MSLCE 460-0 Design, Culture, and Politics: Leading Organizations in the Creative Sector (1 Unit)  

Leading organizations requires a balance of art and science. Some elements of leadership are structural, others are relational. In this course, we will learn to lead organizations in the creative sector by analyzing companies and crafting recommendations using three lenses: design, culture, and politics. Strategic design includes org charts and incentive structures. Culture includes visible symbols and unwritten codes of conduct. Politics includes power and allyships. This course will equip you with the framework of the three lenses to develop a more complete understanding of organizations and how to lead them.

MSLCE 464-0 Understanding the Creative Industries (1 Unit)  

Historical and theoretical introduction to the creative industries, providing students with a framework that can be applied to a range of different.

MSLCE 468-0 Economics of Creative Enterprises (1 Unit)  

This course will give students an understanding of the language of business in the creative sector by studying key aspects of economics, accounting, and corporate finance. With that foundational knowledge in hand, students will explore what types of funding are available and how to access the right source of capital for each type of venture. Translating a creative concept into the language of finance is the key skill needed to launch any idea as every potential funding source asks for certain financial information. This course will teach students how to frame creative activities with the language of business and speak intelligently about the financial data behind any new venture.

MSLCE 472-0 Marketing Strategies in Creative Industries (1 Unit)  

After an initial overview of marketing strategy basics and creative industry idiosyncrasies, each week the class will first break down elements of the framework learning from non-media and entertainment examples, before applying the lessons and methodologies to the unique media world. Each student will work with a small team on a course project to develop an innovative marketing strategy for various creative sectors and will individually complete a mystery shopping exercise to better understand consumer engagement. All students will also co-lead a group discussion in one of the classes, and facilitate an active online discussion board.

MSLCE 495-0 Leadership Intensive (1 Unit)  

This course equips professionals in the creative industries with the self-awareness, communication skills, and collaborative leadership strategies needed to lead effectively in dynamic, interdisciplinary environments. Through a progression from personal leadership insight to team and network-based leadership, students explore how to articulate their leadership identity, build meaningful professional relationships, and foster high-performing, inclusive teams. Emphasizing real-world application, the course integrates reflection, peer feedback, and practical tools to help students navigate ambiguity, drive creative work forward, and lead with intention and impact.

MSLCE 497-0 Internship (1-3 Units)  

MSLCE Students are required to search for and locate a summer internship that aligns with their interests, coursework, and goals. This experience requires a minimum of 24 hours per week of onsite supervised experiential learning while students are enrolled in the MSLCE Internship Seminar. The seminar occurs simultaneously while students are interning to provide a structured approach to their internship experience. Through weekly readings and reflection assignments students will assess their own skills, experiences, and interests to develop a personal plan on how to best approach their internships in order to further their career development. Enrollment by application in advance through EPICS office.

MSLCE 498-0 MSLCE Thesis (1-2 Units)  

The thesis is a final project option for the MS in Leadership for Creative Enterprises program. Completed during the summer quarter, the student will secure a faculty advisor and perform original research on a topic that has been approved by their advisor and the MSLCE program. The student will meet with their advisor at least three times over the course of the summer for review and feedback. The final thesis is submitted to the advisor and MSLCE program for approval and should not exceed 10,000 words in length.

MSLCE 505-0 Arts and Entertainment Law and Ethics (1 Unit)  

This course covers principles of copyright, contracts, and entertainment business practices from the perspective of entertainment leadership. The class will read graduate-level cases and secondary sources as well as the original text of important cases. Popular articles will be used in each class to put the legal and business issues into a real-world, current context.

MSLCE 510-0 Business Models in Creative Enterprises (1 Unit)  

An introduction to media business models utilizing media company case studies to determine viable strategies and the role content plays in strategy implementation. Executives will describe their business strategies firsthand, and students will learn frameworks for understanding and evaluating content and media platforms.

MSLCE 515-0 Culture and Art Analytics (1 Unit)  

Big data is currency, to those initiated in the nuts and bolts of data science. This data literacy course introduces research on cultural markets, social media, machine learning and crowdsourcing, and provides you with tools to apply this research. You will learn how to plot and interpret graphs to measure performance in a cultural market; use Internet search data, Google's Ngram Viewer, and Twitter conversations to forecast trends; build, visualize, and explore networks; train machine learning algorithms for prediction; and use Amazon's Mechanical Turk for crowdsourcing. The course provides core data science skills as well as "soft skills" like problem-solving, communication, and project management. Its key goal is to teach you how to be appropriately skeptical of findings from big observational data. Accept an open mind, there are no prerequisites for the class. While formal thinking is encouraged, the course focuses on providing conceptual foundations and hands-on tools that apply across a variety of creative sectors.

MSLCE 517-0 Leveraging Networks in Creative Enterprises (1 Unit)  

Networks shape how we build and manage our careers, leverage entrepreneurship, mobilize for strategic partnerships, assemble dream teams to maximize innovation, optimize implementation, hone marketing strategies, and enhance customer engagement. Developments in the digital realm offer unprecedented opportunities to reimagine the creative enterprise based on fluid and diverse networks. The ability to design and leverage these networks will differentiate leaders in the creative sector. This course provides you with the concepts, insights, and techniques to give you that competitive edge using a set of case studies, review articles as well as an overview of easy-to-use, but powerful, computer-based visual analytics.

MSLCE 520-0 The Business of Streaming (1 Unit)  

Television programming options and ownership structures have changed significantly from the network era following the introduction of cable and Internet distribution. Yet series development — the selection, financing, production and marketing of new programs — has been slower to adapt to new technologies and viewing practices.

MSLCE 525-0 Understanding Media Markets: Users, Makers, and Metrics (1 Unit)  

Examination of how the preferences and habits of media users, the strategies and constraints of media makers, and the growing prevalence of media metrics form a dynamic marketplace that shapes popular culture and the public sphere.

MSLCE 529-0 Special Topics in Creative Enterprises (0.5-1 Unit)  

Artistic and creative enterprises encompass an ecosystem of commercial, not-for-profit, community and personal engagement with arts and forms of creative expression. Vital aspects of this ecosystem address the public purposes of arts, which include initiatives, stakeholders and institutions that affect - and are affected by - public policies. This course will look at a selection of current policy matters that artists and art leaders are dealing with in the U.S.

MSLCE 530-0 Project Management in Creative Industries (1 Unit)  

An overview of how to scope, plan, resource, and manage small and large business projects. Topics include setting objectives and scope, identifying inter dependencies, multi-tasking, communicating with team members, and moving projects forward.

MSLCE 535-0 The Power of Pitching and Persuasion (1 Unit)  

A successful pitch relies on both the ability to craft a presentation and on the ability to present it. These skills can be mastered and are essential as a leader in the creative industries. This course provides the foundation of pitching techniques and strategies as well as the opportunity to discover, practice and master one's own unique style.

MSLCE 540-0 Leading Creative Teams (1 Unit)  

This course provides fundamental tools from the behavioral and social sciences that will improve students' ability to analyze organizational dynamics and to take robust action. Leveraging a combination of theory and practice, a hands-on applied teaching style will be used to enable students to support and lead high-performing creative teams and firms. Also, using a variety of assessments and tools, student will begin to answer the question of what type of leader they aspire to become so that they can thoughtfully and deliberately manage their careers.

MSLCE 545-0 Entrepreneurship in the Creative Industries (1 Unit)  

The goal of this course is to facilitate the creation, innovation, and organization of new ideas and companies in the field of the creative arts and help students understand that success in the arts is a function of passion, work ethic, talent, and entrepreneurial drive. It culminates in a term project that will help translate ideas into potential products or services related to the arts. While we will spend time studying traditional media companies involved in the arts, the goal of the course is to fuel the students' passion to become entrepreneurs in the arts and start a company.

MSLCE 547-0 Brand Management in the Digital Age (1 Unit)  

Brands are ubiquitous to modern society. The logics of branding shape how we view nearly every aspect of social life and, oftentimes, how we view ourselves. But the practices of brand management—of creating, shaping, maintaining, and contesting brand meaning—have transformed dramatically in recent decades. Technological changes have “opened up” the processes of branding and shifted the distribution of communicative power within consumer culture. At the same time, brands have become more “personal,” taking on public personalities and more explicit stances on issues of identity and justice. This course provides an overview of how these changes have altered the practices of brand management, bringing together both critical and administrative perspectives on contemporary branding. The ultimate aim is to provide students with a practical understanding of how brand management works, while also providing them with the conceptual tools to critique those practices.

MSLCE 549-0 The Power of Strategic Storytelling (1 Unit)  

Humans are innate storytellers and narratives have played a vital role in transmitting crucial information for thousands of years. Indeed, human-beings are creatures who naturally think about the world in story elements and who rely on narrative structures in order to explain their surrounding world and the actions of those who inhabit that world. In various contexts, research has repeatedly demonstrated that engaging stories may be especially valuable as they facilitate processing of new, difficult, or controversial information, produce longer-lasting effects, and encourage adoption of story-consistent attitudes and behaviors. Informed by the media psychology perspective, this course will examine core texts, story factors, audience characteristics, and processes underlying narrative persuasion, as well as ongoing inconsistencies and debates. The questions posed by the literature and the current media landscape in many ways will help us develop a “playbook” for writers, showrunners, producers, and executives who seek to use storytelling for education and social justice.

MSLCE 550-0 Culture and Globalization (1 Unit)  

This course will address questions regarding globalization and its affect on cultural production, among others, through an engagement with scholarship on a range of creative industries including fashion, television, music, movies, fine arts, and the high-end food industry. The course is designed to provide a historical and theoretical introduction to the intersection between globalization and cultural production and to allow students to apply that knowledge to a range of contexts. Sorting out the factors that shape cultural production can best be accomplished via comparative research - across geographical regions, and institutional fields. This course offers a theoretical and methodological roadmap to such a project, helping students navigate through the landscape of how contemporary culture is globally produced.

MSLCE 555-0 Cultural Nonprofit Organizations (1 Unit)  

This course is designed to provide students with a deepened understanding of the sector and the practical skills that are essential for effectively leading and managing nonprofit arts organizations. The course is divided into four parts: after a broader overview and introduction to our live case, the second part will cover key questions of non-profit governance. We will look at the responsibilities of the board and its development; the different roles of chief executive and artistic directors; as well as a variety of leadership styles. The third part engages with fundamentals of non-profit management as they apply to the creative sector, followed, lastly, by two sessions that expose students to important contemporary issues and strategic opportunities.

MSLCE 560-0 Arts, Public Purpose and Policy (1 Unit)  

This course will expose students to a range of arts' public purposes and the considerations needed to inform key questions such as, what is the policy issue being addressed? what are the public values associated with different artistic enterprises? who decides what kinds of culture should be provided for and supported? who pays? who benefits? what are the anticipated and unanticipated outcomes? The ability to process such questions is essential for being an effective and impactful leader of artistic and creative enterprises with public purpose.

MSLCE 580-0 Professional Development (0.5-1 Unit)  

Students in the Master of Science in Leadership for the Creative Enterprises have the opportunity to engage in an array of experiential learning opportunities throughout the program that include the MSLCE Speaker Series, Professional Development Workshops, Faculty Talks, and Company Site Visits. This course provides a structured academic component to those learning opportunities. In addition to attending these curricular events, students will gain valuable practice in researching and reflecting on these activities and professional engagement.

MSLCE 598-0 Independent Study (0.5-1 Unit)  

Independent study course for students in the MS in Leadership for Creative Enterprises program.

MSLCE 599-0 Internship Experience (0 Unit)  

This course provides students the opportunity to have their on-campus or off-campus internship recognized on their academic transcript as a 0-Credit Internship Course. The course is graded as a pass/fail. The course will be listed on the transcript if all requirements are met. As a primary requirement, internship sites must provide over 72 hours of supervised experience to be eligible for the 0-credit internship.