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Coursework: Syllabus

GSB associate professor Austan Goolsbee says he’s excited about teaching the course Strategy and Entrepreneurship in the Information Economy this winter quarter because electronic commerce is “growing so fast and it’s so new. There’s not much written about it yet from an academic standpoint.”

Students’ grades in the course, he says, will be based on class participation; a short paper evaluating different on-line business alliances; a research briefing; and a group project that presents a case study of some sector of the Internet or a specific firm. The case studies should describe the fundamental economics of the business, the actions of the existing players, and the strategic options of the existing and potential players.

So you want to be a cyberspace pioneer
Goolsbee recommends catching up with Internet technology by reading Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston’s Electronic Commerce: A Manager’s Guide (Addison-Wesley, 1997), and to follow Internet business developments covered in the magazines Business 2.0, Industry Standard, and Red Herring. Given the newness of his topic, Goolsbee relies heavily in his course on recent magazine articles and reports. But he also requires certain chapters from these texts:

• Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1998), by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian.
• Principles of Internet Marketing (South-Western College Publishing, 2000), by Ward Hanson.
• Digital Darwinism: 7 Breakthrough Business Strategies for Surviving in the Cutthroat Web Economy (Broadway Books, 1999), by Evan I. Schwartz. --C.S.