Online Certificate in Scaling a Business: How to Build a Unicorn
Online
DURATION
6 Weeks
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Part time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
Request application deadline
EARLIEST START DATE
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STUDY FORMAT
Distance Learning
Key Summary
Scholarships
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Introduction
Achieving unicorn status — a valuation of $1 billion or more — is no simple feat. But preparing your business for scaling success early on can help ensure your company joins the unicorn ranks. This program is designed to help business leaders and entrepreneurs unlock the secrets of unicorn success and discover what it really takes to scale companies to billion-dollar valuations. You’ll learn the characteristics of a unicorn and how to recognize one as well as explore the challenges that come with building and scaling a unicorn to help you grow your own startup or business initiative.
- 1,000+ The number of unicorns worldwide, with just under half established as recently as 2021 (Source: Statista)
- 40% Only two out of five startups achieve profitability (Source: Zippia)
Program Outcome
Key Takeaways
Wharton’s Scaling a Business: How to Build a Unicorn program explores the concept of unicorns, from what they look like and how they prepare for growth to how they deal with failure and crises along the way. This program will enable you to:
- Identify the characteristics of unicorn organizations
- Design a well-structured business experiment
- Analyze organizational resources and constraints to scale technology
- Examine the processes and structure of a growing organization
- Examine effective frameworks and metrics of an organization’s readiness to scale
- Evaluate the personnel and cultural needs within an organization
Curriculum
Program Modules
Module 1: Characteristics of a Unicorn — Yes, They Are Real
Begin by gaining a broad understanding of the program’s key concepts: the main characteristics of unicorns, myths of unicorns, growth limiters, and common mistakes.
Module 2: Experimentation: Scaling the Organization
Learn how small companies can succeed even without all the resources large organizations have, and examine the latest research on conducting business experiments, how to make them successful, and how you can use them to continue to grow your organization to unicorn status.
Module 3: Scaling Technology and Operational Resources
Discover the ways you can prepare to invest in the right operational and technological resources, including how to move from short-term to long-term considerations and how to think about modeling uncertainty.
Module 4: Scaling Processes and Structure
Understand what problems processes solve and learn the advantages and disadvantages of formalizing processes. Then create a road map to identify and design processes that scale.
Module 5: Metrics and Financials
Explore the framework for determining your organization’s readiness and ability to scale, as well as the metrics necessary before and after scaling to ensure that expansion is successful and sustainable.
Module 6: Scaling Culture: Rewards, Hiring, Incentives, and Interviewing
When the time comes to scale, many companies realize internal factors are slowing their scaling process. Delve into scaling internally by focusing on your organization’s culture and people.
Industry Examples
This online program provides real-world learning examples to help you understand the realities of building a unicorn startup through the experiential lens of leading global brands.
Blue Apron
Premature scaling can be dangerous for a company. Discover the critical mistakes Blue Apron made during its scaling phase and how that affected its growth.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Underestimating and overestimating are both common in the startup world, but maintaining adequate resources and processes is essential to any startup's growth. Learn how Amazon Web Services (AWS) attempted to stay nimble even after becoming a large enterprise.
Casper
Most founders consider operational scalability a high-class problem — but it’s still a problem. Discover how operational scalability affected the mattress firm Casper due to inaccurate demand forecasting.
Tesla
Learn how Tesla overestimated in their plans to build a Gigafactory in 2014. While the company was capable of producing batteries for 500,000 cars, the actual car sales were 5,000.