Business & Entrepreneurship
Courses on starting and running a business: strategy, operations, pricing and the mechanics of getting paid.
Verified courses first, then the rest of the category
Finance across currencies and jurisdictions, the international counterpart to the corporate finance courses. Free from Saylor.
Not independently verified
Marketing across markets and cultures rather than within one. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Why people buy, drawn from research rather than from conversion folklore. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Building and maintaining a brand as an asset with measurable value. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Digital channels taught inside a university marketing programme rather than around one vendor’s toolset, which is unusual and useful. Free from Saylor.
Not independently verified
Running a sales function, covering structure and measurement rather than selling technique. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Marketing research as a method, from designing a study to acting on what it says. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
The graduate continuation of organisational behaviour, for people shaping culture rather than working within it. Free from Saylor.
Not independently verified
Negotiation at the level of ongoing commercial relationships rather than single transactions. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Applying information systems to real organisational problems, following the introductory MIS course. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Change management as a discipline, addressing the part of strategy that usually fails. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Leading a venture specifically, where the constraints differ from leading an established firm. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
The legal questions a founder meets, from entity choice onward. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Generating and testing venture ideas, treated as a method rather than as inspiration. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
The launch itself, following the ideation course in Saylor’s entrepreneurship sequence. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
The closing seminar of Saylor’s entrepreneurship sequence, drawing the earlier courses together. Free from Saylor, readable as a guest without an account, with a free certificate on completion.
Not independently verified
Wharton’s business analytics specialization, covering customer, operations, people and accounting analytics. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Modelling a business in spreadsheets and interpreting what the model says, from Wharton. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
A narrowly scoped course on writing one specific business document well, which makes it more useful than a general communication course. Free from The Open University, startable without signing up, with a free statement of participation on completion.
Not independently verified
Wharton’s foundational business sequence, covering marketing, accounting, finance and operations as one programme. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Wharton on strategy where social and environmental outcomes are part of the objective rather than a constraint. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Darden’s strategy specialization, covering how a firm chooses where and how to compete. Delivered through Coursera; the browse listing publishes no price.
Not independently verified
Eighty-one minutes aimed at nonprofit organisations using Canva Pro, which Canva offers to that sector on different terms. Product training.
Not independently verified
An orientation to the career paths available in finance, published free by the Corporate Finance Institute alongside its paid certification programmes. An account is required and no credit card is asked for. Useful mainly for deciding which direction to pursue rather than for building a specific skill.
Not independently verified
About this subject
Courses on starting and running a business, from university programmes in strategy and management through to practical material on launching a venture. This is the broadest subject in the directory, which means it holds two quite different kinds of course: academic teaching that assumes you want to understand how organisations work, and operator material that assumes you want to do something on Monday. Both are useful. Knowing which one you are looking at is the first decision.
Guidance
Verification tells you that a course delivers the material it advertises. It cannot tell you whether the approach it teaches will work for your business. These are the things worth checking yourself.
A graduate strategy course and a founder-led course on getting your first ten customers can both be excellent and are not substitutes. University material tends to give you frameworks that survive changes in fashion and will not tell you which tool to use. Operator material tends to be concrete and specific to a moment, a market and a channel. Read the summary for who the course says it is for, and the level, before the syllabus.
Advice that is right for a company with a hundred employees is often wrong for one person with an idea, and the reverse is equally true. Courses on organisational behaviour, operations and change management assume an organisation already exists. Entrepreneurship courses assume it does not. Neither states this as loudly as it should, so it is worth checking what the examples look like.
Business is a subject where a strong personal story is often presented as a method. One person succeeded once is not evidence that a sequence of steps causes success, and survivorship makes this hard to see. Prefer material that says where its ideas come from, admits what it does not know, and describes conditions under which its advice would not apply. Be wary of anything that promises a specific outcome from a specific process.
Company formation, employment obligations, contracts and tax are national. A course on hiring or business law may be accurate and current and still be about a different legal system from yours. Strategy, operations and marketing travel much better than anything with a statute behind it.
This catalogue contains courses of forty hours and courses of forty minutes. A long course is not automatically more useful, but a two-hour treatment of a subject like operations or finance is an orientation rather than a working competence. Where a provider publishes hours we record them, so you can judge before starting rather than after.
Standards
The published standard applies unchanged. These are the checks that tend to matter most in this subject.
A verification says nothing about whether a strategy will work in your market, your industry or your circumstances. We do not assess commercial merit, and no verification is a prediction that a business will succeed.
Questions
No. Verified means the course is real and broadly matches what it advertises. Business outcomes depend on your market, timing, capital and execution, none of which a course can control and none of which we assess.
Neither is better in general. University material is usually stronger on frameworks and evidence, founder material on specifics and current practice. Each listing names the institution or instructor so you can judge which you are getting.
Universities publish openly, and software companies publish training around their own products. Where a course is free to take but charges for a certificate, the listing says so rather than describing it simply as free.
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