Harvard Online Courses

Course outline

• Digital Strategy and Innovation

  Through global case studies on market leaders and innovative startups in diverse industries, Professors Iansiti and Lakhani will examine the strategies and operational changes needed to make data analytics integral to your future success.

• Programming and Data Science Systems

  Through a mix of technical instruction, discussion of case studies, and weekly programming projects, this course empowers participants to make technological decisions even if not technologists themselves. Topics include cloud computing, networking, privacy, scalability, security, and more, with a particular emphasis on web and mobile technologies.

• Leadership, Innovation, and Change

  This course will focus on the leader’s role in both executing their current strategy better than their competitors as well as their role in shaping strategic innovation. We employ the congruence model that links strategy to execution through alignment of culture, people, tasks, structure, and executive leadership. Because ambidexterity requires leaders that can deal with punctuated change and paradoxical strategies, our course concludes with what we know about ambidextrous leadership and leading large system change.

• Operations and Supply Chain Management

  This course emphasizes managing product availability, especially in a context of rapid product proliferation, short product life cycles, and global networks of suppliers and customers. Topics examined include inventory management, distribution economics, demand forecasting, and supplier management.

• Foundations of Quantitative Analysis

  This course is an introduction to using statistical approaches to solve business problems. The main components of the course include methods for describing and summarizing data, the fundamentals of probability, the basics of study design and data collection, and statistical inference. Data analyses, simulation, and design issues are implemented in the statistical computing package R run within the RStudio interface.

• Leadership and People Analytics

  Participants will build hands-on skills to analyze data in ways that complement the frameworks and intuitions they would normally use to guide their managerial actions on people issues. Anchored in data, this course will equip participants with an analytic approach to diagnosing the varied forces that influence individual, team, and organizational performance, leading to more effective interventions and actions.

• Data Driven Marketing

  What used to be a qualitative and instinct-driven business function (think “Mad Men”) has now become a data-driven profession that relies on quantitative insights on how best to optimize ad creation and placement and influence consumer purchase behavior. This course will examine the ways in which marketing has changed and the new skills and capabilities needed to succeed in this function.

• Data Science Pipeline and Critical Thinking

  This course will take a holistic approach to helping participants understand the key factors involved, from data collection to analysis to prediction and insight. Projects will give students hands-on experience developing and running a data science pipeline to ensure that the correct business predictions are being made.

• Immersions

  In addition to the online learning components of the program, you will attend two weekend-long, in-person immersions hosted on campus at Harvard Business School in Boston. Note: given COVID-19 restrictions, these immersions will take place virtually until further notice.

  During these in-person experiences, you will meet face-to-face with your classmates, network with faculty and industry leaders during nightly events, tour the Harvard campus, and participate in hands-on guided learning exercises. You will also use the Harvard Business School case method, formulating solutions to real-world business scenarios as a way to understand relevant challenges in the industry. Recent topics of discussion have included reputation systems, data sharing and security, and organizational leadership.