The SSE Nordic Defence MBA is given part-time over 16 months, enabling participants to continue working while studying. Participants attend ten campus weeks, each lasting Monday to Friday, for a total of 50 days. Out of the ten campus weeks 1-2 will be delivered outside Sweden.
Full in-person attendance is required during campus weeks, including evening sessions. Between campus weeks, participants complete self-study, digital learning activities, and examinations. The program is intensive and combines case discussions, interactive lectures, group work, and simulations.
Learning foundation
The goal of the module "Learning Foundation" is to create an effective learning environment and to put every participant in a position to make the most of their Executive MBA.
Before our first campus week you are provided with readings and exercises to enhance your learning and reflection abilities. During the first campus week, you will meet your fellow participants and discuss how different perspectives on learning can support you to work and learn as a team. The Learning Foundation module also introduces different approaches to knowledge creation, critical analysis and other tools that help you develop your interpretive skills.
Business context
Organizations are not isolated islands. They operate in a global society shaped by norms and assumptions. They are embedded in a context of laws, rules, regulations, standards, cultures, traditions, and ideologies. To develop an organization, managers need to understand, interpret, and handle relationships with customers, suppliers, employees, and competitors as well as a multitude of other local and international stakeholders.
This module includes the courses "Economics", "Business Law", "Organization of Markets", and "Geoeconomics".
Financial foundation
This module provides participants with efficient tools to evaluate business performance and the interactions of businesses and financial markets.
You will get a solid understanding of financial reporting and how to use financial reports to analyze a company's profitability, financial position, and liquidity. You will learn how to employ managerial accounting methods and techniques to make better management decisions. You will study global asset markets and learn how stocks and bonds are priced, the relation between risk and return and the role of financial intermediaries. Building on that, you will examine how corporations are financed, and investigate the advantages of the main types of funding. The Financial Foundation module includes the courses "Finance" and "Accounting".
Value creation
The ultimate reason for engaging in organized activities is to produce stakeholder value. In this module we take a multi-disciplinary approach where we focus on five pillars to a firm's value creation: management, strategy, operations, marketing, and innovation.
The management pillar emphasizes the overall management and organization of your business; the strategy pillar addresses the overall choice of what a business should be concerned with; the operations pillar focuses on how resources are transformed in an effective way; the marketing pillar addresses the relationship to the market, customers and users; while the innovation pillar puts the light on the continued need to develop the business offering. The focus of the value creation module is to equip the participants with the tools and methods for driving their businesses forward. The overarching question addressed in the module is how organizations are to align their internal resources with the demands from the external environment. This module includes the courses "Strategic Management", "Operations and Supply Chain Management​", "Managing Organizations", "Marketing", "Sustainability Management", and "Business Innovation".
Leadership challenges
In this module you will learn and use different management strategies, processes and tools which can help you manage these challenges.
Managers experience various challenges throughout their careers, such as driving change and implementing strategies in the organization, communicating with target audiences, and keeping on top of new methods for business data collection and analysis.