Management 7210 - Corporate Development: Mergers & Acquisitions (Full-time Wharton MBA program)

This course explores the various modes of corporate development available to managers to drive firm growth and change, including internal development, strategic alliances and other types of partnership, outsourcing, corporate venture capital, minority investments, and particularly mergers and acquisitions. The objectives are four-fold: (1) to arm students with a set of evidence-based tools to facilitate the selection of the appropriate growth strategy mode in a given situation; (2) to provide students with insights into how to manage partnerships and minority investments; (3) to develop a comprehensive framework for executing M&As, from initiation to implementation; and, (4) to gain intuitive understanding of how to manage the entire corporate development portfolio, optimizing synergies across various modes of corporate development.

The emphasis is on strategic and operational aspects of corporate development transactions, rather than financial deal structure or other financial considerations. While we will cover deals from a variety of industries, a number of them are from technology-based sectors. This is not only due to the recent prevalence and continued importance of external growth strategies in these sectors, but also because the fast pace provides early assessments of outcomes and management lessons. Insights from these settings are generalizable to many other contexts.

The course has four core modules. In Module I, we examine the different modes of corporate development, including the applicability and management approaches for each. In Module II, we turn our attention specifically to the different modes of mergers and acquisitions. In Module III, we delve into acquisition screening and deal-making. In Module IV, we consider different aspects of post-merger integration. There are also special topic sessions on other relevant subjects of interest such as private equity and activist investors. The latest syllabus for the course could be found here.