Dates
TBA
Location
Online
Program Fee
$499
Contact
For more information, please contact: AcademyPrograms@wharton.upenn.edu
Overview
Dive into the heart of startup culture with the Entrepreneurship Strategy program, a dynamic, multi-session experience that challenges learners to navigate the journey of founding a startup. This program was designed to introduce learners into the roles of a startup’s founding team, confronting them with the complex challenges of entrepreneurship. From critical decision-making and strategic planning to team management, negotiation, and hiring, learners will experience firsthand how to lead a business to success.
Business leaders are challenged every day to make fast-paced decisions while navigating a complex landscape. To succeed, they must:
- Continuously upskill their business acumen
- Acquire and hone new leadership skills
- Cultivate agile mindsets
- Synthesize information to make critical business decisions
- Deliver innovation and sustainable profitability
Wharton Interactive’s Entrepreneurship Game supports learners new to the world of entrepreneurship. The program aims to teach critical skills needed to compete in changing business environments, where team, organization, and data-driven leadership capabilities are the keys to success. Through personal and team journeys and ongoing coaching and application sessions, participants will explore and gain experience in building and leading teams, conducting business experiments, and they will practice strategies for countering common team pitfalls and increasing their team’s collective intelligence.
Details
Program Objectives
• Learning Objectives: Build a successful founding team, finance your venture, conduct meaningful business experiments, scale your organization effectively, and master sales and marketing strategies.
• Practice Objectives: Gain firsthand experience in handling real startup data, preparing essential documents, interacting with key stakeholders, and overcoming common startup failures.
• Thinking Objectives: Develop perspective-taking, improvisation, self-monitoring, and self-efficacy skills to navigate and overcome entrepreneurial challenges.
✅ The online program begins with an Orientation Session by the Wharton Academy team, setting participants up for success as they begin their experience.
✅ The program consists of 8 synchronous virtual sessions culminating in a debrief to tie all of the core learning objectives together. Participants take part in a learning journey, experiencing each concept multiple times and through a variety of lenses. Ideas introduced in one session are explored in the next one.
✅ The debrief pulls together concepts explored in previous sessions and helps participants think through how to apply their newly acquired knowledge to their real lives. Each program experience includes personalized instruction and adaptive feedback in the simulation, as well as instructional time to reinforce the various learning objectives.
Instructional Methods
The program leverages various virtual instructional strategies including direct instruction, feedback, interleaving, testing, and reflection, all facilitated by Wharton instructors. You will engage with content through videos, emails, documents, and calls, and apply what you’ve learned through simulation and real-world decision-making. The program emphasizes gradual skill development, providing immediate feedback and opportunities for reflection to foster learning and improvement.
* Classes are delivered online and synchronous each week
Eligibility
Participants should be between the ages of 18 and 25 and have a keen interest in entrepreneurship and a desire to learn.
All participants will earn a Wharton Academy certificate of completion with a digital badge.
Instructional Team
Instructor: Coming Soon
Program Author: Wharton School Professor, Ethan Mollick
Ethan Mollick is the Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar, a Wharton School Associate Professor of Management, and Academic Director of Wharton Interactive.
At Wharton, Dr. Mollick studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship. He also examines the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education, leading the conversation on how ChatGPT and other AI-driven tools are changing how we work and learn. His papers have been published in top management journals and in 2020 he authored the book The Unicorn’s Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders and Investors.
Dr. Mollick has long had interest in using games for teaching, and he coauthored a book on the intersection between video games and business that was named one of the American Library Association’s top 10 business books of the year. He received his PhD and MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, magna cum laude.