Capstone Course in Markets & Management Studies
MMS 190.01

Theme -- Creating and Managing Technology in Organizations

                Integrative learning is a fundamental challenge in our contemporary world.  The Markets & Management Studies Program at Duke is premised on the idea that an interdisciplinary perspective offers the best training for people who will be pursuing careers in business, government, or the non-profit sector.  This Capstone course is intended to help M&M students pull together material from core courses in the program, but it is meant to facilitate integrative learning in other ways as well.  You will learn how to work in teams to identify and resolve problems confronting companies, industries, and communities today.  This is a difficult assignment because you will be expected to blend your diverse perspectives and backgrounds, to bridge theory and facts, and to convince the participants or stakeholders in the situation you are analyzing that you have a realistic contribution to make.  In this regard, you must move beyond the passive learner role ordinarily associated with students to become both engaged researchers and policy advocates. 

Opening the “Black Box” of Technology

There is a technology focus in this Capstone course.  It is a truism in the business world that whenever technology people can understand business, or business people understand technology, they become very successful.  Unfortunately, this combination is relatively rare.  How to make it happen more frequently is the challenge we need to address.  On the one hand, our lives are increasingly influenced by advanced technology.  On the other hand, fewer and fewer of us are equipped to understand, much less actually utilize, this technology.  A curriculum that focuses on particular industries and technologies, whether the highly specialized disk drive industry or the more diversified world of e-business, can provide an initial sense of key technological principles, practices and problems.   In so doing, it equips students and citizens with the tools to think, talk about, and make decisions that affect technological change.  This has always been a difficult issue – recall C.P. Snow’s long-standing emphasis on the problem of “two cultures.”  It is even more challenging in the contemporary era of globalization.  As such, a more integrated business and science curriculum can bridge the gap between technology specialists, who often don’t know how to communicate the value of their research to broader audiences, and managers, venture capitalists, and public officials who are often at a loss with regard to the scientific foundations and ethical implications of their decisions about technology.

Course Requirements

            There are three main requirements for this course:

1)  Technology and Organizations Websites:  There is a major team project required in this course.  Teams comprised of 4 or 5 students will be formed, each focusing on a different technological arena.  Within each website, students will be asked to address a number of different dimensions, including:

• Core or defining technologies
• Intellectual property rights (e.g., patentability of discoveries)
• A competitive analysis of market structures and opportunities
• Capital markets and financing
• Policy policy and ethnical issues

These dimensions will be outlined in more detail in a separate memo.

2)  An interview-based profile of a scientist, technologist, or business person dealing with the challenge of effectively harnessing technology in organizational or societal settings

Students will write a profile of a person who is dealing with the intersection of business and technology in their work experience.  This person may be someone you know, one of the guest speakers in class, someone working at Duke or in the local business community, or anyone else with whom you can have an extended conversation about what they do and how they are meeting the kinds of challenges we are discussing in class. 

3)  A focused and up-to-date literature review of theories, concepts, and findings that address the technology or organizational challenges of the person you profiled

Using materials from your research for this course or from pervious courses, you will develop a focused discussion of what the current literature tells you about how to address the issues confronted by the technology or business person whom you profile.  In a sense, your review of the literature should provide a constructive effort to resolve the technology or organizational problems that the person you are interviewing is confronting.

Course Grade

Four components determine the final course grade:

30% -- 1) Participation in team project.

30% -- 2) A case study of a particular individual. This paper will be about 8-10 pages long, and it is due on Wednesday, Oct. 10^th.

30% -- 3) A literature review to address a technological or organizational challenge.  This paper will be 10-12 pages long, and it is due on Monday, Nov. 5^th.

10% -- 4) Participation in class.  This grade will include write-ups done on each of the guest speakers by designated students (one write-up per semester), as well as periodic inputs on the CourseInfo Discussion Board (under Communication tools) or feedback on peer projects.

Readings

The syllabus and other information relevant to this Capstone are available on the Markets & Management Studies website <www.markets.duke.edu>, and also will be provided through CourseInfo at http://cinfo.aas.duke.edu/courses/MMS190.01/ 

The articles we will read for the course are all available through E-Reserves at Perkins Library: http://www.lib.duke.edu/access/reserves/

COURSE OUTLINE

29 Aug. 2001