Business for Engineers

ME30197 (Moodle Link)

We hope to teach you a wide range of business skills, knowledge and experiences that you can apply now or carry with you in case you need them at some future point in your careers. But I’m aware that many of you choosing this unit because you’re thinking of a career outside of engineering. Don’t worry, you’re very welcome! Topics we’ll try to cover are; finance, corporate and personal, innovation approaches and theory, costing and pricing, operations, leadership and office culture as well as strategy, marketing and supply chains. Hopefully there’s something here for everyone!

I’ve taught this unit since 2018 and it’s always a joy and an honour to teach. The syllabus is varied and unlike most units in the department is very free flowing. If there is something you want to understand more deeply let me know and we’ll try our best to either help you ourselves or to find an expert for you. The principle aim is to give you business knowledge and skills that will serve you throughout your life, no matter where your career takes you.

The style is relaxed and interactive but we expect your attendance and enthusiastic participation. Since it’s now one of the most popular elective unit in the department, that’s never usually a problem. I try my best to keep the material up to date and relevant whilst also always looking to improve our teaching style. So I’m immensely proud of our teaching scores and the response from students to the course. It’s a labour of love but nothing ever stays still, so I’m not resting on my laurels… if you think something could be better let me know as soon as you can rather than complain at the end of the course. If I don’t know there’s an issue I can’t do anything about it.

Praise for the unit:

“Everything, this is a perfect unit.”

“Fantastic lecturers. I really enjoyed the lectures and was able to learn a lot on business plans as well as on more general business and financial news. Would recommend this unit to every engineer willing to focus more on the business side of things.”

“The lectures are well thought out and well delivered. I like the large variety of content covered. The group activities are fun and well varied.”

“Great lectures, good speaking, and engaging powerpoint slides, really allows thinking and helps with the business essay. Lecturers are approachable for questions and general talking. Engaging activities with teams, relaxed atmosphere.”

“Brilliant lectures and flexibility of coursework allows for individual load management”

“Lectures are enjoyable, group setting is nice and makes it more fun. The opportunities for feedback on the coursework are really valuable and feels like you genuinely get help.”

“Unit of great quality, it was engaging and unique.”

“I really enjoyed taking this unit, and found its content varied and interesting. I feel taking this module as a final year option has widened my skillset, and made me a better engineer.”

“I like the fact that it is a very free unit and puts a lot of trust on us to take away what we want from it. This is very useful, because as engineers we are all taking this class for different reasons and we can choose which parts of it are useful to our career afterwards.”

“The structure of this unit is great. Everything is clear from the beginning, including how the coursework works as well as what topics will be covered. I also enjoyed the almost laidback nature of the unit. All lecturers are great speakers and delivered very interesting content.”

“Ed’s lectures and web page were always incredibly informative and engaging. This was great to see and inspired hard work on the coursework as his passion towards the course was clear.”

“I found the teaching incredibly engaging and interesting.”

“Nice Style of teaching, very refreshing and inspiring to hear someone so passionate about business. I learnt a lot.”

“Very good teaching. Very good ties to everyday life. Very good topics. Very approachable staff. The pre-learning used was particularly helpful in understanding the concepts.”

“Genuinely enjoyable course, very different from any of my other units but that's such a benefit to it and I genuinely enjoy having this course to round off the week on Friday afternoons!”

“Loved Ed’s energy and enthusiasm in his teaching, this made the lecturers a pleasure to attend each week.”

“The lecturers were really good and the weekly activities were all fun. Ed is one of the best lecturers I have had and runs a really good, refreshing and unique module.”

“This was a very calming module. The invited lecturers work well as do the group activities. Having one piece of coursework due in January was an immense relief.”

“Love the lectures, especially the more personal growth, start-up, personal finance ones. Really love the real life examples and think some of the lecturers are truly world class - not just good for a university lecture.”

Is there anything I could do before the course starts?

The aims of this course are to teach you about how business works, the reality as well as the theory. How finance, money and purpose play a part and skills you can apply to your future careers and life outside of university.

One of the most important skills to learn is that of curiosity and the ability to make yourself interested in a topic. It sounds like a slightly odd thing to be able to do, but if you can be find some aspect of a subject that makes you want to read more, hear more or do more, everything becomes easier.

So what can you do to get a head start? I think a fun place is by listening to episodes of How I Built This (available on all podcast platforms). It gives such a rich and honest insight into how business really works. But unless you’re already a business super nerd, start with an episode from someone you know or a company you’ve heard of. That way you can start to form a curiosity for something new, by learning about someone or something you already care about. Enjoy.

At the start of term we’ll be wanting to know if there is anything you really want to know about. So please bring any business questions you might have so we can try and weave them into the course material.

2024/2025 Schedule

Course Details:

Look through the contents below, if there is something you’d like to better understand and don’t think we cover it, send us an email or come and speak to us. We’ll try to help explain it to you or find someone who can.

This course is a wonderful team effort, my deepest thanks to all those who have been involved over the years. The team of fabulous teachers who will join me for 2024 / 2025 is as follows:

  • Dr. Ed Elias

  • Dr. Debbie Jansen

  • Prof. Steve Cayzer

  • + Guests

Why do we teach as a team? It’s more fun, you get a variety of opinions and experiences and no one can ever be an expert on all things business, the topic is just too big.

We look forward to seeing you all soon!

Locations & Times:

This was not out desired outcome, but due to timetabling constraints outside of my control we’ve got the following situation:

Wednesdays 12:15 - 13:05 : In Person (4E 3.40/44)

For group work and activities

Thursdays 8:15 - 10:05 : Online “Breakfast Club” (MS Teams)

For teaching and content delivery

Optional Fridays 14:30 - 16:00 : In Person (room tbc)

For coursework support, career advice and general chitchat.

Yes I know, crazy times and apologies for being online (believe me the alternatives were far worse!). But it actually worked really well during COVID for content delivery and I’m confident we can make it work again here. My plan is to make the Thursday online session the primary teaching lecture part with the focus for Wednesdays being group work and activities. Hopefully this will strike a nice balance.

One big advantage of teaching online is it means I can get a wider pool of interesting external speakers so I’m searching my contacts for people who I think you’ll find inspiring. Every cloud has a silver lining!

Also, since I’m going to be on campus on fridays anyway as I teach a different course in the morning I’ll be doing an optional drop-in session for anyone who wants to discuss coursework or anything off-topic. Come and share a coffee with us!

Content & Plan:

Week 1

(Sept 30th - Oct 4th)

Course Introductions & Business Basics

Wednesday Activity - Meet and great your team, a Q&A on how the course will run, an introduction to the assignments and also I’m really keen to know why you’re doing the course and what areas you want to know about. The course content is very free, meaning we can go in a number of directions or focus more on some things if you want us too. There are some key things that are important to know but if you want to know about anything specific let us know!

Thursday Lecture - Some real business basics just to warm you up and introduce you to a few new terms.

Some themes for the week:

  • History & Purpose of Business : The idea of businesses have been around since ancient times, they are an important part of society and not just a vehicle for making money.

  • Business Economics Basics : There isn’t just one way of doing things, different societies and cultures have done and still do things differently. Plus what we have now could evolve or change into something else in the future. So good to have some idea of possible alternatives.

  • Business Models : The key to any successful business is a successful business model. Without it you have hype and maybe even fraud. A successful model needs to be desirable, feasible, viable and adaptable.

  • Business Model Innovation : There are ten ways to innovate, a new better product is just one of them.

Week 2

(7th Oct - 11th Oct)

Personal & Corporate Finance

Wednesday Activity - Supermarket Challenge, Part 1: In your teams, bring to the session photos of parts of supermarket shelves that interest you. Could be a photo of all the milk, or the jams, or the meat etc… I want you to work in your teams to develop a new product idea that will compete in that space.

Thursday Lecture - According to one study 80% of adults in the UK have had no financial education and a third have less than £1000 in savings. The state of money education in this country is pretty poor but by no means unusual. Getting a basic understanding of money and how it works is essential to being able to understand how business’ work too. A business needs money to be able to do what it hopes to do, to survive difficult changes in circumstance, just like us. The goal of a business should not be to make money, money is just the fuel to move the business closer to a more meaningful goal. Just like people, our reason to live is not to make money, but having it and knowing how to utilise it effectively helps us live the life we want to live.

Some themes for the week:

  • Personal Finance, Compound Interest & Tax : You can reach financial freedom if your monthly income is greater than your monthly outgoings. Assets produce an income, liabilities an expense. Maximise your assets and use the income to get more.

  • Financial Markets, Stock Exchanges & Traders : Investing is gambling. 92% of active stock pickers fail to beat the market. You’ll always hear the story of your mate who made money in the stock market because everyone keeps their failures quiet.

Week 3

(14th Oct - 18th Oct)

Value & Storytelling (with special guest James Jesty)

Wednesday Activity - Supermarket Challenge, Part 2: You’re going to now pitch your idea to a different team (and visa versa), critique the ideas and give constructive feedback. Consider key storytelling elements such as: Context, Characters, Conflict & Concept.

Thursday Lecture - Humans are not rational logical robots. We are animals, influenced by stories, habits, cultures, tradition. In order for something to have value it needs to have a compelling story. No matter how good an idea is, if it doesn’t have a good story around it, people just won’t buy it. To help us unpack and explore this issue we’re joined this week by a wonderful guest, James Jesty who is an innovation consultant who helps companies large and small create new ideas and products.

Some themes for the week:

Week 4

(21st Oct - 25th Oct)

Business Competitors & Rivals

Wednesday Activity - Supermarket Challenge, Part 3: Final session with this supermarket new product challenge. James will be joining us for your final pitches. (4E 3.40 / 3.44)

Thursday Lecture - Competition is often more good than bad. As the saying goes, no business was ever murdered by their competition, but they often committed suicide in front of them. What your competition does is very rarely the reason for your problems. Instead it’s your decisions, actions, lack of awareness, lack of foresight, lack of strategy that causes you issues, and that’s not their fault, you just stopped paying attention.

Some themes for the week:

  • Competition : Businesses are not murdered, they commit suicide. Business fail not because of the competition but because of poor decision making and a lack of imagination. If you want to stay in business you need to climb the competitive mountain and escape the competition and learn from your worthy rivals.

  • Radical & Incremental Innovation : Radical innovation is when you don’t know who the customer is and what they want (typically a novel problem) whereas incremental is a more routine and lower risk activity, although that doesn’t mean it’s boring or unimportant. It’s critical.

  • Pioneers & Conquerors : Should you always try and be the first to market? If you’re a large company researchers don’t think so. They believe you have a better chance of making a long term success by swooping in quickly to conqueror a new market once you can see which design will be dominant.

  • Disruptive Innovation : Christensen’s identification of a dilemma between creating something new that none of your customers want or doing what you know will be more profitable? If you don’t do both you risk being disrupted by someone who will.

Week 5

(28th Oct - 1st Nov)

Innovation - A Better Way of Doing It.

Being an inventor is quite easy, all you need to do is make something. But being an innovator, making something people want and being able to deliver it to them for a price they are willing to pay and being able to do this over and over again in such a way that it enables you to keep doing more, is hard. So we’ve worked for a couple years on a framework that helps you make sure you’ve considered all the important points to whether an idea is a success or not. Conquer the 8 towers of the Innovation Castle and you’ll have a winner.

Some themes for the week:

Week 6

(4th Nov - 8th Nov)

Coursework Support

Wednesday - Due to 1st Year labs, we’ve lost the room so will do an online coursework support Q&A session instead. Usual Teams link.

Thursday - Again due to timetable clashes and things I can’t control, there will not be any formal teaching this thursday, instead we’ll do an online coursework support Q&A session.

Week 7

(11th Nov - 15th Nov)

Making Ideas Real (with special guest Duncan Boa)

Wednesday - Back in the usual room. New challenge for this week… in your teams, I want you to write a business pitch. Think of an idea for something that could be a business. I’m happy for it to be anything. Each week we’ll develop it further and pitch it at the end of term.

Thursday - Usual online session with special guest Duncan from NatWest Boxed. We’ll be talking about new businesses, how to get started and what to look out for. As well as innovation in heavily regulated environments.

Some themes for the week:

  • Starting a Business & the Business of Starting : Open and receptive of the facts in front of you, nimble and quick to change course, humble of the reality that luck is often the most critical element. But most of the time you can skew the game in your favour by keeping things as a side project until it can stand on it’s own.

  • Entrepreneurs vs Self-Employed : One is not better than the other, but don’t confuse the two. Entrepreneurs hope to build something bigger that ultimately makes them redundant. Most self-employed roles can’t scale beyond themselves.

  • Growth and Investors : There are many ways to grow and many ways to get financial support. But different investors want different things. The key is building momentum so like a snowball rolling down a hill at some point people think you’re unstoppable.

  • Choosing Which Ideas to Develop : All idea selection methods are basically an equation between value and effort but make reversible decisions very quickly, make irreversible decisions very slowly.

Week 8

(18th Nov - 22nd Nov)

Leadership & Culture (with special guest Luca De Matteis)

Making changes, to anything, requires some form of leadership and whilst we’re going to go into that in more detail later with Peter, it’s important to note that most people don’t like change. People like things to stay the same and since business is a study of people, knowing how pig-headed people can be sometimes to not changing is good to investigate. When people do the same thing for long enough, cultures start to form and that makes it even harder to change.

Wednesday - Usual room on campus. Continue to work on your new business ideas. Remember what we discussed in last week’s Thursday session, in order to have a good idea you need a lot of them to pick from. So keep those creative juices flowing, but remember this is competitive idea generation, so be quick to judge each others ideas, but slow to dismiss them. The best ideas only happen once the obvious ones are interrogated for better ones underneath!

(also an intro to Debbie’s work next week. You’ve got a bit of homework to do! See moodle for a small costing challenge. It won’t take you long as I’ve been made aware there are some other deadlines next week too. It’s a bit of fun designed to help you understand the content and not a significant piece of coursework. So have a go.)

Thursday - Continuing our theme of special guests. This week we’re going to be joined in our discussion on Leadership and workplace culture by Luca De Matteis. Luca has had an incredible career (Chief Technology Officer at Huawei and Koolzone, and also grew a startup to a $375million exit). We’re immensely privileged to have someone of such experience join our session. Hope you can join us too.

Some extra thoughts on the subject from me:

  • Leadership vs Management : With additional material from Peter (Moodle Link coming soon)

  • Impact Players : We usually can’t start on day one as the leader, we have to climb to the top. But research shows some character traits in some performers greatly accelerate their rise to the top.

  • Strategy : A good strategy defines the problem, creates guiding policies and clear actions or instructions as to what to do.

Week 9

(25th Nov - 29th Nov)

Costing & Costs (with Debbie Janson)

Wednesday - Due to 1st Year labs, we’ve lost the room so we’ll be moving online. Usual Teams link.

Your task is to create a cost estimate for a fictional assembly and build up your price. You will be competing to win the business with other groups but it's not necessarily the cheapest price that wins.

Debbie will provide an information pack for prospective bidders - all the information is contained within there. If you think something is missing, you can estimate. Your nominated contact can also email Debbie to ask questions but you may or may not received an answer. Debbie will explain all on moodle. Enjoy!

Week 10

(2nd Dec - 6th Dec)

Game Theory and Turning Business Green (with Steve Cayzer)

Week 11

(9th Dec - 13th Dec)

Tbc

Work:

We change the assignments around each year in response to feedback, keeping it fresh and maintaining a point of difference to other units the students will experience. As the course evolves and improves we must also change things to better align them with the teaching aims and learning objectives. Hope you enjoy these ones!

 

Individual (70%)

‘Hard’ Business Skills:

An individual piece of work, you are required to illustrate the application of a business topic, it may or may not be one looked at during this course. This is not an assignment where you write about a particular topic. The task is not to write an essay on something… the task is to do something and then tell us about it. Apply some business theory.

Your work should be brief and succinct, within 3 pages and 1200 words (a hard limit). References and any title page are not included in this limit. Do not provide an abstract, summary or contents page, it is already short enough to not need a summary. 

You must include a word count at the start of the report. PDF format is preferred, but all document formats will be accepted.

Extra notes and advice:

The idea is to take a piece of business theory and explore it / critique it, come to a position that could help inform others. So just talking about something isn’t enough, we need to learn actionable points from it…

The assignment is testing two things:

  1. That you can conduct thorough and insightful research

  2. That you can convert that research into wisdom and apply it

To that end, it is important not to just talk about a subject, but to try and distil what you’ve learnt into something actionable or strategic that you can then apply.

For example I might research how IKEA’s retail store business model operates and how they are able to stay so competitive and then apply these learnings to something less obvious, a clothing retailer perhaps? Picking White Stuff as an example I could use their local store in Bath as a setting for my changes and suggestions demonstrating my application in a real setting and talking through the implications of this approach.

If your submission reads like a book report or a Wikipedia article on any given subject, it might do alright but it won’t be great.

Final Submission Date: January 10th

If you have an idea for what you want to write about, please don’t keep it a secret! Come and tell us because I’m sure we’ll have ways in which we can help you make it even better!

 

Group (30%)

‘Soft’ Business Skills:

Whereas the individual assignment looks to examine your ‘hard’ analytical ability, the group element will focus on three soft skills that are essential to business success; Professionalism, Teamwork and Service.

1.     Professionalism

Respectful and curious. This will be assessed through a number of elements all associated with general contribution to class:

  • Attending class on time and prepared (or sending apologies ahead of time if absent)

  • Completing the short class assignments to a reasonable standard

  • Being respectful and considerate in any communications

  • Being an engaged participant

2.     Teamwork

No one was ever successful alone. Teamwork and working with others is an essential life skill that is not challenged enough during university. We’ll be looking for good teamwork in a number of different areas:

  • Completing the short class assignments to a reasonable standard

  • Helping and supporting each other with the individual assignment throughout the semester (start thinking about it early to give you a chance for the best marks)

  • Helping and supporting each other with any course materials that they may be struggling with

3.     Service

The final soft skill we’d like to encourage on this course is a more general drive to be more empathetic, more understanding and considerate of each other. Leadership is a privilege that is built on the service of others. If you are to be good managers and leaders of people you must think in terms of service.

Towards the end of term you will have the chance to submit a formative draft of your individual assignment. This will be peer-reviewed by 3 other students, taking part in this process is a good way to demonstrate your service of others (as well as picking up good tips for your own assignment).

More guidance on how to give constructive feedback will be provided.

Do not be alarmed by the format of this assessment. It’s been designed to catch any ‘bad apples’ who intend to be passengers on your hard work. We expect most of you to receive 100% for this element just by being your normal engaged selves. But 100% does not mean free marks, it just means your individual assignment mark won’t move.

All the following work is produced by the student as part of this academic course, the contents does not necessarily represent the views of this website or the University of Bath. It may contain errors and should not be used for anything other than it was intended.

Some Past Coursework Examples I loved:

For Inspiration Only…

Use these as inspiration, how you can squash a lot of information and insight into a short 3 page submission. Remember to think about the knowledge pyramid, we’re looking for insightful thoughts and wisdom rather than just the raw data.

What makes these amazing:

  1. Business ideas are not just discussed but applied

  2. There’s some creativity behind the idea

  3. Clearly explained and digestible

Don’t panic, anything could be a good idea, so don’t stress, come and chat about it. Most of these had several back and forth sessions with me to really distil their best work.

A common approach is to try and think of a business concept that interests you, might be the way someone did / does something, and then reimagine it in a new situation. The key is to try and do it, and then report on the findings, not just suggest it and leave it to me to figure out if it might be a good idea or not.

2022

Thomas Santini - Manipulating the Startup Hype Engine - [Download PDF] - I’m obviously familiar with the subject matter, but you've done a great job tuning the work to a much more concise and better flowing piece. A fresh take on a frequently discussed but rarely investigated topic. Well done.

James Bozeat - Business Model Stickiness Why businesses need to change but don't want to - [Download PDF] - I won’t hide the fact I enjoy visual representations of complicated topics, I find they much more powerfully explain something that would take thousands of words.

2023

Tilly Bowlt - Mascots, why do businesses need them? - [Download PDF] - Starts as a review of the role of mascots in business but applies this knowledge by creating mascots and updating old ones for some companies. Great application of theory.

Mio Masuoka - Level 5 Leadership, Japanese Edition - [Download PDF] - Another great piece of original work, this Japanese student investigated if the American idea of Level 5 Leadership translated into a Japanese society as many of the traits required are commonplace in Japan.

Tara McKenna - The Seven Circles of Corporate Inferno - [Download PDF] - Loved this work… the student looked at some sustainable business frameworks and didn’t think they made sense, how can bad companies do well in them? So we workshopped are own framework that scored companies negatively instead. It’s brilliant, super well researched and a lovely original idea

2024

Adham Ramadan Elattar - Criminal Profiling Executive Fraud for Venture Capital Due Diligence - [Download PDF] - Really fascinating idea to see if it’s possible to create a checklist for fraud. What makes this an excellent assignment though is he tests it out.

Ashleigh Mckenna - A Framework for Successful Social Responsibility Campaigns - [Download PDF] - Wow, an insane amount of research all brought together into a superb framework and flow diagram to help advise companies on the effectiveness of their campaigns. Incredible work.

Dominic Lafone-Ward - The Effect of Power on Business - [Download PDF] - Leaning on his love for the book the 48 laws of power with business practise. Dominic has fun combining the two.

Emma Hudson - The Six Pillars of Success Inspired by Greek Mythology - [Download PDF] - Loved the idea behind this, do the world’s great companies fall into different categories that can be summarised by the characteristics of the Greek Gods. And if so, how can smaller companies (mortals) rise to the level of demi-gods and the Gods themselves?

George Adshead - Utilising South African Rugby’s ‘Bomb Squad’ System To Reduce Pressure On NHS Hospitals - [Download PDF] - Really interesting idea taking a concept from a winning sports team and seeing if such a thing could work in a completely different work environment.

Zoe Adams - Driving Welfare Improvements in Mining - [Download PDF] - A wonderfully clear concept explained succinctly.