Entrepreneurial Strategy: Acquisition, Commercialization, and Growth

Strong entrepreneurial leaders do two things well: they recognize value, and they realize it. The first is knowing which opportunity is genuinely worth pursuing. The second is turning that opportunity into a business that lasts, one that holds its value as it grows and changes hands. These skills are usually taught separately and mastered separately, and the leaders who command both are rare. They are also the ones who build companies that outlive the deals that created them.

This course develops both. It brings together the transaction discipline of entrepreneurship through acquisition; the art of finding and buying a business worth owning; and the strategic discipline of commercialization and growth, the work of turning what you own into a venture that keeps creating value. You leave with a rarer and more durable kind of judgment: knowing not only how to win the deal, but how to build something that endures long after it closes.

Delivered fully online and self-paced, this hands-on course puts you in the decision-maker’s seat rather than the audience. Instead of just absorbing content, you repeatedly engage in realistic entrepreneurial situations and build a usable body of work as you go. Each of the four modules pairs short faculty videos and guiding questions with applied activities, a workbook that becomes your running record of insights and progress, quizzes that help the material stick, and optional challenges that push the learning further.

The four modules move from opportunity to ownership to growth:

The course culminates in a project, Strategy in Action, in which you synthesize your work into an implementable plan. You choose one of two paths, an ETA Strategy or a Technology Commercialization Strategy, and leave with a roadmap you can use in a search process, a venture plan, an investor conversation, a diligence or post-close context, or an internal innovation effort.

This course is designed for professionals who want a stronger, more practical framework for owning, commercializing, and growing a business, including:

This course is best suited for professionals with some operating experience who are asking: Should I buy, build, partner, or license? What is actually worth pursuing? How do I know whether value is real and transferable? How should I lead and grow after the close?

To further leverage the value and impact of this program, we encourage companies to send cross-functional teams of executives to Wharton. We offer group-enrollment benefits to companies sending four or more participants.