Course Description

Retailing is a large component of a country’s economy and is an extremely dynamic industry as it responds to changing consumer tastes on the one hand and technological advances on the other hand. Especially in the last decade, due to the confluence of a number of societal and technological developments, retailing has seen massive change. Yet, these developments are ongoing, which implies that retailing will continue to be disrupted in the next decade at an accelerating pace. The high-level aims of this course are:

1. Develop an understanding of some basic frameworks to analyze retail, identify the broad societal and technological trends that are shaping and enabling retailing and how they fit into the frameworks, and project the trends and their impacts into the future to predict how retailing might evolve.

2. Take a deep dive into specific trends and topics of high importance to retailing today and in the near future.

The topics that we will focus on are the following (some of these topics overlap with each other or are otherwise closely connected, and will be discussed accordingly):
· Connected Retail and Customer Centricity
· Personalization and Individuality
· Retail Ecosystems
· Direct-to-Consumer Retailing
· Retail Marketplaces, including Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces
· Retail Media
· Sustainability, Recommerce and Circular Retailing
· Decentralization in a Connected Social Community
· Social Commerce
· Data, Artificial Intelligence and a Coordinated Backend
· Automation and Robotics
· Supply Chain and Inventory Management
· Antitrust and Policy