When: 15, 16,17 & 18 December 2016
Where: USI, Executive Center, Via Giuseppe Buffi 13,6900 Lugano

The session is divided into two courses

Course: Strategy

Professor Erik Larsen

Professor of Management

Course Description and goals

This course focuses mainly on business strategy, examining issues central to its long and short-term competitive position. We will explore a variety of conceptual frameworks and models to analyse and gain insight about how to achieve or sustain competitive advantage.

The journey starts by analysing the external environments influence on a firm’s performance and subsequently analysing the impact of the internal context (resources and capabilities) on firm performance.

After covering both the external and internal perspectives, we bring these concepts together to discuss firm level competitive advantage.

The first part of the course focuses on single business or business unit strategy while the second part of the course explore corporate

Course: Finance

Professor François Degeorge & Professor Eric Nowak

Professor François Degeorge
Professor of Finance

Prof Eric Nowak
Curriculum
Full Professor of Financial Management and Accounting at USI since 2003, Eric Nowak studied at the Universities of St Gallen and Bocconi in Milan and completed his PhD at the University of St Gallen in 1997 after a research period at the University of Chicago with a fellowship of the National Science Foundation.

Subsequently, he was assistant professor of finance at Goethe University Frankfurt, where he received his venia legendi in 2002. Eric Nowak was visiting professor at the Universities of Hohenheim, COPPEAD Rio de Janeiro, CEIBS Shanghai, and Witten/Herdecke, a fellow of the Center for Financial Studies (CFS), and an affiliate member of the Swiss Finance Institute (SFI).

He has published in the top journals of fields as diverse as finance, entrepreneurship, and business history, among them the Journal of Finance,the Journal of Business Venturing, and Business History.

He was the national coordinator for the European Research Network ‘Regional Comparative Advantage and Knowledge Based Entrepreneurship’. During his sabbatical academic year 2010-11 he was the Rock Center for Corporate Governance Visiting Scholar at Stanford University.

Course Description and goals

This course teaches the logic underlying the firm’s financial decisions: investment, financing, and payout policies. The main themes will be:

• What is corporate finance?
• The concept of value
• The discounted cash-flow (DCF) method in theory and practice
• Capital budgeting decisions
• Market efficiency and financial policy
• Financial structure and the Modigliani-Miller theorem
• Payout policies: dividends and share repurchases.
  You can easily register by sending an e-mail at emba@usi.ch