Entrepreneurial Finance

Today it is crucial to be able to use data for making better marketing decisions. This is possible by better understanding, predicting and managing customers’ behavior in a landscape where customers and brands (firms) are decision makers. This course focuses on the applied use of various techniques/methods, theories and approaches from marketing literature in practical business cases. In more particular words this means exploring, investigating and predicting behavioral and attitudinal (customer) data to provide data-driven answers to relevant marketing questions

The course is focused on understanding of the opportunities arisen from digital transformation, in terms of innovative business models for companies and new value for users. Specifically, the course will deepen technology forecasting and technology roadmapping methodologies, applied to emerging digital trends, focusing on Fintech, IoT and Artificial Intelligence.

Meoli Azzurra

The course addresses the main ethical, political, and legal issues related to AI, with particular attention to the myth of artificial intelligence ethics, the political properties of information systems, and Italian and European regulations on AI. The conceptual analysis will be accompanied by the discussion of concrete cases. Participants will thus develop the ability to recognize fallacies, myths, and misleading narratives — which lead to the hasty adoption of immature products — and to identify realistic automation pathways that comply with fundamental rights.

The course aims to explore the principles of financial statement analysis. It provides the participants with a framework to understand how businesses’ value and risks are captured in financial statements and price them correctly.

The digitization of the economy is one of the most relevant issues of our time. The objective of this course is to analyze how digital economy has fundamentally challenged traditional business models and created new business opportunities. We will start with a brief introduction of the digital economy and then analyze the specific business strategies adopted by the different players in this ecosystem, specifically platforms. We will also discuss the implications for public policy and regulation. In particular, we will consider whether new business practices and contracts in the digital economy are beneficial or detrimental to society. Real case studies related to Amazon, Airbnb, Booking.com, Facebook, Google, Uber, and others, will be analyzed.

The “Sustainable Finance and ESG Investing” course explores the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into financial decisions and investments. Students will learn how sustainable investments can generate long-term value, and by the end of the course, they will be able to apply ESG strategies in the financial sector, responding to the growing demand for responsible investments.

This course emphasizes statistical methods useful for tackling modern-day data analysis problems. A special attention is dedicated to techniques that help managers to make intelligent use of databases by recognizing patterns and making predictions.

The students will develope skills to:
• plan a statistical data analysis process
• manage a data source
• choose the best method to analyze the data
• implement the analysis and interpret the results

This course will provide students with an overview of financial markets and the valuation of securities. The course will start presenting the financial system and a taxonomy of the type of securities traded in financial markets. The single asset classes will be then studied, including fixed-income and money market securities, equity instruments, mutual funds, financial derivatives, and hybrids.

The course deals with financial risk management with an emphasis on the recognition of price risk and on financial risk management tools from the point of view of the company. A significant part of the course is dedicated to the analysis of derivatives and their use in risk management.

The role of IT into banking industry is dramatic and innovative at the same time. Banking business models are redesigning by new paradigms: they will impact to strategies and operational perspectives.  Banking players need to be into the new picture, supported by new toolkit able to combine the current landscape with new technologies.

Last but not least, ITC firms, media networks, and Big techs companies are the new entrants into financial services arena. FinTech emerging applications are disruptive forces capable to transforming the financial services industry by making transactions faster, cheaper, more secure and transparent. Our banking course delivers a general framework of financial industry and provide some specific knowledge into the disruptive innovation in terms of organization/processes/infrastructures/applications.

This course provides an alternative approach to the study of financial markets: behavioral finance. This approach starts with an observation that the assumptions of investor rationality are overwhelmingly contradicted by both psychological research and empirical evidence. The course gives an introduction into this field and includes results from behavioral finance that help to understand many puzzles in traditional finance. The psychology of dealing with automated financial counterparts/advisors as opposed to humans will also be discussed.

The “Business Planning” course provides the necessary skills to develop a solid and strategic business plan. Students will learn how to define clear objectives, analyze the market, develop growth strategies, and manage resources effectively. With a focus on financial analysis, marketing, and risk management, the course prepares participants to create business plans that can drive the success of new ventures or business projects.

The course focuses on the finance aspects following the life cycle of young and innovative ventures from their start-up. These young ventures usually require substantial outside financing in early stages to eventually create employment, growth, social contributions and tax revenues in their future. Bank financing is hardly available for these ventures and therefore, all funds need to be raised from other sources, e.g. friends and family, business angels, or from professional financial intermediaries, so-called venture capital and private equity funds. Besides those traditional channels, ventures can raise funds from “the crowd” using digital platforms (crowdfunding) or blockchain-based technologies (ICOs).

The course provides the skills needed to understand and analyze the main corporate financial decisions and examines the impact of the rise of digital finance on these decisions. The main topics include investment choices, the definition of a firm’s financial structure and its effect on the cost of capital, the decision to go public versus peer-to-peer solutions, and the management of financial risks.

This course examines the rules and processes through which firms are controlled and managed. At the heart of corporate governance is the agency problem: Managers, who control corporate resources, may prioritize their own interests rather than maximizing returns for the providers of capital. What are the consequences for the firm’s value if they fail to act in investors’ interests? What mechanisms and incentives ensure they do? The course explores governance structures across different ownership models, with a focus on Europe, where large shareholders play a dominant role.

The course is intended to provide the students with a framework they can use every time they will have to “create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty” (Eric Ries).

From launching their own startup to leading a corporate innovation project at a Fortune 500 company; from the reboot of a brick-and-mortar family business to the creation of a mobile app. All of these seemingly unrelated problems can be tackled using the same iterative data driven approach