Professional Certificate in Strategic Management

Professional Certificate in Strategic Management

Offering high-quality products and services at competitive prices is no longer a sufficient business strategy. Increased competition and an evolving digital landscape demand more from organizations and their leaders.

Enhance your leadership capabilities and learn how to develop sustainable, successful business strategies with the Professional Certificate in Strategic Management from Wharton. Offering practical lecture knowledge and hands-on application of concepts, this program teaches you how to decrease costs, increase operational efficiencies, and improve customer experiences.

Created by world-renowned professors at the Wharton School, the Professional Certificate in Strategic Management walks you through how technology has changed the way businesses interact with customers and why this necessitates connected strategies. This program of business strategy courses is designed for managers and leaders of all industries who want to better identify, amplify, and sustain the competitive advantage of their businesses.

Why Study Strategic Management?

  • 61% of senior executives admit that their companies have a hard time bridging the gap between strategic planning and implementation.1
  • Only 40% of employees strongly feel their managers comprehend the goals and strategy of their company.2
  • Only 41% of employees feel their companies have the competent personnel necessary to execute strategic initiatives.3

1 https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/learning/thought-leadership/why-good-strategies-fail-report.pdf
2 http://georgejamesltd.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/What-Employees-Really-Think-about-Todays-Workplace.pdf
3 https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/learning/thought-leadership/why-good-strategies-fail-report.pdf

Program Details


Start Dates:
Enroll Immediately

Duration:
6 weeks per course

Commitment:
2-4 hours per week

Program Format:
100% Online

Program Tuition:
$537.30
$199 (per individual course)


READY TO START?

Professional Certificate in Strategic Management Course Descriptions

BUSINESS STRATEGY FROM WHARTON: COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Course Description

Price: $199
Duration: 6 weeks
Hours: 3-4/week

What sets your organization apart from others? How can you maximize and sustain its impact over time? Understanding and maintaining your competitive advantage is no small task.

Business Strategy from Wharton: Competitive Advantage will give you the tools and frameworks necessary to execute a well-designed strategy. You’ll understand the drivers and barriers of competitive advantage so you can sustain your distinct advantage. You’ll also learn how to assess the impact of your competitors’ strategies.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to enhance your strategy to maximize your competitive advantage and drive revenue growth.

Course Modules

  1. Analyze Your Firm’s Internal Fit
  2. Analyze Your Firm’s External Fit
  3. Maintaining Your Firm’s Dynamic Fit
  4. Creating New Strategies and Initiatives

Participants Will Learn How To:

  • Evaluate your firm’s strategic environment
  • Distinguish between organizational effectiveness and strategic positioning
  • Identify barriers to organizational change and strategy implementation
  • Map central and supporting firm activities, understanding how they interact with each other
  • Engage in sustainable strategic management and planning

INTRODUCTION TO CONNECTED STRATEGY

Course Description

Price: $199
Duration: 6 weeks
Hours: 2-4/week

Technology has fundamentally changed the way businesses operate and how leaders engage in the strategic management of their firms. Understanding the customer journey has become essential to creating and executing connected strategies.

Connected Strategy examines how technology has evolved and changed the ways businesses interact with their customers. Professors Christian Terwiesch and Nicolaj Siggelkow will walk you through the connected customer experience and how connected delivery models are used in various industries. You’ll learn about connected strategy examples and analyze existing frameworks that can inform connected relationship design.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to identify, assess and implement connected strategies for your organization.

Course Modules

  1. Connected Strategy and Value Proposition
  2. Connected Customer Experience and Customization
  3. Connected Producers and Connected Strategy Matrix
  4. Revenue Model, Technology Infrastructure, and Disruptive Innovation

Participants Will Learn How To:

  • Analyze innovation frameworks and value propositions
  • Identify connected relationships and their potential for your firm
  • Examine customer experiences as they relate to the greater customer journey
  • Create customization strategies by leveraging positive customer feedback loops
  • Develop connection architecture and connected customer relationship strategies for your business

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT CAPSTONE

Course Description

Price: $199
Duration: 6 weeks
Hours: 2-4/week

You understand connected relationships, but how can you apply this knowledge to excel the strategic management of your firm?

Connected Strategy Capstone Project provides you with the necessary tools to ideate, plan and execute a connected strategy for your business. Tailored worksheets and lecture videos from Professors Siggelkow and Terwiesch will guide you through each step of connected strategy creation. The final capstone project will be a combination of your worksheets and analysis of the strategy you created.

Throughout the capstone project, you’ll be able to reflect on your organization and develop actionable strategies.

Course Modules

  1. Connected Customer Experience
  2. Connected Customer Experience Strategy
  3. Connected Delivery Model Strategy
  4. Capstone

Participants Will Learn How To:

  • Apply the concepts learned in the Connected Strategy course
  • Approach connected strategy planning and creation
  • Move beyond traditional customer interactions to create a new business model
  • Create a connected customer experience and connected delivery model for any organization
  • Envision and develop a connected strategy that can be directly applied to your business

Key Certificate Program Takeaways

Participants will learn how to:

  • Identify business’ competitive advantages
  • Amplify competitive advantages and drive profits
  • Leverage connected strategies to create continuous customer relationships
  • Transcend traditional forms of customer interaction and adopt new business models
  • Achieve sustainable competitive advantage

Professional Certificate in Strategic Management Faculty

Christian Terwiesch photo

Christian Terwiesch

Andrew M. Heller Professor at the Wharton School
Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions
Professor of Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine
Co-Director, Mack Institute of Innovation Management

Faculty Research Interests

He is a Professor in Wharton’s Operations, Information and Decisions department, co-director of Penn’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management, and also holds a faculty appointment In Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. His research on Operations Management and on Innovation Management appears in many of the leading academic journals ranging from Management Science to The New England Journal of Medicine. He is an award-winning teacher with extensive experience in MBA teaching and executive education.

Professor Terwiesch is the co-author of Matching Supply with Demand, a widely used text-book in Operations Management that is now in its third edition. Based on this book, Professor Terwiesch has launched the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in business on Coursera. By now, well over 250,000 students enrolled in the course.

His latest book, Innovation Tournaments, was published by Harvard Business School Press. The novel, process-based approach to innovation outlined in the book was featured by BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, and the Sloan Management Review and has lead to innovation tournaments in organizations around the world.

Professor Terwiesch has researched with and consulted for various organizations. From small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, he has helped companies become more innovative, often by implementing innovation tournament events and by helping to restructure their innovation portfolio.

Most of his current work relates to healthcare and innovation management. In the healthcare space, some of Professor Terwiesch recent projects include the design of patient centered care processes in the VA hospital system, the impact of emergency room crowding on hospital revenues and the patient experience at Penn Medicine, and the usage of patient portals and remote patient monitoring.

In addition to his teaching and his research, Professor Terwiesch is experimenting with a new career as a host of a national radio show on Sirius XM 132. Also, after 20 years of Ironman racing, he is trying to become a competitive rower, a transition that unfortunately turns out to be harder than expected.

"View profile"

Nicolaj Siggelkow

David M. Knott Professor
Professor of Management
Co-Director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management

Faculty Research Interests

He studied Economics at Stanford University and earned an M.A. in Economics from Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University and the Harvard Business School. Professor Siggelkow has been the recipient of multiple MBA and Undergraduate Excellence in Teaching Awards, including the Class of 1984 Award presented to the faculty member with the highest teaching rating in the MBA classroom, the Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Teaching Award, the Wharton Award, and the Wharton Graduate Association Student Choice Award. His research has been published in the leading management journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Industrial Economics, Management Science, Organization Science, and Strategic Organization. In 2008, he received the Administrative Science Quarterly Scholarly Contribution Award for the most significant paper published in ASQ five years earlier. Nicolaj is a member of the Editorial Review Boards of Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Strategic Organization, and Academy of Management Perspectives.

His current research focuses on the strategic and organizational implications of interactions among a firm’s choices of activities and resources. In particular, his research has focused on three broad questions: How do firms develop, grow and adjust their set of activities over time? How does organizational design affect a firm’s ability to find high-performing sets of activities? What role do interactions among a firm’s activities play in creating and sustaining competitive advantage? To address these questions, he has employed a range of methodological approaches, including in-depth field studies of individual firms, econometric methods for large-scale data sets, formal modeling, and simulation models.

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