From AI Prototyping to Emerging Markets: Inside Tuck’s 2025–2026 MBA Electives

These are some of the tough questions Tuck MBA students explored through new elective courses introduced during the 2025–2026 academic year. Spanning entrepreneurship, economics, finance, marketing, organizational behavior, sustainability, leadership, and global development, the new courses reflect the complexity of the decisions today’s, and tomorrow’s, leaders will be called to make.

Without further ado, here are the new MBA elective courses Tuck launched in the 2025–2026 academic year.

---

NEW MBA ELECTIVE COURSES 2025–2026

Explore our full catalog of elective courses.

This course is designed for students who aspire to lead or invest in high-growth technology companies. It focuses on the critical organizational, strategic, and go-to-market decisions that shape a company’s trajectory after early fundraising. Through case discussions and guest lectures from leading technology executives, students will gain practical insights into how ventures transition from startup to scale. The course emphasizes three core pillars of venture management:

• Building Culture and Teams: Creating the right culture, defining values, and developing organizational practices to attract, retain, and empower top talent.
• Strategic Product Planning: Using market analysis, goal-setting frameworks, and strategic roadmaps to make key product and business decisions under uncertainty.
• Go-to-Market Execution: Designing an early-stage sales organization, learning from customer interactions, and scaling toward a repeatable and sustainable revenue model.

By the end of the course, students will gain frameworks and real-world perspectives on how to align people, product, and go-to-market strategy in the critical years following a company’s initial growth phase.

In this class, students will use tools from the economics of industrial organization to prepare to manage firms in a variety of market structures, including concentrated oligopolies, differentiated product markets, multi-sided platforms, and algorithmic marketplaces, with the goal of understanding how firms compete in these markets.

To ensure managers and firms do not leave money on the table when making decisions, the course provides quantitative tools to rigorously derive economic fundamentals from market data, such as measuring true marginal costs on the supply side, estimating demand elasticities on the demand side, and accounting for the interactions of substitution and complementarity across a firm’s multi-product portfolio.

The course is split into two sections. The first section, Foundations of Market Power, takes a price-theoretical approach to managerial decisions, holding competitors’ actions fixed to focus on the main tradeoffs managers face when exercising market power to maximize profits. The second section, Game Theory, extends these tools to a game-theoretical approach, where managers’ actions depend on their competitors’ actions, and vice versa. Topics include collusion, algorithmic pricing, entry deterrence, killer and serial acquisitions, and platform competition.

This course interrogates the past, present, and future of disruptive innovation. It serves as a companion to Leading Disruptive Change, which focuses on strategy and leadership tools and frameworks for navigating disruptive change. Disruption Through History takes a historical and analytical approach to understanding how the concept of disruptive innovation emerged, evolved, and spread across industries over the past three decades. The courses stand alone; neither is a prerequisite for the other.

Zooming into the idea of disruptive innovation, along with historical and ongoing examples of disruption, allows students to learn more broadly about how ideas evolve and how ideas influence the world.

This sprint looks at the role international institutions play in financing development in less developed countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The main focus is on public international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, regional development banks, and institutions like the International Finance Corporation, which seeks to mobilize funds to the private sector. Comparison will also be made to large bilateral programs such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

A key objective of this course is to give students the skills and tools to analyze the major challenges developing countries face in accessing public finance, and the steps international agencies, business, government, and civil society can take to help developing countries grow their economies. Skills and knowledge acquired in the course will assist students in developing strategies for dealing with or investing in developing markets in a turbulent global economy where growth is a prerequisite to poverty reduction and business activity.

Sub-Saharan Africa is extraordinarily wealthy in natural resources, power potential, and labor. With 70 percent of Africans under 30 and a median age of 19, Africa will account for half of global population growth in the next 25 years.

Understanding the risks, challenges, and opportunities in emerging markets can be one of the most rewarding and complex aspects of investment for American businesses. Leaders must consider the regulatory and legal environment, key industry and government players, logistics and infrastructure, political stability, workforce skills, and risk mitigation.

This sprint class acquaints students with an overview of the opportunities, risks, and great power competition surrounding economic development and investments in sub-Saharan Africa. It also helps students explore how global challenges such as shifting demographics, growing inequality, climate change, and emerging technology will affect Africa and its investment environment in the decade to come.

This course is grounded in the idea that acquiring and retaining customers through superior experiences is central to business success, and that digital technologies provide powerful new ways to achieve this. Building on core marketing frameworks, students examine how foundational marketing principles must be rethought and adapted in digital contexts.

Students explore how firms leverage digital tools to design business models, set pricing strategies, and execute promotional approaches, drawing on examples of both successful and unsuccessful implementations. The course also examines how firms navigate strategic tradeoffs when managing digital platforms, which often bring together multiple stakeholders with competing objectives. Throughout the course, the focus is on developing a strategic lens for understanding how digital transformation reshapes marketing decisions.

This course invites students to examine mentoring relationships across diverse settings, from traditional face-to-face interactions to emerging AI-integrated models. Through article discussions, interactive activities, cross-disciplinary insights, and dialogue with subject matter experts, participants investigate the strengths, challenges, and nuances of human connection alongside technology-enhanced approaches.

Building on these explorations, students reimagine career support systems with an emphasis on flexibility, cultural intelligence, and innovation. They evaluate hybrid mentoring frameworks, consider conditions that promote inclusive and psychologically safe environments, and navigate the ethical dimensions of AI in leadership development.

This sprint introduces personal financial decision-making through the analytical lens of household finance. The organizing framework is a household balance sheet view, embedded in a life-cycle model of consumption, saving, borrowing, portfolio choice, and insurance. Students evaluate major decisions, including debt use, precautionary saving, investing, housing, retirement, and insurance, as interrelated capital-allocation and risk-management problems under uncertainty. The goal is to help students build a coherent decision rule for managing resources over time rather than treating financial choices as isolated transactions.

This practicum provides students a deep understanding of climate action at the international level through applied learning. While exploring the latest climate science and how the climate treaties function, students work with selected external project partners on timely issues on the negotiation agenda at the annual Conference of Parties. Past partners have included an aerospace company leading on carbon markets, a venture capital firm adding an adaptation portfolio to its successful mitigation investments, and a household products giant assessing regenerative agriculture’s potential to decrease its Scope 3 emissions.

Students build relationships with their project partners throughout the term and deliver an array of work product, including memos, decks, and oral presentations. As future business leaders, this practicum gives Tuck students a unique experiential learning opportunity in private sector climate action at the international level.

This two-session sprint course explores how AI is transforming the practice of prototyping. In today’s innovation environment, business leaders must validate ideas quickly, cheaply, and persuasively to stay competitive and operate at the velocity customers expect. While prototyping is not new, AI-enabled tools fundamentally shift the speed, accessibility, and fidelity of what can be created by non-technical leaders, freeing up technical capacity and accelerating the overall product development process.

The course builds foundational knowledge of prototyping as a leadership and alignment tool, then demonstrates how generative AI and AI-enabled no-code platforms allow leaders to create working demos in days. Students will emerge with skills to:

• Lead teams through ideation and prototyping under accelerated timelines.
• Gain comfort getting hands on with new tools and embodying the role of “builder.”
• Understand the strategic and ethical implications of AI-generated prototypes.
• Communicate and pitch ideas through demo-driven storytelling rather than static PowerPoint decks or narrative documents.

This course demystifies how to work with AI with engineers and offers students a unique opportunity to get hands-on with current tools they are likely to be expected to use in many future workplaces.

Derivatives markets are some of the largest in the world and an essential feature of the modern global financial system. The goal of this course is to understand how these markets function, what opportunities and risks they afford, and how derivatives and other instruments are used for risk management. The core material will cover how and why firms and investors trade derivatives, the pricing of derivatives using the concept of no-arbitrage.

The applications part of the course focuses on cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a new asset class, with many large asset managers now recommending 1-5% allocations for diversification. Importantly, most institutional investors do not hold the assets directly, but rather gain exposure through ETFs, futures, or perpetual futures. This makes derivatives central to understanding how crypto markets function in practice. Stablecoins, which aim to maintain a fixed value, provide a clear, real-world example of the no-arbitrage principles that also underpin futures and options pricing.

This course significantly expands upon the futures and options material covered in the Capital Markets class. It gives the tools necessary to price a broad range of derivatives and understanding of the measurement of risks and hedging.

This course invites students to step back from the external demands of performance and consider the inner life of leadership. Drawing on ancient and contemporary wisdom traditions, modern research in values-based and ethical leadership, and embodied reflective practice, the course explores how spirituality and values inform meaning, moral decision-making, and organizational culture.

Participants engage in guided reflection, mindfulness, and group dialogue to examine the relationship of spirituality to leadership and management, clarify their values, examine the negotiation of personal and organizational commitments, and expand their vision of leadership for the common good. The course creates space for stillness, introspection, and authentic conversation, with attention to purpose and moral imagination.

Marketing has a vital and unique role to play in creating a more sustainable society, as most consumers’ material needs and many psychological needs are met through marketing systems. Sustainable marketing is the process of creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers in such a way that both the environment and human capital are preserved or enhanced throughout.

This course provides a broad range of tools and frameworks for understanding how business can interact with issues related to sustainability from a marketing perspective. In particular, students examine how traditional marketing strategies can be incorporated into or modified in domains where sustainability is critical. The course also examines how sustainability can augment, but not replace, the firm’s value proposition.

The course draws upon cases, guest speakers, academic and industry research, and recent articles and events. The final course deliverable is a marketing plan focused on a firm strategy that can increase the sustainability of the firm’s actions while also creating stakeholder value.

Explore our full catalog of elective courses.