Executive PhD in Business Curriculum Information
The Business PhD for Working Professionals
The Executive PhD in Business is a part-time, accelerated and flexible three-year program that will allow you to earn a doctorate while continuing to grow your career.
For the first two years, you will take two online synchronous classes per week during each semester. You will also attend six residency weekends each year (two weekends per semester). This Friday and Saturday residency, with travel days on Thursday and Sunday, will be an immersive, intensive learning session that allows you to deeply engage with faculty and the members of your cohort on the Bentley University campus in Waltham, Mass.
Curriculum Overview
Year 1
Focuses on learning how to apply quantitative and qualitative academic research techniques.
Year 2
Transitions to developing a research agenda.
Year 3
Dedicated to your dissertation.
Your Dissertation
Your faculty adviser will help you apply the techniques learned in the first two years of classes toward researching and writing your dissertation. Instead of cohort residency weekends, you will have dedicated in-person time to meet, collaborate and work with your faculty advisor.
Focus Areas
You will choose from three different areas — Leadership, Business Analytics, or Experience Design — to help further focus your research interest with Bentley faculty.
The challenges facing business executives today are interdisciplinary in nature and require a broad range of skills and human understanding to manage change. This program emphasizes an understanding of organizational behavior to help you become a transformational leader equipped to handle complex business situations. Whether it's sustainability, climate change, ethics, social auditing or diversity equity and inclusion, you will engage in research to help solve problems around contemporary leadership issues.
The increased use of advanced analytical tools and the volume of available data require business executives to embrace new ways to improve decision making. In this program, PhD students will explore the human side of big data and learn the technical, analytical and modeling skills required to solve some of them most complex problems facing society today. The program will make strategic use of Bentley's Center for Analytics and Data Science.
This fast-growing discipline explores and researches the ethics, aesthetics and design of products or services from a human perspective. Experience design practitioners with doctoral degrees are in high demand and the credential has become mandatory for certain leadership roles in design and research. Students focusing in this area will benefit from Bentley's national reputation in this field and our state-of-the-art User Experience Center, Haptics Lab and Virtual and Augmented Reality Lab.
The entire Executive PhD in Business course sequence is 69 credits, mapped below by semester.
Year One: Fall
Synchronous classes:
- Quantitative Analysis (3 credits)
- Organizational Theory (3 credits)
- Applied Research Seminar I (1 credit)
In-person experiences:
- Orientation Weekend
- Immersion Weekend 1
- Immersion Weekend 2
- Immersion Weekend 3
Year One: Spring
Synchronous classes:
- Quantitative Research Methods (3 credits)
- Focus Area Course I (3 credits)
- Applied Research Seminar II (1 credit)
In-person experiences:
- Immersion Weekend 4
- Immersion Weekend 5
- Immersion Weekend 6
Year One: Summer
Synchronous classes:
- Qualitative Research Methods (3 credits)
- Focus Area Course II (3 credits)
- Applied Research Seminar III (1 credit)
In-person experiences:
- Immersion Weekend 7
- Immersion Weekend 8
Year Two: Fall
Synchronous classes:
- Quantitative Analysis II (3 credits)
- Focus Area Course III (3 credits)
- Applied Research Seminar IV (1 credit)
In-person experiences:
- Immersion Weekend 9
- Immersion Weekend 10
- Immersion Weekend 11
Year Two: Spring
Synchronous classes:
- Research Methods Course (3 credits)
- Focus Area Course IV (3 credits)
- Applied Research Seminar V (1 credit)
In-person experiences:
- Immersion Weekend 12
- Immersion Weekend 13
- Immersion Weekend 14
Year Two: Summer
Synchronous classes:
- Research Methods Course (3 credits)
- Strategic Management (3 credits)
- Applied Research Seminar VI (1 credit)
In-person experiences
- Immersion Weekend 15
- Immersion Weekend 16
Year Three: Fall
Independent work with adviser:
- Dissertation Course I (9 credits)
Year Three: Spring
Independent work with adviser:
- Dissertation Course II (9 credits)
Year Three: Summer
Independent work with adviser:
- Dissertation Course III (9 credits)