The Digital Economy - Expertise Track

From digital commerce and marketing, big data, fintech to industry 4.0, the digital age is having an ever-increasing impact on how we live and work. The Digital Economy MBA Expertise Track offers courses in

• Digital Commerce and Marketing
• Big Data & Business Analytics
• FinTech
• Industry 4.0

After completing this expertise track you have the knowledge and the skills to deal with these new challenges, to identify new market opportunities, to manage new processes and to change mindsets to cope with the dynamic digital revolution.

Digital Commerce and Marketing
To succeed nowadays, it is not enough to only establish an e-commerce division of your business. Organisations should use technology and data to meet the needs and expectations of the new digital customer. Customers’ behaviour and expectations have changed; customers expect social media and mobile applications to guide them through the complete purchasing journey from online to offline and vice versa. More than ever, organisations must put the customer at the core of their growth strategy, and provide them with a unique journey. Integrating the online and offline worlds into a unique holistic experience will be the new normal. During this course, you learn about the main drivers, which are currently pointing out the direction of the way business is done. We discuss how to re-image your business, learn how to strengthen the growth strategy and how to address the competitive challenges of digitalisation. We focus on the main characteristics of the new “selling” concepts, exploring the Omni channel approach and the unified commerce concept. We learn how to design a successful customer experience strategy. The second part of the course focuses on the marketing aspects of digital retail. In our current digital economy, it is important for companies to understand the unique strengths, possibilities, and limitations of the various digital marketing options. The ability to understand strategies for using a correct combination of channels, and the insights for correctly interpreting data and results is also needed.

Big Data & Business Analytics
Big data is being generated by everything around us, continuously and in every sector and function in the global economy. It comes from multiple sources, in a variety of formats and arrives in both high volume and high velocity. Being able to use this vast resource will help you make effective strategic decisions. This course looks at where we can find data, how we can transform it and how we can use it in the decision-making process. You will gain insight and knowledge in how big data creates value through making information transparent. This allows you to make better decisions concerning efficiency, performance and risk management. It provides for better market segmentation and allow firms to better tailor products to consumer needs, as well as providing essential information for the next generation of products.

FinTech
A hype or a serious branch of finance? Should managers know about fintech? Where is the money? Should we invest in crypto-currencies or NFTs? The answers will be provided in this course, which will introduce you to a high technology and innovative strategy approach. Various functional areas of FinTech will be addressed, such as Payments, (Personal) Banking, Digital Lending, Wealth Management, Insurtech, Capital Markets, SMB, Real Estate and Mortgages. In addition, we will discuss technologies, like Cloud, API, Low-Code, AI & ML, Blockchain & DLT. Financial business models will be analysed, including DeFi (a.o. Is it better to stake or provide liquidity, on Lido or Nexo or elsewhere?) and the Fintech investment ecosystem. At the end of the course, you will be able to answer whether FinTech will have a place in your organisation, next to traditional finance.

Industry 4.0
Industry 4.0, otherwise known as the fourth industrial revolution, has become a central point of discussion for today’s business leaders. With the increases in digitisation and automation, we see radical developments in interconnectivity that affect both professional and personal worlds. Managing at the interface where man meets machine is becoming blurred, and requires business leaders to embrace new perspectives and react to new opportunities. This course looks at how business is being affected by automation and the use of robots in production processes, cyber-physical systems (such as medical monitoring or process control systems), the
internet of things (the inter-networking of physical devices) and cloud computing (whereby the internet allows to shared computer processing resources as well data with other devices on demand).