Education

Sponsored Content

EMBA Pillars of Excellence

SFU Beedie School of Business offers students the skills and experience to succeed through its Executive Master of Business Administration program

 

BCBusiness + SFU Beedie School of Business

SFU Beedie School of Business offers students the skills and experience to succeed through its Executive Master of Business Administration program

With more than 50 years behind it, the Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) continues to be SFU Beedie’s flagship program. Its mission to develop innovative and socially responsible business leaders with a global perspective ties in seamlessly with SFU Beedie’s three strategic pillars: global outlook, innovation and entrepreneurship, and social responsibility.

“EMBA offers a learning environment in which students develop their ability to make managerial decisions through solving real life cases and challenges,” says Karel Hrazdil, academic director for the EMBA program. “They learn and collaborate with experienced professionals from diverse backgrounds outside the individual’s experience and expertise.”

EMBA offers a global perspective through the rich diversity of students, faculty and staff, and through experiential opportunities to work on multinational projects and interact with students outside North America.

“The Americas MBA for Executives (AMBA) stream is an optional second-year stream that provides students the opportunity to study with EMBA students from our partner universities in Brazil, Mexico and the USA,” Hrazdil says. “Students work on real projects proposed by different companies and apply their knowledge from modules dealing with family businesses, new ventures and innovative practices in these markets.”
In the regular stream in Vancouver, students also learn about global issues from classes such as Cross-cultural Management and International Competitive Strategy.

Innovation and entrepreneurship manifest through courses such as Structure and Change in Organizations, Business Simulation, and Technology Enabled Transformation, which expose students to issues like disruption or digital transformation, which organizations constantly address in order to stay competitive.
“In another course example, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, we teach the Lean LaunchPad where students design and perform a series of experiments in the market to test their hypotheses about their ideas based on querying and learning from customers,” Hrazdil says.

SFU Beedie has long been committed to social responsibility as a guiding principle and strategic pillar, and this is evident in all aspects of the EMBA program.

Students take courses in Business Ethics, Corporate Responsibility, and Corporate Governance, where they work through cases that introduce different perspectives of responsible leadership.

SFU Beedie has also redesigned its SFU EMBA in Indigenous Business Leadership (EMBA IBL), which addresses Indigenous business, economic development and entrepreneurship.

“It has now become a cohort special arrangement program that draws on the world views and the wealth of experience of Indigenous managers and leaders from First Nation communities across Canada,” Hrazdil says. “The program is unique in that it explores contemporary economic issues and insights while recognizing and respecting that traditional knowledge, cultural protocol and history play a significant role in planning, decision-making and leadership within Indigenous communities and organizations.”

SFU Beedie uses a cohort model where students work and learn alongside 40 experienced business professionals in carefully chosen groups of about six or seven gender-balanced members with different backgrounds, industry experiences and personalities.

“Students develop close relationships with their peers and learn to encourage, challenge and develop them to be better leaders,” Hrazdil says. “They learn through real-life cases with debates that address a multitude of possible solutions to a given problem in respectful and friendly environment, and through more traditional courses that provide them with a necessary background in accounting, finance, managerial economics or operations management.”

The EMBA program also supports students through workshops, mentorship and networking and career coaching. Learn more at about the EMBA program at SFU’s Beedie School of Business

Created by BCBusiness in partnership with SFU’s Beedie School of Business