Curriculum

MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences students complete degree requirements in four semesters over two years, augmented by coursework during August at the beginning of the program and during both January terms. Students have the summer free between Year 1 and Year 2 to work on their own startup concept or pursue an internship at a technology company.

Most of Year 1 is spent at HBS completing the MBA Required Curriculum (RC), although students start the program as a cohort at SEAS in August, taking the Design Theory and Practice course. They also meet periodically as a cohort at SEAS during Year 1 in the Engineering, Design & Innovation Management Seminar, and complete the Technology Venture Immersion course together during the January term.

During Year 2, students split their time between SEAS and HBS, enrolling in electives at each school. As a cohort, they also take the Designing Technology Ventures course during the fall term, and, during the January and spring terms, complete the Capstone course, in which they work in a small team to build and launch a new product.

Reimagining the Future

The program is completed in two years and is designed to train future leaders of technology ventures. The MS/MBA Engineering Sciences Program provides a strong foundation in general management and convey concepts and builds skills in engineering, design, and innovation management.

First Year

August

Harvard Business School Online CORe Harvard Business School

As with all MBA candidates, students take a short test to determine whether they are required to complete Harvard Business School Online CORe prior to matriculating in August of Year 1. CORe, an online program requiring about 150 hours of work over roughly ten weeks, covers basic business analytics, microeconomics for managers, and financial accounting.

Design Theory & Practice Joint Course

Any organization, business or venture grounds its value on how “meaningful” are its products (functionally, symbolically and emotionally). Design Theory and Practice (DTP) empowers students to create products that are meaningful, to people who use them and to society at large. The course has three purposes:

To inspire students about the power of design in new business creation. We will address questions such as: Why is design relevant in tech ventures? How does it create value? And, most of all, why is it fundamental for a technology entrepreneur/leader?
To enable students to move into action, by learning the theories and practice (mindsets, processes, methods) of design: Where do ideas come from? How to frame (and especially re-frame) a problem? How to understand what is meaningful to users? How to make a product desirable (functionally, emotionally and symbolically)? How to design and build the user interface of a product? How to test it? How to narrate and visualize a novel idea?
To co-explore, with the class and the instructor, the use of design as a leadership practice: How does a leader who masters design better contribute to creation of value? How can we forge a new manifesto for leadership, inspired by design?

The course is intensively project-based. Students will work in teams on a complex innovation challenge proposed by a real corporation. They will suggest a more effective framing of the problem, and create a novel meaningful solution, with a special focus on the user interface.

Fall Term

HBS MBA Required Curriculum Harvard Business School: Fall and Spring of Year 1 is spent at HBS completing the MBA Required Curriculum (RC)

January

Technology Venture Immersion Joint Course: During the January term of Year 1, students complete Technology Venture Immersion, a two-week course jointly taught by HBS and SEAS faculty. Modeled on the HBS Startup Bootcamp, the Technology Venture Immersion employs a learning-by-doing approach, with students working in teams on their own startup concepts and on problems provided by instructors to build skills with human-centered design and lean experimentation methods.

Spring Term

HBS MBA Required Curriculum Harvard Business School: Fall and Spring of Year 1 is spent at HBS completing the MBA Required Curriculum (RC)

Second Year

Fall Term

Designing Technology Ventures Joint Course

Launching a successful startup requires a business model that defines the venture’s customer value proposition; plans for technology, operations, and marketing; and a formula for eventually earning profit. It also requires an organization that can execute that business model. Students will learn the attributes of effective tech venture business models and organizations—and how to design them. They will employ system dynamics modeling using simulation software to inform business model choices, and gain practice with organization design methods to diagnose misalignment and resolve tradeoffs (e.g. efficiency vs. effectiveness, decision speed vs. quality).

(2) HBS Electives Harvard Business School

These are representative sets of electives that focus on technology management and entrepreneurship. Specific course offerings will vary each year. Students will select their second-year electives with the advice of their academic advisor. They can take any HBS elective, except for Field Courses or Independent Projects due to overlap with project requirements in the MS/MBA’s core courses.

Technology Management Focus

Building & Sustaining a Successful Enterprise: The focus of this course is to learn how to use well-researched theories about strategy, innovation and management to understand why things happen the way they do in businesses, and to understand what management tools, strategies and methods will and will not be effective, in the different circumstances in which our students find themselves. Read More
Digital Innovation & Transformation: The course introduces you to the critical elements of designing and developing digital products and services, how these can be configured and lead, and how the results are managed. These elements include economic and technological principles underlying digital transformation, identifying and integrating diverse user needs, organizing and leading product and service innovation initiatives, harnessing crowdsourcing and distributed innovation networks. Read More
Entrepreneurial Finance: The goal of Entrepreneurial Finance is to help managers make better investment and financing decisions in entrepreneurial settings. The course covers all stages of the venture's life cycle from startup to exit, and delves into issues such as deal structures, incentives, business models, and valuation. Read More
Field Course: Entrepreneurial Sales & Marketing: Startups face challenges with customer acquisition at stages from customer discovery to scaling. This course examines some representative issues and tools for that context. Read More
Founders’ Journey: The course is divided into three modules that cover key milestones in a Founders' Journey: Founding a venture, scaling a venture, and exiting a venture. Read More
Introduction to Technology Sales: The purpose of this entrepreneur-focused course is to demystify sales and help you understand how to sell and manage sales teams. Read More
Law, Management & Entrepreneurship: This course is designed to develop the legal literacy of MBA students by honing legal instincts that will help business leaders avoid legal pitfalls, attain a competitive edge and promote long-term success. Expanding well beyond the basic legal concepts introduced in LCA, the course will refine students’ understanding of how law affects all aspects of business, and develop a deeper appreciation of how legal systems operate and how to operate within the boundaries of legal systems. Read More
Managing the Future of Work: The course covers business and policy perspectives in advanced economies, and companies of many sizes are considered. While the material is necessarily broad in nature, a modest edge is given to implications for business leadership in larger corporations (i.e., what can Apple or Siemens do?). Read More
Managing with Data Science: This course focuses on helping students develop the basic data skills needed to guide an organization towards becoming data-centric and to potentially create data products. Read More
Negotiation: This course will teach you how to analyze, prepare for, and execute negotiations at a sophisticated level-through actions both at and away from the bargaining table. It will give you the opportunity to enhance your strengths as a negotiator and to shore up your weaknesses. Read More
People Analytics: People Analytics is designed to help students use data — and manage others who use data — to improve people-related decisions and practices in their role as a general manager. Read More
Strategy & Technology: This course explores the unique aspects of creating effective management and investment strategies for technology-intensive businesses. Read More
Building Sustainable Cities & Infrastructure: The world faces challenges including rapid urbanization, increasing pressure on the environment and on basic resources, and the growing difficulty governments face in managing the confluence of these trends. This class will appeal to students who would like to explore tools and examples that help investors, entrepreneurs, and policy makers understand and address these issues. Students interested in infrastructure, private equity, real estate, business and environment, and social enterprise also will find the course to be useful. Read More
The Business of Smart Connected Products/Internet of Things: The attempt in this course is to not only understand what are smart connected products, what technologies are needed for smart connected products, how these products create value for end users, but also what ecosystems need to be created and supported to realize the full value of this technology. Read More
Contemporary Developing Countries: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Intractable Problems: This course will provide a framework (and multiple lenses) through which to think about the salient economic and social problems of the five billion people of the developing world, and to work in a team setting toward identifying entrepreneurial solutions to such problems. Read More
E-Commerce: This course is intended for students interested in either working as a manager in an e-commerce company or entrepreneurs building their own e-commerce startups. We will study the challenges of creating, growing, and optimizing for profitability an e-commerce business. Read More
Field Course: Transforming Health Care Delivery: This course will help students develop the managerial skills required to identify and implement change. It will draw upon a range of approaches for improving health care delivery, including the value-based health care framework, continuous improvement, organizational redesign, population health management, precision medicine, patient engagement, and payment reform. Read More
Entrepreneurship & Technology Innovations in Education: This course explores how entrepreneurs are applying business practices and technology innovations to transform classrooms and schools/colleges to lead to higher performance. Read More
Entrepreneurship in Healthcare IT & Services: This course will examine a series of innovations within the burgeoning HCIT industry, and look at the decisions entrepreneurs face as they refine their business models, innovate, and grow. Read More
Innovating in Health Care: This course helps students to create successful entrepreneurial health care ventures by enabling them to: Identify the alignment between an entrepreneurial health care venture and the Six Forces that shape health care - structure, financing, technology, consumers, accountability, and public policy; and create a business model that responds appropriately to any misalignments. Read More
Launching Technology Ventures: The course takes the perspective of founders in technology startups across all functional elements, with a particular focus on product, sales, marketing, growth and business development. For each function, we explore challenges that managers encounter before a startup achieves product-market fit, that is, a match between its product solution and market needs. We also study cross-functional conflict in new ventures as well as investor-founder conflicts and ways in which managers cope with such conflicts. Read More
Leading Social Enterprise: This course is about leadership and strategy for creating, developing, and scaling the impact of high-performing social enterprises—be they nonprofit, for-profit, or hybrid organizations. Read More
Making Markets: Students will learn how to identify market failures and determine when those failures create opportunities to launch or redesign marketplaces. Read More
Public Entrepreneurship: Public entrepreneurship is designed for students who want to solve the world’s biggest, toughest problems; for those individuals that want to sell to the world’s biggest customers and to lead them in creatively new ways. Read More
Scaling Technology Ventures: Through case discussions, this course will examine executive leadership and functional management challenges in scaling startups after the "search and discovery" stage of startup evolution. Read More
21st Century Energy: The course is intended to provide students with a basic understanding of the microeconomics and politics of energy and adjacent industries and to introduce students to some of the unusual challenges of strategy and leadership that arise from these externalities and from pervasive government interventions in energy markets. The course also covers some enduring ideas about innovation and entrepreneurship as these apply to the energy field. Read More

All HBS Elective Courses

(2) SEAS Electives Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science

The program requires three elective courses of graduate-level technical rigor that form a coherent area of expertise. Visit the SEAS MS/MBA Master of Science Course Requirements page for further specification. Prospective applicants should check prerequisites on the Harvard Course Catalog to ensure that they have adequate preparation. These are representative sets of graduate-level technical courses in specific depth areas. Specific course offerings will vary each year, and some courses are offered in alternate years. Students will select their courses going into the second year, with the advice of their academic advisor.

Engineering Sciences

Robotics

ES 259 Advanced Introduction to Robotics
CS 283 Computer Vision
CS 284 Optimization Algorithms for Robotics
ES 252r Advanced Topics in Robotics Research

Biological Engineering

ES 221 Drug Delivery
ES 222 Advanced Cellular Engineering
ES 230 Advanced Tissue Engineering

Neuroengineering

ES 249 Advanced Neural Control of Movement
ES 226r Special Topics in Neural Engineering: Learning & Memory in Neural Systems
ES 201 Decision Theory
CS 283 Computer Vision

Microelectronics & Photonics

ES 273 Optics and Photonics
ES 274 Quantum Devices
ES 276 Introduction to MicroElectroMechanical System
ES 277 Microfabrication Laboratory

Computer Science

Data Privacy & Security

CS 263 Systems Security
CS 227 Topics in Cryptography and Privacy
CS 226 Algorithms for Big Data

Data Science

CS 222 Computational Learning Theory
CS 281 Advanced Machine Learning
CS 234 Topics on Computation in Networks and Crowds

Big Data

CS 222 Algorithms at the Ends of the Wire
CS 265 Big Data Systems
CS 242 Computing at Scale

Software Systems

CS 222 Algorithms at the Ends of the Wire
CS 262 Distributed Systems
CS 265 Big Data Systems

EconCS

CS 223 Probabilistic Analysis and Algorithms
CS 234 Topics on Computation in Networks and Crowds
CS 236 Topics at the Interface between Computer Science and Economics

All SEAS COURSES

January

Launch Lab/Capstone I Joint Course: The MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences Capstone is an intensive project that requires teams of students to apply and integrate the skills they have learned across core disciplines developed in the program curriculum. Specifically, teams will be expected to design, build and launch a new technology-based product/service venture, and thereby to demonstrate mastery with respect to three areas of knowledge: Design Knowledge: The use of human-centered design methods to understand users, identify solutions to their needs, and gather feedback via rapid, iterative prototyping. Technical Knowledge: The use of rigorous system engineering methods to plan, design, develop, build, and test a complex technology-based product/service, integrating knowledge across multiple engineering disciplines. Business Knowledge: The use of business model analysis and lean experimentation methods to develop and test a set of hypotheses that capture how the new product/service will create value, including business model design, pricing, sales and marketing, operating model and profit formula.

The Capstone is divided into two parts, the first of which is an immersive course completed during the January term of the EC year (Capstone I). The subsequent spring course (Capstone II) follows on from and builds upon work completed in January. In Capstone II, dedicated mentors will be allocated to each team based upon the specific projects they are completing. Given students prior coursework, a working knowledge of human-centered design methods, systems engineering techniques, and business modeling and lean experimentation is assumed. Launch Lab therefore focuses on the practical application of these skills to team projects, supplemented by content in three areas: i) seminars on advanced methods and techniques, ii) workshops that demonstrate how to put these skills and tools into practice, and iii) guest speakers who share their experience in the areas of design, technology and business.

Spring