The Internet, mobile and social media have created a long series of innovative and exciting business opportunities along with major competitive and management challenges. This course provides a strategic framework for analyzing the impact of e-commerce and mobile commerce across industry sectors. Students will learn e-commerce best practices and develop management skills for leading online and mobile initiatives. We will cover interactive marketing tools and metrics, enterprise use of social media and web analytics as well as emerging business models, lessons from past online failures and successful high-growth companies, and new technology trends. The executive-style Saturday class meetings will include a high level of small group interaction, case studies, debates and in-class discussion with visits and guest presentations by e-commerce executives, company founders, technology innovators and industry analysts.

This course is an approved elective for Product and Brand Management and Competitive Service Delivery specializations and it is required for the Marketing and Information Analytics specialization. It will be taught by Mary J Cronin, Professor in the Information Systems Department (cronin@bc.edu).

Course Instructor

Mary Cronin has been researching, teaching and writing about e-commerce since the 1990s. Her books on Internet business, mobile and wireless strategies have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and several other languages. Dr. Cronin developed the first courses taught at Boston College on the Internet and E-Commerce and she still teaches E-Commerce at the undergraduate and MBA level with continued enthusiasm for this ever-changing field.

Selected Publications

• Smart Products, Smarter Services: Strategies for Embedded Control, Cambridge University Press, 2010
• Developing MMS Applications: Multimedia Messaging, McGraw-Hill, NY: 2003 (with Scott B. Guthery)
• Mobile Application Development, McGraw-Hill, NY: 2001 (with Scott B. Guthery)
• Unchained Value: The New Logic of Digital Business, Harvard Business School Press, 2000
• Banking and Finance on the Internet, John Wiley, 1997 (Editor)
• Global Advantage on the Internet: From Corporate Connectivity to International Competitiveness, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1996
• The Internet Strategy Handbook: Lessons from the New Frontier of Business (Editor), Harvard Business School Press, 1996
• Electronic Commerce, Alliance for Converging Technologies, Toronto, 1996
• Doing More Business on the Internet, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995
• Doing Business on the Internet: How the Electronic Highway Is Transforming American Companies, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994