At Wake Forest, we believe that in order to deliver what the market demands, our programs must be closely tied to the market. The 10-month Wake Forest MSBA program is designed with input from our corporate partners to ensure we are exceeding industry demands and delivering performance-ready professionals who are driven to achieve results with integrity.
Our program has been developed with substantial involvement and feedback from leading organizations including:
Executives from these companies and others will serve on the MSBA board of advisors to ensure our curriculum remains cutting-edge and that we continue to deliver the talent today’s companies are seeking.
“Our next generation of leaders must grasp at the deepest level the value of data and how to use data to impact business decisions. The Wake Forest University School of Business is again demonstrating its understanding of what the market will need from the students it is preparing. By building this program and combining it with real-time, raw retail data available through the Wake Forest Center for Retail Innovation, the Wake Forest MSBA Program will be the gold standard for business analytics training in retail analytics and beyond.”
David Mounts Former Chairman and CEO, Inmar
Corporate partnerships expand classroom learning to the business world
Wake Forest has partnered with a variety of leading corporations to bring real-world data and experiences to their analytics training. Our revolutionary Retail Learning Labs in partnership with the School’s Center for Analytics Impact, provides access to live, real-time data from retailers such as CVS Health and Lowes Foods. With this exclusive resource, MSBA students will analyze large data sets, master technological skills such as data mining and predictive modeling, and formulate actionable insights to corporate partners through hands-on experiential learning.
A three-course practicum sequence over two semesters provides students the opportunity to work in teams to collaborate with a corporate partner to model and analyze a current project and present strategies and solutions to leadership based on their insights. Through this blend of classroom and real-world experiences, our graduates will discern critical relationships between data and organizational performance while learning to communicate results with impact and clarity.
Retail Learning Labs bring analytics to life
In collaboration with corporate partners Lowes Foods, Bellomy Research, Inmar and WestRock, Wake Forest launched the Retail Learning Labs in 2014 to provide real-time, real-world, in-store insights on shopping behavior. The Retail Learning Labs are set up inside 10 Lowes Foods stores across North Carolina. State-of-the-art technology detects smartphone signals and tracks shoppers’ movements through the store, noting where they stop and think over a purchase, as well as which merchandising and promotions catch their attention and spark a purchase.
With exclusive and unprecedented access to this type and volume of data, MSBA students learn how to analyze and organize information that provides never-before-understood insights about shopper behavior to retailers. The Retail Learning Labs provide opportunities to identify shopper traffic patterns through the store, and gather real-time data to provide actionable consumer insights.
“We are breaking new ground in business analytics with these Retail Learning Labs. Students gain current, real-world insights from their data analysis which gives them hands-on experience before they graduate, and provides faculty with new research opportunities.”
Roger Beahm Director, Retail Learning Labs and Professor of the Practice of Marketing
