Entrepreneurial Strategy: Acquisition, Commercialization, and Growth

Program Experience

Highlights and Key Outcomes

This course builds the judgment to evaluate, acquire, and grow a business with discipline. By the end, you will be able to:

• Evaluate whether an opportunity deserves deeper pursuit, separating evidence-based prospects from attractive narratives
• Judge where a business’s value comes from and whether it is defensible, monetizable, and transferable to a new owner
• Prepare for seller conversations in ways that build trust and surface what you most need to learn
• Structure offers, work through diligence, and interpret lender and investor requirements in light of the real quality of the business
• Decide when new information calls for clarifying, restructuring, repricing, slowing down, partnering, or walking away
• Connect business model, monetization, and ecosystem choices to long-term value capture
• Lead after the close, making sound decisions about growth, organization, scaling, and exit
• Produce an implementable ETA strategy or technology commercialization strategy you can put to work right away

Experience and Impact

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:

• Paths, Search, and Opportunity Selection: Choosing among buy, partner, and compete, and producing an opportunity screening brief
• Defensibility, Business Model, and Seller Insight: Revisiting a target to test whether value is real, defensible, and transferable, and building a monetization and ecosystem playbook
• Offers, Diligence, and Financing the Deal: Interpreting financing and diligence scenarios and deciding when to clarify, restructure, reprice, or walk away
• Leadership, Growth, Scaling, and Exit: Working through post-close leadership and culture choices and weighing stewardship and exit trade-offs

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.

Entrepreneurship Certificate Pathway

This course stands on its own or works as an elective within Wharton Online's Entrepreneurship Certificate. Take it independently as a single course or pair it with the certificate's three core courses to earn an Entrepreneurship Certificate with a specialization in Acquisition and Commercialization Strategy.

Tuition

The tuition for this course is $1,350. You can also apply it toward the Entrepreneurship Certificate; bundle details are available at the certificate page.

Course Duration

Many learners finish sooner than the suggested pace by working through modules in a shorter timeframe. You may progress as quickly as you'd like, provided you complete all required coursework before the course end date.

Attend as a Team. Amplify the Impact.

Wharton Executive Education offers group-enrollment benefits for organizations sending four or more participants. Learn More »