Envisioning and Innovating
All EMMIO courses combine a solid theoretical component with a hands-on, practical approach. Lectures are heavily interactive and discussion based and they combine presentation of frameworks with discussion of business cases, simulations and role-plays. The EMMIO approach requires participants’ critical thinking, active contribution in class and willingness to engage in peer-to-peer learning.
Modules in this section scrutinize the complex and dynamic environment within which international organizations operate, explore the main frameworks and tools for strategic thinking and planning, tackle the building blocks of organizational design, institutional governance, and change management, and foster participants’ ability to drive and assess successful and sustainable innovation.
In this first term you will elaborate on the following topics:
This course serves as background to understand the main current strategic, managerial and governance issues faced by International Organizations (IOs) further explored in the EMMIO program. The course presents an overview of the international development landscape and how different approaches to delivering development assistance have evolved through time. It then focus on the relations among IOs and other global actors of the international cooperation system and their respective roles. The course also investigates the operational impacts of changing funding patterns and program delivery modalities, the notion of system-wide consistency and competition dynamics among IOs.
Strategy can be seen as ‘positioning’ of an organization within a competitive space, ‘fit’ between the organization and its environment and managerial ‘perspective’. Having a clear strategic vision and the ability to put it in place is fundamental for modern International Organizations to gain visibility, acquire essential resources and to effectively achieve its objectives are critical for the organizations’ success. This course provides the theoretical foundations of strategy formulation, analyzesthe role of managers in strategic planning and management and provides tailored tools to formulate, implement and evaluate corporate strategies. This course also aims to stimulate participants’ ability to think strategically and to apply their vision into concrete strategic propositions.
This course provides practical Human Resource Management (HRM) knowledge on how to leverage human capital and maximize performance to improve organizational effectiveness through integrated talent management, sustained levels of engagement and motivation, and a clear orientation towards results. This course presents the main practices, challenges and innovations throughout the HR management cycle -workforce planning, talent attraction, recruitment and induction, performance assessment, career development and succession-. It provides a practitioner’s perspective on how to attract, successfully maximize and retain human capital to achieve organizational objectives.
Negotiation and governance in multi-stakeholder environments are complex and diverse processes. The course is based on the blended learning methodology with lectures that are supported by class discussions, exercises and simulations. It provides participants’ the tools and techniques needed in the management of successful negotiation processes and stimulates participants’ negotiation style self-assessment. The coursepresents real examples on how to manage conflict in business and political contexts and puts participants in front of live-case situations of handling negotiations and conflict in a complex, multi-stakeholder environment.
Innovation is a holistic concept; its domain extends to envisaging and implementing changes in strategies, organizational structures, managerial skills, relationships with stakeholders and overall performance metrics. The need for successful change is today a survival imperative for most organizations which are asked to ‘do more with less’ and to evolve their modes of engagement ‘to deliver thinking, rather than things’. This course analyzesthe key concepts for managing complex innovations in the international organizations. In particular, it aims at providing an analytical framework to assess needs, prioritize objectives, support decision-making and set the road map for implementation. The ultimate aim is to empower participants to be real change actors, to proactively identify the need for change and to drive sustainable, credible initiatives within their organizations.