Minor in Digital Business Development

A minor gives you the opportunity of having a second specialization in your degree. The minor is a bundle of three electives that can be chosen separately but if chosen together rewards a minor.

Digital technologies are becoming the fundament for developing elaborations of existing businesses and for completely new businesses models. Intersecting the domains of digital technologies and business development, this minor provides students with a unique opportunity to engage in the development of business opportunities draws on the deeply transformative capacities of digital technology. Doing so requires engaging the corporate IT function in business development activities that stretches beyond the support of efficient operations and business managers that can harness the unique characteristics of emerging digital technologies for the conduct of business.

The minor forms part of the MSc in Business Administration and Information Systems as a specialization into business development. For CM(it.) students, the minor implies an extension of the IT function as a critical partner in digital business development. Equipped by an in-depth understanding of the IT enablement of business, students are challenged to expand their ability to aid managerial aspects of digitalization and to embrace perspectives on digital strategies and business models that enables design of technical solutions which fuels digital business ventures. The minor aligns with the mission of the CM(it.) program by building industries scientific as well as applied competencies, thus strengthening the brand of the degree as a quality signal for graduates.

The minor is also open to CBS students with a general business/management background that wish to specialize in digital business development. For these students, the minor will present a journey into the transformative characteristics of digital technologies and how they impact the domains of strategizing, organization of work and innovation processes. Students are challenged to not black-box emergent digital technologies, but to understand their characteristics and how they incentivize different digital business development approaches. 

The interdisciplinary grounding is a critical constituent of the minor and is reflected in both the content and the activities of the minor. Students pursuing the minor are expected to come from a diverse background and will benefit from engaging across disciplines in a way that is critical to foster digital business development.

The below table lists the structure and the ECTS credits of the individual courses. The course descriptions are available in the online course catalogue. Direct links are inserted in the below table.

The minor comprises three elective courses that intersects business development and digitalization, with strong educational linkages between theory and practice. The courses complement each other by providing insight into current academic work and practical approach to changing rules of competition (“A Digital Battlefield”), new demands on IT organizations to enable digital business strategies (“Transforming IT management for digital business”) and the need to apply novel practices of business development (“Delivering Digital Business”) in the era of digital competition.  After completing the three courses, students will be equipped with theoretical and practical tools to explain, design, create, and assess the impact of digital technologies to a variety of problems facing organizations. The minor combines traditional modes of instruction (e.g., lectures, seminars) with hands-on sessions (e.g., workshops/tutorials) during which solutions to real-world problems are assessed.

Digital Battlefield: How to transform a new business venture to a sustainable digital business?

The course portrays the Internet an exciting competitive arena with a number of global digital platforms, such as Apple, Facebook and Google, providing digital goods and services. There are numerous business opportunities to develop innovative digital products and services and in this digital battlefield. Focusing on new digital business ventures, students will be taught concepts, models, and economic principles that are useful in analyzing the digital battle field, creating a new business venture and developing a sustainable strategy. The special characteristics of the digital products and services in specific industries will be integrated in order to build sustainable strategies for new digital business ventures in the light of competitive dynamics in the international digital arena.

The course includes the following topics: principles of information economics and digital platform elements such as network effects, positive feedback in creating the installed customer base, multi-sided networks etc., value capture and value creation strategies, internationalization strategies for digital platforms and global competitive dynamics in the digital battlefield. Specific topics of interest for new digital business ventures will be covered, such as, sharing economy platforms and key success factors, exploitation of big data for value capture and value creation activities, online advertising, crowdsourcing and value co-creation, crowdfunding and exploitation of social capital.

Transforming IT Management for Digital Business

The is no digital business without digital technology backbone. And there is no digital technology backbone without an IT department geared at delivering digital services. In the context of a transforming role of IT departments in the digital world, the course aims is to train the students in coping with the challenges and opportunities confronting IT department that transforms to form part of a company’s development of a digital business dimension. Students will get the case background for a large number of realistic issues, and will be provided with different tools/methods potentially relevant for addressing the issues. The course has a orientation towards a research-based practice of solutions to real world issues aiming at education of reflective managers.

This course uses Harvard-style teaching cases to examine important issues in IT management through the eyes of Jim Barton, a talented business (i.e., non-technical) manager who is thrust into the Chief Information Officer (CIO) role at a troubled financial services firm that seeks to reinvent itself in the age of digitalization. The course follows Barton through challenges, mistakes, travails, and triumphs. We take this journey with him, commenting on and debating his choices and decisions. During his first year as CIO, Barton confronts issues related to skill and talent management, IT value, priority setting and financial justification of digital investments; operational models geared at innovation rather than efficiency; cybersecurity security risks and crises; internal communication challenges; technology partner management; and how to handle potentially innovative technologies like blockchain, machine learning and artificial intelligence. As Barton encounters these issues, we address them too, through associated readings that clearly brings forward the deep interdependence between the trials of the IT department and the company's ability to compete on digital business innovations.

Delivering Digital Business
This course offers a series of hands-on tutorials around the implementation of digital business initiatives. While digitalization is the new reality for most organizations, implementing digital business initiatives is not straight forward. Regardless of whether a firm is established or just starting up, delivering digital products, transforming a process, or integrating skills and roles needed for digital business initiatives is hard.

The goal of this course is to equip students with the tools necessary to assess, frame, understand, evaluate, and deliver business initiatives using digital technology. The tools covered include - but are not limited to; customer journey maps, strategy canvas, business models, stakeholder mapping, designing a value proposition and others. The course comprises workshops with minimal lecture elements. The focus in this course is on the pragmatic approach to delivering a business solution using digital technologies. Throughout the semester, students will work in groups on a ‘proof-of-concept’ in a given problem domain. To that end, the in-class sessions will run interactive workshops during which students apply different analysis techniques and work on their suggested solution. Students are expected to actively participate in discussions and in-class activity.

The minor consists of the examinations listed below. The learning objectives and the regulations of the individual examinations are prescribed in the online course catalogue. Direct links to the individual examinations are inserted in the table below.

The following courses have compulsory assignments or requirements about active class participation. Further specifications and regulations are listed in the relevant course description in the online course catalogue, see the below link(s).

Minor Coordinators:

Stefan Henningsson, Professor MSO, Department of Digitalization

Philipp Hukal, Assistant Professor, Department of Digitalization

Study Board

The minor in Digital Business Development is offered by the Study Board for BSc and MSc in Business Administration and Information Systems, MSc in Business Administration and Ebusiness, and MSc in Business Administration and Data Science.

How to sign up

If you like to sign up for the Minor in Digital Business Development, you have to select CINTM1001U when you sign up for electives. You will then subsequently be signed up for all three courses. You do not have to select all three courses individually.

CINTV1015U - A Digital Battlefield: How to transform a new business venture to a sustainable digital business?

CINTV3004U - Transforming IT Management for Digital Business   

CINTV1021U - Delivering Digital Business