Teaching
Digital Strategy (MGT 857) Fall-1 2024
This is an elective class designed for graduate students at the Yale School of Management. If you are a Yale student * not * affiliated with SOM (Yale undergraduates and Masters students), you should apply directly to the professor, not through the bidding process. You should also send an e-mail with the following: 1) a 1-paragraph description of your interest, 2) Resume and 3) Course List / Grades including other SOM courses. A select few will be admitted at the discretion of the instructor.Please Note: Students will *not* be permitted to audit this class.
Syllabus
See Digital Strategy Syllabus (Fall 2024) (PDF)Course Objectives
The course is designed to provide a strategic perspective on digital technologies, but given the broad scope of the topic, aiming for comprehensive coverage will not be feasible. So we'll have to make tradeoffs in selecting areas to examine in depth. My goal is that a student who completes the course successfully should be able to:- Understand growth and monetization tradeoffs in adopting business models
- Determine whether a disruptor or complementor strategy is more appropriate
- Evaluate design and governance decisions for platforms
- Understand challenges and opportunities involved in undertaking a digital transformation
- Develop a perspective about new emerging technologies that could potentially reshape markets and have important strategic consequences for firms
Course Description
Digital Strategy is a half-semester course that builds upon topics in strategy, marketing and economics to understand issues in high-tech markets. Through a mix of case studies and lectures, the course brings together a variety of issues unique to markets significantly impacted by technologies. The course is divided into 4 modules. Each module will feature a lecture session laying out the conceptual foundations followed by 2-3 case studies. First, we begin by studying the essential elements of business models, and examine why we observe a variety of business models in the market, and identify opportunities and challenges in adopting these models. Second, we focus on understanding strategies that can be used by disruptors and complementors , with a view to evaluating how each of these could be successful in the marketplace. Third, we focus on platforms to understand the primary issues in developing multi-sided platforms as well as the perspective of participants on platforms. Fourth, we examine technology-driven transformation both from a technology perspective (with blockchain), as well as from a firm perspective (with The New York Times).
Textbook(s): None required.
Readings, Assignments and Course Notes/Slides will be posted on Canvas.
Artificial Intelligence: Strategy + Marketing (MGT 853) Spring-2 2024
Artificial Intelligence is a general-purpose technology which has the potential to transform many aspects of business and society. In business, the impact ranges from commonplace predictive improvements at one end of the spectrum to opportunities for creating entirely new markets at the other. As background, the course will briefly introduce students to Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning methods comprising of Unsupervised, Supervised and Reinforcement Learning. Through a combination of lectures and case studies, we will learn how to integrate AI into decision making, focusing on the strategic choices firms face in developing and using AI / ML. We will seek to understand how consumers, decision-makers other stakeholders evaluate decisions made by AI systems and are impacted by it. We will examine the state-of-the-art in explainable and interpretable AI, which aim to make black-box decisions more transparent. Finally, the course will also explore issues at the intersection of AI and Society including fairness and bias, which have proved especially challenging to address.Course Objectives
The course is designed to provide a strategic perspective on AI technologies, but given the broad scope of the topic, we have to make tradeoffs in selecting areas to examine in depth. My goal is that a student who completes the course successfully should be able to:
- Understand the basics of AI and ML models
- Determine how AI objectives connect to business objectives and strategy
- Understand a framework for decisions on AI / ML and identify the major resources required to implement the chosen AI strategy
- Develop a perspective regarding new emerging AI technologies and how they could reshape markets and firms
- Evaluate the broader societal implications of AI, and how different stakeholders (consumers, employees, firms, regulators, investors and others) are impacted by AI.
This is an elective class designed for graduate students at the Yale School of Management. Please note that this course will not be available for audit, and students must be officially registered to attend.
The course will be taught *in-person only* (there is no virtual option as per SOM policy), unless public health concerns cause YSOM to change course.
Note: We will use Google Colab and Python / R code will be provided. Students will be asked to explain the purpose of specific parts of the code (in an assignment), and make modifications to see how things change. Students will not have to write their own code from scratch, but must be comfortable understanding and modifying code. An overview of the code will be discussed in class.
Please Note: Students will *not* be permitted to audit this class.
Syllabus:
AI Strategy + Marketing Syllabus (Spring 2024) (PDF)
If you are a Yale student * not * affiliated with SOM (Yale undergraduates, masters or PhD students), you should apply directly to the professor, not through the bidding process. You should also send an e-mail with a 1-paragraph description of your interest, Resume and Transcript / Course List with Grades by e-mail: vineet.kumar@yale.edu. A select few will be admitted at the discretion of the instructor.