Curriculum

This 36-credit-hour program is split across three semesters. Here's a step-by-step look at your next 12 months:

Summer Semester

Leadership Assessment and Development (LEAD)

IIME400 — Summer Semester 3 Credit Hours

The goal of the course is to help students learn methods for assessing their knowledge, abilities, and values relevant to engineering and management, and for the acquiring of new professional knowledge and skills throughout their career.

Accounting, Finance, and Engineering Economics

IIME 410 — Summer Semester 3 Credit Hours

This class uses a combination of class lecture and discussion, in combination with problem-type and case-type assignments, to introduce you to key concepts and tools of financial economics. You are expected to use the resources at your disposal, such as the textbook or the accounting dictionary, to help you understand any unfamiliar concepts. Normally, each class will be divided into two sections. The first part of each class session will be devoted to discussions of selected problems and cases, with focus on the specific topics being covered. The second part of each class will be devoted to prepare you for the following session class assignments.

Technology Marketing Strategy 

IIME 475 — Summer Semester 3 Credit Hours

High technology products and services are unique in the levels of ambiguity and risk that challenge a manager's ability to craft a marketing strategy.  Understanding the customer, reading market trends, creating a compelling vision of value, and launching marketing programs (already foreboding tasks in traditional marketing situations) have a heightened sense of uncertainty in the context of high technology platforms such as nanotechnology and regulated medical devices.  This course draws on contemporary ideas in the literature by thought leaders in technology marketing.  We work through several marketing models and methods in practice today to assist students to synthesize and build appropriate conceptual and managerial frameworks for technology marketing practice.

Applied Statistics for Decision Support in Data Science

IIME 476 — Summer Semester 3 Credit Hours

In this intense summer application-oriented course, the goal is to bridge traditional statistical tools with the R language to prepare beginning graduate students for further study in data science. Managerial decision support involves the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data for understanding uncertainty and risk in decision-making; quite simply, decision support requires statistics! The "R" language plays a significant role facilitating the building of statistical and data science models and approaches to visualizing data and making predictions to support decisions, but absent a foundational knowledge in probability and statistics the impact of the tools and their use may not be fully realized. The course is project-based to provide direct application of probability and statistics to the extraction of knowledge from data. 

Fall Semester

Project Management

IIME 405 — Fall Semester 3 Credit Hours

Project Management is concerned with the management and control of a group of interrelated tasks required to be completed in an efficient and timely manner for the successful accomplishment of the objectives of the project. Since each project is usually unique in terms of task structure, risk characteristics and objectives, the management of projects is significantly different from the management of repetitive processes designed to produce a series of similar products or outputs. Large-scale projects are characterized by a significant commitment of organizational and economic resources coupled with a high degree of uncertainty. Thus, the objective of the course is to understand what are the main issues and problems in the management of projects and to have a thorough knowledge of the conceptual models and techniques available to deal with them.

Understanding People and Change in Organizations

IIME 425 — Fall Semester 3 Credit Hours

This course is intended to help students assess events occurring in organizations from a behavioral and human resources perspective and to help them develop strategies for managing these events. The course applies knowledge from the fields of organizational behavior and human resource management to provide an understanding and the skills needed to be effective in organizations. The fields of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management are devoted to the study of how human beings act in organized settings and how organizations can affect human behavior through a variety of policies, practices, structures, and strategies. In today's environment, organizations are faced with high levels of international competition and an increasing pace of technological, market, and social changes. As an organizational member, you are expected to successfully operate within these increasingly complex demands as well as help create and guide change. The purpose of this course is to provide you with the framework and tools needed to analyze and operate in the changing organization. We will examine some of the features that characterize an emerging organizational form and contrast this to its traditional predecessor. The focus of the course will be on the skills you will need to operate in the "new" organization including skills for being a change agent working in entry level and early career managerial roles.

Product & Process Design and Development

IIME 430 — Spring Semester 3 Credit Hours

An integrated approach to the teaching of the complex relationship of customer to designer and to manufacturer, this course will be team taught by faculty from WSOM and CSE, with participation of corporate representatives sponsoring projects for the teams. The course will be built on a series of projects, each emphasizing different aspects of the product/process design experience, selected to provide exposure to a wide variety of entrepreneurial activities. The project activities are expected to promote the development of realistic activities of cross-functional teams.

Operations Research and Supply Chain Management

IIME 432 — Fall Semester 3 Credit Hours 

This course is an introduction to Operations Research, and then focusing on applying Operations Research tools to manage business and organizations' Supply Chain Operations. Operations Research (also called Management Science) is the discipline of applying advanced mathematical methods to help make better decisions. By using techniques such as mathematical modeling to analyze complex situations, Operations Research gives executives the power to make more effective decisions and build more productive systems based on considerations of all available options, careful predictions of outcomes and estimates of risk, and the latest decision tools and techniques. Operations Research solves problems that arise in every business function (e.g., operations, finance, marketing, accounting, HR), every economy sector (e.g., financial, healthcare, industrial goods, technology, utilities), and every business type (e.g., for-profit and non-profit, start-ups and Fortune 500 companies), even government.

Spring Semester

Six Sigma and Quality Management

IIME 440 — Spring Semester 3 Credit Hours

The Six Sigma process is the standard for quality improvement in organizations around the globe. In this course, we study the details of the five steps in the Six Sigma process: DEFINE, MEASURE, ANALYZE, IMPROVE, and CONTROL (DMAIC). We introduce the concept of sustainability into the criteria to use to evaluate proposed solutions during the Six Sigma process. Many tools, concepts, and processes that are often an integral part of Six Sigma projects in companies are included in the course content. They range from the very basic tools of quality (such as cause-and-effect diagrams for brainstorming) to complete processes (such as benchmarking, quality function deployment, failure mode and effects analysis-FMEA). Statistical concepts that are central to Six Sigma including statistical process control and introduction design of experiments are also included. Once the Six Sigma process and its various components are understood, we study quality management including quality control, quality planning, quality improvement, strategic quality management, and quality strategy. Students meeting the required standards of performance will earn a Green Belt Certification in Six Sigma and Quality Management from the Weatherhead School of Management. 

Engineering Entrepreneurship

IIME 450 — Spring Semester 3 Credit Hours

Entrepreneurship is an area of importance to business leaders, educators, politicians, and individual members of the society. It is a driver of economic development and wealth creation in organizational units ranging in size from the individual company to entire nations. Technology-based entrepreneurship is particularly important to economic development due to its impact on productivity (innovations in action) and its potential for exponential growth. This course will emphasize and explore a variety of issues related to innovation and entrepreneurship, demonstrating that there are not many "absolute truths," but there are numerous best practices. Successful students will conclude this course with new knowledge about opportunity analysis and insight on entrepreneurship & innovation, as well as having demonstrated measurable improvement in their critical thinking skills. This course is one-semester version of a course taught alternatively as a two-semester course. Recent growth in CWRU curricula centered on entrepreneurship and related subjects enables students to specialize in, say, wealth creation, leadership, and finance topics once included under the broader two-semester umbrella.

Representative Sample of Other Electives

• Independent Projects
• Biodesign
• Fundamentals of Clinical Information Systems
• Technology Marketing Strategy
• Lean service operations
• Health economics and strategy
• Commercialization and Intellectual Property Management
• Marketing Metrics
• Supply Chain Logistics
• Executive Leadership
• Leadership in Diversity and Inclusion: Towards a Globally Inclusive Workplace
• Exploratory Data Science
• Advanced Control & Energy Systems
• Translational Research for Biomedical Engineers
• Entrepreneurship & Innovation