Masters of Science in Professional Studies: Future Foresight and Planning | RIT Dubai

Program Contact

Sanjay Modak

Chair - Graduate Programs and Research Department, Associate Professor of Economics

Offered within the

Department of Graduate Programs and Research

Accredited by the UAE Ministry of Education

A rich program content that includes a variety of tools and knowledge of the future will enable graduates of public sector and business leaders and other professionals to improve their strategic thinking and planning and improve the way they make future-related decisions and deal with ensuing change.

Overview

The Program aims at exploring and institutionalizing the concepts of future foresight and planning in organizations. A rich program content that includes a variety of tools and knowledge of the future will enable graduates of public sector and business leaders and other professionals to improve their strategic thinking and planning and improve the way they make future-related decisions and deal with ensuing change. Students will also be able to develop professional expertise in terms of managing and leading future foresight and strategic planning projects.

The program would focus on:

Conceptual issues.
Methods and problem solving.
Domain specific applications.
Possible responses to the future.

The methods would include:

Quantitative approaches to long term and short term foresight.
Qualitative methods in long term foresight.
Synthesis, integration, and application of the methods (Scenario Planning and development).

Mission Statement

Develop an understanding of modern concepts and methodologies of future foresight.
Deploy effective future foresight knowledge and skills in managing strategic planning and decision support in organizations.
Develop expertise in future foresight to enable effective decision-making for organizations.
Analyze and address with real life issues as future thinkers and developers of ideas, strategies and solutions.

Program Goals

Develop crucial future foresight skills such as systems thinking, scenario planning and strategic planning.
Couple future foresight skills with a literature review to produce a viable piece of research.

Program Learning Outcomes

Formulate an organizational strategic future foresight framework.
Evaluate the role of scenario planning in an organization and explain its relation to strategic planning, forecasting, extrapolation and other processes.
Analyze and apply in-depth comprehension of relevant leadership and change requirements needed for formulating and delivering successful foresight decisions.
Examine and compare future foresight methods including scenario planning, environmental scanning and envisioning for evaluating various decision support systems.
Design and develop innovative strategic foresight plans for institutional change that will lead to the development of sustainable futures.
Analyze and interpret research that relates to future foresight and planning.

Curriculum

Typical Course Sequence

Total Credit Hours - 33

Course		Sem. Cr. Hrs.
PROF-705	Context and Trends The gateway course for students enrolled in the MS in professional studies degree program. Course provides students with opportunities to interact about controversial issues while discovering foundational knowledge about interdisciplinary history, theory, along with applied problem-solving, research methods and professional ethics. Students use this course as a means of designing and receiving approval for individualized plans of study. (Department permission required). Students should consult their adviser before registering.	3
PROF-730	Introduction to Future Foresight This course exposes students to the concepts, tools and techniques necessary to develop an understanding of the challenging area of future foresight, where the focus is on anticipating and initiating future ideas, plans, trends, and issues. The course will cover topics that are relevant and important to today’s leaders, decision makers, entrepreneurs, strategists and others Topics include the future foresight approach with analysis of practice and theory, discussion and analysis of pertinent issues raised by future foresight design and application, future foresight developments and relevant issues, and the impact of future foresight on organizational planning and development. The use of future foresight approaches and tools in the UAE will be benchmarked with international, regional and local settings where lessons will be drawn.	3
PROF-731	Systems Thinking This course focuses on the introduction and use of leading-edge systems thinking and modelling tools that are necessary to diagnose and solve complex business and social problems. Students will learn how to implement a flexible and powerful approach to structuring managerial problems and visualizing the interconnectedness of business, social and environmental systems. The development of skills to conceptualize and build simulation models of an enterprise, enabling the exploration of the dynamic consequences of different strategy/policy decisions and the identification of key leverage points in the system, is a central goal of this course. Systems thinking in business and public policy as it pertains to firm growth and stagnation, competitive strategy, capability development and human resource policies, environmental sustainability, and the boom and bust dynamics of start-up businesses will be explored. Successful Industrial applications of applied systems thinking and business dynamics will be reviewed.	3
PROF-732	Scenario Development and Analysis The development and analysis of realistic future scenarios provides an organization with a useful and pragmatic framework for making better, more flexible decisions concerning its own strategy or longer-term development issues, as well as, in some instances, shorter-range operational or market-oriented questions. While most business organizations carry out some kind of strategic planning, those that include a futures component in the process gain a decided advantage, as they will have considered alternative future landscapes rather than basing their plan on the assumption that one particular future will materialize. This approach involves not only understanding a range of outcomes that might plausibly develop a given strategic environment, but also, using this vision to formulate resilient strategies and bring about organizational alignment and buy-in. In this course, students will learn the methodology for building future scenarios and will apply them to real-life examples in order to develop a portfolio of realistic scenarios for a specific organization or industry.	3
PROF-733	Scenarios for Future Planning This course focuses on integrating scenarios into strategy. Strategic planning requires – but sometimes fails to take fully into consideration – identifying and monitoring emerging issues, as well as understanding how current trends, already identified, could intensify, change, or dissipate. All of these changes could have a significant impact on the future business landscape. Scenario planning therefore offers a clear advantage to strategy/policy makers, since it helps them foresee this new landscape, and their plans can accordingly be more realistic, more flexible, and more credible. Working in teams, students will delve deep into the scenarios they have devised in the previous term and elaborate strategic recommendations for each one. They will then assess these strategies in terms of operational and financial planning.	3
PROF-734	Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Leveraging big data to deliver solutions to complex challenges requires an organizational leadership that is responsible for understanding and directing these approaches to achieve their business goals. Rather, organizational leadership is responsible for understanding and directing these approaches to achieve business goals. Toward this end, this course provides students with the knowledge and confidence needed to imbue organizations with innovative, efficient, and sustainable aspects that will carry them into the future through an understanding and application of business analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Students will gain a theoretical and working knowledge of data science, enabling the identification of the challenges that analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence can address. An introduction to the ethical and social implications of analytics and AI in terms of guiding an organization’s strategic assets for the future will also be presented.	3
PROF-736	Strategic Planning Drawing on the principles of systems thinking and complex adaptive systems, this course provides students with a complete guide for writing and implementing a strategic plan with special emphasis on the unique requirements of development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In particular, the UAE’s extensive experience and special focus on long-range planning in various sectors, enabling it to become a competitive leader in the world, will be a highlight of this course. Developing mission and vision statements that communicate values and serve as a guiding force within an organization; framing new and flexible approaches for planning; comparing business, long-term, and strategic plans; and understanding the importance of formal and informal mandates will be addressed. Particular emphasis will be placed on effective strategy development specifically for complex and uncertain policy environments in the public sector.	3
SERQ-712	Breakthrough Thinking, Creativity and Innovation This is an introductory-level survey course on the dynamics of innovation. The course focuses on individual, team and organization human and systems dynamics that impact organizational innovation. Students gain awareness in, understanding of and important skills in fostering multi-level organizational human ecologies conducive to the creation of innovation. Issues and challenges important to leaders at all levels in an organization, entrepreneurs and talent management practitioners will be examined and explored. There is a required fee for the class to pay for the administration of the ISPI and Meyers Briggs evaluation instruments. Students will develop in their understanding of innovation, their own personal innovation capabilities and preferences and the human dynamics unique to innovation applied in an organizational context. This background is becoming increasingly critical to developing innovation capabilities in and across organizations in our increasingly competitive and complex world. This course will build awareness and improve competency in the application of overall course content and design principles particular to developing innovation competent individuals, teams and organizations.	3
PROF-799	Special Topics: Future Foresight and Planning This course is designed to enhance students’ learning and understanding of areas of future foresight and planning as it applies to their domain of work and the priorities established by the UAE Vision. Each offering of the course will focus on a particular area where students will get a view of the future as it applies to technology, smart systems and sustainability. Specialist instruction in these domains will concentrate on the key enablers of the fourth industrial revolution, viz., disruptive technologies, systems of the future that will make cities smart and safe and the elements that enter into creating a long-term sustainable economy that can withstand future global and local shocks and generate economic growth.	3
PROF-770	Proposal Seminar (The) seminar course provides a structured context to enable students in the MS in Professional Studies degree program to prepare a formal Thesis Proposal as a prerequisite for entering the final course in the program, PROF-776 Thesis. Activities include researching and defining a real-world, multidisciplinary problem or opportunity; providing a justification as to how the student's multidisciplinary education has prepared him/her to be uniquely qualified to address the defined problem; proposing a solution to the defined problem (a project) that consists of a problem statement, a set of deliverables, a timeline, and a research methodology for assessing the success of the completed project; and establishing a formalized relationship with a thesis supervisor with relevant subject matter expertise who can guide and evaluate the student's work in the subsequent course, PROF 776 Thesis.	0
PROF-776	Thesis Part 1	3
PROF-776	Thesis Part 2	3