This course builds on First-Year Strategy to focus on multi-business firms and expands beyond the classical strategy concepts (i.e., capabilities analysis or five forces) to understand how firms can best optimize their scope, develop new business models, and leverage existing resources. The course is for anyone interested in managing, investing, financing, or advising a company that operates in multiple markets. As modern firms span many geographies and categories, this course is for anyone interested in developing new strategies and effectively running a business today - big or small.

Many of our most successful entrepreneurial companies have been founded and significantly influenced by professional venture-capital firms. This course focuses on the professional world of venture capitalists and how venture capitalists work with entrepreneurs to create substantial, enduring ventures. The course addresses three topics: how venture-capital firms are formed, funded, and managed; how firms manage their relationships with the limited partners who provide their investment capital; and how the parties work together to build successful major companies.

GEMstone is a second-year capstone course that builds on the monetary and financial electives offered in the GEM area, specifically Economics of Money and Banking (EMB) and Global Financial Markets (GFM). As a capstone, this course is designed to help students consolidate the knowledge they have accumulated over two years at Darden into an unshakable understanding of international finance and monetary economics.

This is a business-world-focused course on game theory: the mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational (and irrational) actors. Some of the common applications covered in the course include competition between firms, trading in financial markets, auctions, international politics, warfare, and artificial intelligence.

As economies and businesses become more global, companies worldwide will increasingly need to examine their economic practices and beliefs. The purpose of this seminar is to help participants 1) develop a deep understanding of the strategic concepts and business models underlying foreign (in this case, Chinese) business, based on a thorough knowledge of cultural and institutional differences. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden Students.

This course is designed to provide a forum for student leaders to talk about the challenges and rewards of leadership at Darden. Enrolling students should have a clear commitment to a practical leadership experience during their second year. Selected readings in the leadership and social psychology literature serve as frameworks for examining one's personal leadership style. Prerequisite: Restricted to Darden students.

This advanced strategy seminar provides class participants with an integrative framework and specific analytical tools for understanding how firms interact in the marketplace: within an industry, across industries, and beyond national borders. The premise of the course holds that business competition is both dynamic and relative; it is a constant interplay between companies as they juggle market positions by exchanging moves and countermoves, and a firm initiating a competitive move (whether a new product introduction or expansion into a new market, an acquisition bid or a simple price cut) must be prepared to meet counteractions from rivals. Understanding the relative nature of this dynamic process is the key to building and sustaining competitive advantage. The seminar is designed to develop an appreciation for cutting-edge academic research and its application to pertinent competitive issues, which is an essential skill for managers responsible for developing and implementing business strategies and for consultants advising such managers. Participants will be expected to abstract larger strategic issues from financial and operational particulars and to apply the concepts, analytical tools, and research methods learned in class to an intensive project on competition. The course will be especially useful to those interested in strategy consulting, marketing and strategic planning, and industry security analysis, as well as anyone seeking to develop sophisticated competitive thinking. Prerequisites: Restricted to Darden students.

Leading with influence is a deep dive into the science and personal application of leadership, with a particular focus on facilitating ongoing leadership development and assessment beyond Darden. Leader development does not begin or end with business school; our behavioral tendencies were shaped before we got here, and our evolution will continue when we leave.

In this course students will be immersed in real time cases of multinational companies that are challenged with communicating the rationale and imperatives behind their strategic renewal, reset, or total organizational transformation.

This course examines the benefits and shortcomings of markets as an institutional arrangement for improving social welfare, and it explores conditions under which government action helps direct better market outcomes. The textbook case for government intervention to correct market failures. It describes an idealized environment in which market outcomes are Pareto optimal.