies, debates, and even some simulations. Thus, students will see how to apply these concepts in the real world and leave with useful strategies for their future professional or academic endeavors.

Sustainable Business

Sustainable management: Managing the business transformation towards a sustainable landscape: Alfonso Antonio Hernandez Vivanco
The world is passing through a critical moment, and businesses across the world are challenged not only by how to deal with the consequences of environmental disasters and social inequalities, but also they are responsible to transform this potentially catastrophic landscape. In this course, students will learn how to identify business opportunities to tackle these issues from a management perspective. The course will be mostly practical to provide students with the ability to learn based on real situations by applying sustainability-oriented tools that have been designed based on scientific evidence. Some of those tools include doing critical assessment of firms’ sustainable performance, planning, execution and control.

Sustainable Performance Measurement: Jonatan Valeriano Calleja Blanco
Traditionally, business performance analysis has been approached from a highly objective standpoint: input and output values are collected from a comparable group of companies, and through various techniques (e.g., data envelopment analysis, stochastic frontier), efficiency rankings within an industry can be obtained. However, there is a growing trend to assess outputs not directly related to the core activity but rather as a result of good environmental, social, etc., practices. This course could introduce students to efficiency measurement, as well as the inclusion of all those desirable outputs related to sustainability. The course orientation would somewhat depend on the final profile of the students.

Enterpreneuship

Recognition of opportunites for entrepreneurs: Jaume Valls Pasola
Session deals with the broad idea of the recognition of opportunities for entrepreneurs. The “risk taker” profile will be analysed together with some key factors that influence the creation of a new company and relevant attributes in order to identify opportunities.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems: Jaume Argerich
Entrepreneurship is defined as the interaction of entrepreneur and opportunity.  That traditional approach fails to explain why the same entrepreneur and the same opportunity will have different probabilities of success depending on the ecosystem where they are based.  The session provides an understanding of the notion of EE and its elements (entrepreneurs, investors, government, institutions), discusses several public policy measures to boost entrepreneurship in different cities, and explains how EE emerge and evolve.

Innovation & Digital Transformation

Creativity for Innovation: Adriana Espinet Patcho
Get immersed into creative thinking to develop successful innovations. Learn how to improve both individual and group creative skills to break down the barriers to innovation. Participants will discover the role of creativity for innovation and understand how both can be fostered within organizations. They will get a fresh perspective on their current professional endeavors and boost their creative confidence while discovering new creativity techniques.

Emerging Trends in Business: VR, AR, Metaverse, Blockchain: Yelena Smirnova
The session will encompass exploration into four primary topics: Virtual Reality, encompassing various virtual environments, components of VR systems, including CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), and virtual worlds; Augmented Reality, focusing on its diverse applications; Metaverse; and Blockchain, covering the fundamentals of blockchain technology, the origins of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, an overview of top blockchain platforms, and insights into Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). This comprehensive discussion aims to provide participants with a holistic understanding of these emerging technologies and their potential implications across different sectors.

Leadership 4.0

Leadership 4.0: Juan Batlló Ferrer
To effectively navigate through disruptive changes, managers must acquire essential business skills as their role significantly impacts fostering seamless collaboration, motivating subordinates, tackling emerging technological challenges, facilitating problem-solving, enhancing decision-making, and nurturing creativity within their teams. This session adopts a practical approach to delve into critical skills necessary for success in this dynamic landscape. Participants will explore problem-solving techniques, hone critical thinking abilities, foster creativity, master people management strategies, facilitate collaboration, develop emotional intelligence, sharpen decision-making prowess, prioritize customer orientation, refine negotiation skills, and embrace flexibility. Through this comprehensive curriculum, students will gain a global perspective and acquire the tools required to adeptly manage the multifaceted challenges posed by the disruptive era.

Conflict Management: Patricia Elgoibar
Conflict is an inherent aspect of human interactions, manifesting within individuals, groups, and across various domains, including business. Recognizing the inevitability of conflicts, executives must develop adept conflict management skills to navigate through them effectively within organizational dynamics. This session adopts a practical approach to explore key facets of conflict management, which will be applied through a business conflict simulation. Participants will delve into understanding the concept and characteristics of conflict, analyzing conflict behavior, exploring diverse conflict management strategies, and engaging in role-play scenarios to reinforce learning and application.