Six Segments, Three Countries: What a 13-Month EMBA Curriculum Actually Contains
Image Recommendation: A world map with six pins connected by a dashed line across Singapore, China and the United States, each pin labelled with a segment number.
Six residential segments. Three countries. Thirteen months. That’s the entire shape of the programme before any of the actual subject matter gets mentioned, and it’s worth starting there, because the structure explains a lot about why the content inside each segment looks the way it does.
Six Stops, Three Countries, Thirteen Months
A 13-month EMBA built on Nanyang’s own format doesn’t run as a single continuous course. It runs as six separate week-long residential blocks, four of them on NTU’s own campus in Singapore, one at Tsinghua University in China, and one at UC Berkeley in the United States. Candidates who need more time can stretch the same six segments across twenty-four months instead of thirteen, without changing anything about their content or their order.
- 4 segments, NTU campus, Singapore
- 1 segment, Tsinghua University, China
- 1 segment, UC Berkeley, United States
The Six Segments in the Order They’re Taught
Laid end to end, the sequence moves from foundational decision-making through to organisational-level change, with two international segments dropped in partway through rather than saved for the very end:
- Business Strategy for Executive Decision-Making (Singapore)
- Strategy, Finance and Innovation (Singapore)
- Analytics, Economics and Sustainability (Singapore)
- Business and Innovation in China (Tsinghua University)
- Innovation and Leadership (UC Berkeley)
- Leading Organisational Transformation (Singapore)
That ordering isn’t accidental. The first three segments build a shared analytical and strategic vocabulary before anyone leaves Singapore; the two international segments introduce outside markets and outside teaching styles once that foundation is in place; and the final segment brings the cohort back home to apply everything to questions of internal transformation.
A Few Modules That Don’t Sound Like Typical MBA Fare
An Executive MBA curriculum built for senior candidates tends to skip some of the more introductory material a younger cohort would still need, and a handful of modules here make that especially clear:
- Identifying Opportunities in Blockchain & AI: evaluating emerging technology as a strategic bet, not a technical skill
- Neuroscience-Informed Marketing in the Age of AI: applying behavioural science to marketing decisions rather than campaign mechanics
- Doing Business in China: taught on the ground at Tsinghua rather than as a case study back in Singapore
- Technology-Based Innovation and Disruption: taught at Berkeley, inside the market most associated with the subject
None of these sit in a single segment on their own. Each one is folded into a broader theme alongside two or three other modules, so a week in Singapore might move from accounting for decision-making straight into cultural intelligence, without either subject getting diluted by the other.
Real Problems Instead of Case Studies at the End
Where many MBA formats close with a final exam, this one closes with SPAN, short for Strategy Projects at Nanyang. Teams take on an actual business challenge, either from their own company or from an external organisation, and work through it under a faculty mentor and an industry sponsor rather than a professor grading a written answer.
The problems teams tackle tend to fall into a few recurring categories, each drawing directly on material from earlier segments:
- Entering a new geographic market
- Building or scaling an innovation initiative
- Designing a growth strategy for an existing business unit
A team assigned a market-entry problem, for instance, is drawing directly on the China and Berkeley segments rather than starting from a blank page, which is part of why those two international weeks sit in the middle of the sequence and not at the very start.
How the Programme Actually Grades Participants
Assessment across all six segments favours application-focused work over traditional examinations. Assignments, group discussions, applied projects and in-class activities carry the grading weight instead, which fits a cohort of candidates who are, in most cases, already a decade or more removed from sitting a timed written exam.
In practice, that means the bulk of the evaluation happens inside the same project work the segments are built around, rather than in a separate testing period layered on top of it. A candidate finishing the Analytics, Economics and Sustainability segment, for example, is typically assessed on how a real analytical framework got applied to a live business question, not on a written test of the underlying theory.
For the specific intake dates and campus schedule currently open for enrolment, contact Nanyang Technological University and speak with the admissions team directly.
