EHL Bachelor students in the final semester of their studies are asked to complete 3 elective courses.
During these 6 weeks, students will learn how to analyze, manage, and improve service processes throughout the value chain, ultimately to add value to the firm. They will extend the knowledge and solution sets to organizational challenges they acquired in previous semesters with specialist knowledge in their desired elective field.
Upon successful completion of this module, students will have acquired specialist knowledge and be able to analyze, evaluate, and recommend organizational actions in their area of choice.
Elective courses
The list of elective courses below is indicative. Courses offered in any particular semester may (and do) change in response to the industry evolution.
Creating the Future of Food Service
The course focuses on the understanding and application of the basics of the experience economy theory. Topics include: values systems, business models, co-creation and experience innovation, techniques against noncreativity, and new product and service development.
The two central questions underlying the motivation for this course are: How could hospitality businesses shift their focus away from services and onto experiences and how can these experiences and networks be managed in order to promote experience innovation through cocreation? Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s theory of experience innovation will play a vital role in the pursuit of answering these questions. Students will further explore the implications of developing a new experience space for a “real” client.
Upon successful completion of this course you should be able to conceptually discuss the shift from value creation as value-in-exchange (i.e. value is embedded in goods and services) to value-in-use (i.e. value is in the use of goods and services), critically appraise the role of experiences as distinct economic values in the form of personally engaging events that remain memorable for the customers, an apply the notion of networks as locus of competence and the notion of the experience space as the locus of innovation in a “real” client setting.
Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable Innovations
Traditional hospitality management can be overly short-term focused, so understand how to tie corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability to long-term success indicators is of upmost importance for successful leaders. This course addresses one of the most pressing issues facing our industry today: how to develop innovative sustainable business models and solutions to challenges in relation to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Quadruple Bottom Line approach: planet, people, profit and purpose.
The course will provide a forum, on the one hand, to discuss applied innovative subjects and, the other, options to help students understand – no matter which side of the debate they are on – how to engage with relevant actors to establish common ground and produce positive outcomes for the future. The course will include lectures, a series of experienced executives as guest speakers, interactive case discussions, and visits to leading-edge sustainable companies and research labs.Objective
On successful completion of the course you should be able to propose both practical and theoretical solutions for the company that is seeking for responsible and sustainable operations and strategy: Understanding how hospitality and tourism stakeholders act, influence and contribute to CSR and sustainability, analyzing © Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne 53 companies’ CSR strategies and proposing sustainable and innovative solutions to improve their actions, critically reflecting on hospitality and tourism organizations and their eco-innovation management, in order to be able to understand the field of sustainable business models, and applying and further developing diverse theoretical approaches available in the academic fields studying ethics, social responsibility, sustainable business models and innovation.
Strategies for Commercial Real Estate Assets
Do you want to be able to make informed decisions about diverse real estate investment opportunities or projects, and understand the best ways to evaluate and support these decisions?
Would you like to expand your general real estate knowledge - learn about different real estate asset classes, specific analytical tools, such as IPMS, CRS certifications, BIM, etc.? This course evaluates strategies for managing assorted real estate asset classes.
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to effectively and ethically evaluate asset management strategies concerning commercial real estate.
Hospitality Luxury Brand Management
By the end of this elective students will have acquired a real understanding of the concept of luxury, the key rules and characteristics that define it and how to recognize and apply these in the context of the hospitality and services industry. The will have learned how to market luxury brands based on a luxury marketing model following specific rules that define it vs. traditional marketing approaches; and the strategic choices required to follow a luxury strategy vs. a premium or fashion model.
Students will learn how to respond to challenges facing luxury brands in view of the social, cultural and economic changes affecting the luxury industry globally, democratization and the emergence of new definitions of luxury.
On completion of this course, you will be able to recommend strategies and solutions for the branding, marketing and communications of luxury goods and services.
Big Data Strategy for the Hospitality Industry
Nowadays data become the most important source of innovation, value creation and business development.Companies that use big data analytics improve the quality of their strategic decisions and are five times more likely to make decisions faster than their competitors.
The main objective of this course is to learn how to make decisions for business growth based on the data. The process of how to transform intelligent data to anactionable decision and create value for the clients will be developed in this course as well as the concepts ofbig data ecosystem, data management, visualization and predictive analysis.
On successful completion of this course you will discover how Big Data tools can be used to enhance business performance. Students will develop a big data strategy and identify the key performance indicators for performance monitoring, apply the main predictive analysis methods (sentiment analysis and clustering analysis for market segmentation) using Big data Software, analyze extracted unstructured data from social networks to develop customer insights, recognize how to make an actionable decision based on the process from the data identification and analysis to valuable insight creation.
Branding - thinking beyond products and services
Storytelling is often praised as the ultimate marketing tool. Whether it is to advertise a product, motivate your employees or rally people behind a common cause. In the hospitality industry, many hotels are turning to storytelling in search for a solution to rising OTAs’ commissions, growth of Air BnB and changing customer behavior.
But what is a “brand story” exactly, how do you develop a great one and to implement it? In this elective you will develop a deep understanding of the power of storytelling in business and yourself. You will learn how to think a story beyond product/services features and concretely craft a complete product/service narrative using the Brand Story CanvasTM.
On successful completion of this course, you will be able to understand the historical and theoretical ramifications of brand storytelling, learn about the 7 components that are part of every story, learn to use the Brand Story CanvasTM to develop brand stories for future independent work, understand the role of graphic design and copywriting to express brand stories, learn to “convert” a brand story into a tangible hospitality experience, learn how to develop an editorial guideline to bring a brand story to life through content, be able to recognize storytelling patterns in everyday communication and advertising, discover case studies about brands in and outside the hospitality industry such as Freeletics, Shinola, Moleskine and more, and to discover a teaser into personal branding.
Crisis/Strategic Communication
In a world wrought with negative comments and online reviews, a company’s reputation is only as good as its communication. Companies like Enron and Volkswagen both endured a crisis, but one went bankrupt while the other is thriving. What made the difference in these cases? Communication. Just recently, Tesla’s reputation has suffered from reports of mass firings and racial discrimination. No company is immune to crisis, but it is the manner in which they react to it that will make a difference. In the workplace, our students (and future managers) will be faced with crises, both natural and human-made and they will need to have the skills to deal with them.
This course is designed to help students learn how to best communicate in the time of crisis and strategically keep their reputation intact. In groups, students will be presented with a crisis which they have to manage over 5 weeks, resulting in a comprehensive and thorough communication plan. This plan will detail all of the oral and written communication channels in a logical order which are necessary in the case of crisis.
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to choose the most effective communication channels and messages to address a crisis situation in a timely and appropriate manner.
