Radboud University
Radboud University is one of the leading academic communities in The Netherlands. Established in 1923 and situated in the oldest city in the Netherlands, Radboud University has nine faculties and enrols over 24,000 students in 95 study programmes. Radboud educates students to become expert, committed, critical and self-confident graduates who help to shape society by taking on positions of responsibility in which they demonstrate their understanding of issues. True to our origins in the Catholic emancipation movement of the early twentieth century, staff and students feel a commitment to one another, to society and to the world. We remain committed to the empowerment of social and cultural minorities. We want to have an impact, and in this we are guided by both academic questions and societal challenges.
Where scientists come together from different backgrounds, new insights emerge. Our society faces complex challenges that require interdisciplinary collaboration. Therefore, Radboud University has explicitly opted for strong and broadly defined disciplines and cooperation between those disciplines.
Nijmegen School of Management
The programme of the European Master in System Dynamics is embedded in the Nijmegen School of Management (NSM). NSM spans seven disciplines: Business Administration, Public Administration, Economics, Environmental Governance and Politics, Spatial Planning, Political Science and Human Geography. The staff members involved in the European Master’s in System Dynamics are members belonging to the Methodology department of Business Administration. The European Master’s in System Dynamics is taught together with the Business Analysis and Modelling master and students take courses together.
The mission of NSM is to contribute to responsible governance for sustainable societies. Inspired by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG’s) and in the context of sustainable societies, our work focuses on topics such as inequality, gender, decent work, and poverty, contributes to innovation and growth, and addresses environmental challenges and climate. By building, questioning, and extending the UNSDG’s we acknowledge their interrelatedness and focus on several grand challenges within society that we seek to address and contribute towards resolving.
Our People
Prof. dr. E.A.J.A. Rouwette
Prof. dr. E.A.J.A Rouwette is the chair of the Methodology department. He lectures on empirical research methods and group decision support methods, including Electronic Meeting Systems, Problem Structuring Methods, gaming simulation and group model building. His research concentrates on the effect of these methods on information exchange and participants’ beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. He supervises PhD research in the domains of sustainability, health, and security.
Personal page: https://www.ru.nl/english/people/rouwette-e/
Dr. H.P.L.M. Korzilius
Dr. H. Korzilius is an associate professor in Research Methodology at NSM. His teaching activities focus on general research methodology, statistics, and quantitative methodology from introductory up to and including advanced levels of scientific education. He has supervised many MA and PhD theses and continues to do so. His current research interests are mechanisms and learning of system dynamics thinking, meta-analysis, methodology of participatory research strategies, and cultural effects.
Personal page: https://www.ru.nl/english/people/korzilius-h/
Dr. I. Bleijenbergh
Dr. I. Bleijenbergh holds a position as an associate professor at NSM. She lectures on qualitative research methods and designing research proposals. This involves case-study research, open interviews, focus groups and qualitative content analysis. Her research concentrates on the quality of participatory research methods (Group Model Building, Delphi Study and action research) and on diversity management and gender equity in organizations.
Personal page: https://www.ru.nl/english/people/bleijenbergh-i/
Dr. V. de Gooyert
Dr. V. de Gooyert is an associate professor at NSM. His research and teaching revolve around increasing understanding of, as well as intervening in, societal transformations towards sustainability. Vincent is trained both as an engineer and as a sociologist, and his work often aims to transcend disciplines, using and contributing to methods on stakeholder engagement, system dynamics, and socio-technical transitions.
Personal page: https://www.ru.nl/english/people/gooyert-v-de/
Dr. S. Smeets
Dr. S. Smeets is an associate professor at NSM. He specializes in EU decision making, with a focus on negotiations on the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), foreign policy and enlargement. He teaches courses on quantitative and qualitative research methods.
Personal page: https://www.ru.nl/english/people/smeets-s/
Dr. S. Eker
Dr. S. Eker is an assistant professor at NSM and a Research Scholar at International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. Her interdisciplinary research profile combines systems analysis and engineering, decision sciences and social sciences, and her work brings systems thinking and uncertainty focus to climate change and sustainability problems with model-based approaches.
Her current research interests center around the drivers and implications of demand-side climate change mitigation, sustainable diets, and co-production of mitigation and sustainability scenarios through simple integrated assessment models.
Personal page: https://www.ru.nl/english/people/eker-s/
Programme
Systems Thinking for Systemic Change (6 ECTS)
The role of models in policy processes and the concepts of organisational interventions with system dynamics will be discussed. Students can transfer the knowledge and understanding they have acquired in this course to other fields of the social sciences. In addition, methods that are discussed, can be used in various settings and in combination with different approaches. These methods are meant to handle complexity in organisational problem contexts.
Modelling for Stakeholder Engagement I (6 ECTS)
Students know about the fundamentals of qualitative Group Model Building. This method is embedded in and compared to other approaches to problem solving and strategic decision-making and students can reflect on this. They know scripts for Group Model Building sessions that represent components of successful applications of the method.
Strategic Decision Making (6 ECTS)
Students can explain different theories and models of decision-making in organisations. Furthermore, individual, group and organisational biases on decisionmaking can be listed.
Modelling for Stakeholder Engagement II (6 ECTS)
Knowledge from the course on Group Model Building I will be expanded, and students will be able to also conduct quantitative Group Model Building projects. Additional tools and scripts will be in the focus of study and become familiar to the students
Research Methodology (6 ECTS)
Students are knowledgeable about various notions of strategy. They can define central terms on the strategy field. Students can conduct a dynamic analysis of a firm’s strategy. The strategic architecture of a company can be depicted, and conclusions can be drawn from this.
