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Wisdom Frontiers Entrepreneurs Program Wisdom Frontiers Entrepreneurs Program
This program offers Chinese entrepreneurs a structured pathway to understand diverse markets, engage with global industry leaders, and sharpen their decision‑making in complex environments. Each module connects academic rigor with real‑world business challenges, enabling participants to refine their global strategy, strengthen organizational resilience, and build long‑term competitive advantage.
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Academic Architecture Overview
The academic design combines strategic depth, concrete business application and exposure to real economic, financial and technological ecosystems.
The program is built on two complementary dimensions:
- curated peer-level engagement with global decision-makers,
- five structured Strategic Pillars.
Together, they ensure that academic rigor, executive exposure and strategic implementation continuously reinforce one another.
Program highlights
- A two-year learning journey structured across 9 modules and 49 days of immersive learning.
- Two complementary learning dimensions:
> High-level academic sessions structured around five Strategic Pillars addressing core entrepreneurial challenges: brand value creation, international development and scale-up, governance and long-term continuity, strategic inflection points, and technology and innovation as business enablers.
> Curated Strategic Executive Dialogues with founders, CEOs and global decision-makers. - Approximately 20 curated Strategic Executive Dialogues across Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
- Global exposure across major economic regions, reflecting the industrial strengths and competitive
ecosystems of each geography. - Structured synthesis sessions connecting executive encounters with academic frameworks and strategic reflection.
Strategic Executive Dialogues
A defining pillar of the program is a series of approximately 20 curated Strategic Executive Dialogues with founders, CEOs, chairpersons and executive committee members across Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
These are not observational company visits. They are structured, peer-level strategic exchanges designed to provide direct access to leaders who have successfully navigated:
- Complex growth phases
- International expansion
- Industrial scaling
- Governance evolution
- Critical inflection points
Program
The Brand Value Creation pillar focuses on what creates long-term brand value and how iconic brands are built to last for decades. Participants step back from short-term performance to understand the strategic levers that make a brand resilient, coherent, and consistently valuable over time.
The pillar also addresses the transition from local brands to international and global brands, with a clear emphasis on what makes a brand truly travel across cultures. The learning then moves into execution: building desirability and differentiation, from product excellence to credible brand promises that can scale without diluting meaning.
The International Development and Global Scale-up pillar equips leaders to design international growth paths and strategic choices, clarifying where to compete, how to enter, and what to prioritize when moving beyond the domestic base.
The goal is to strengthen global judgment before accelerating expansion.
It then goes deep into operating reality: international trade and export operations, including logistics, customs, standards and risk management, and the conditions required for scaling operations across borders.
Participants work on how to organize people, processes and partners so growth is repeatable, controllable, and robust across markets
This pillar reframes family ownership as a strategic asset, not a constraint, when it is structured to support clarity, resilience, and long-term value creation. Participants explore how enduring family-controlled firms protect their strategic intent while remaining competitive through cycles.
A central focus is governance, roles and decision-making in family-controlled firms, ensuring alignment between family, ownership, and management.
The pillar then addresses transmission, succession and continuity across generations, helping leaders anticipate risk points early and design mechanisms that sustain performance, legitimacy, and cohesion over time.
Strategic choices and scenarios at key growth moments trains leaders to recognize and act on strategic inflection points, those moments where past recipes stop working and the next decade is shaped by a few non-reversible decisions.
Participants learn to step back, frame the real problem, and avoid “default” choices driven byurgency.Participants learn to step back, frame the real problem, and avoid “default” choices driven by urgency.
The work is structured around exploring strategic scenarios and trade-offs and strengthening the ability to make decisions under uncertainty.
The intent is to move from intuition-only decision-making to disciplined scenario thinking, so leaders can choose with clarity even when data is incomplete, signals conflict, and stakes are high.
This pillar positions technology as a strategic enabler, a means to accelerate performance, sharpen competitiveness, and unlock new business models, rather than a standalone topic.
The module connects strategic intent to execution, helping participants identify where tech truly moves the needle.
The learning is grounded in data, AI and digital platforms in real business use cases, with a clear emphasis on how to innovate while protecting performance.
A key theme is innovating while scaling the core business, so innovation strengthens the organization’s foundation instead of destabilizing it during growth.
Modules calendar
| Module | Country | Estimate Date |
| 1 | China | June 2026 |
| 2 | France | September 2026 |
| 3 | Qatar & Saudi Arabia or EAU | November 2026 |
| 4 | China | January 2027 |
| 5 | Switzerland & Italy | April 2027 |
| 6 | United Kingdom & Germany | August 2027 |
| 7 | United States | November 2027 |
| 8 | China | January 2028 |
| 9 | France | May 2028 |
Profile
Who is this program for? Is it right for you?
Participant Profile
The program is aimed at:
- Founders, Chairpersons, or CEOs of global industry leaders,
- Enterprise with strong developement potential and international expansion prospects.
WHY CHOOSE US?
Where global vision meets strategic execution.
Faculty
Diego GASPARI
Academic Co-Director, HEC Paris
Faculty
Barbara Stöttinger
Academic Co-Director & Dean of HEC Paris Executive Education
About Diego Gaspari
Diego Gaspari brings over 30 years of international experience in Human Resources across financial services, the automotive industry, and fast-moving consumer goods. Having lived and worked in Europe, North America, and South America, he is fluent in French, English, Spanish, and Italian, and has successfully led multicultural teams in diverse cultural environments.
For the past decade, he served as Chief Human Resources Officer on the Executive Committees of two leading institutions in Wealth Management — Edmond de Rothschild and Indosuez — where he oversaw all areas of HR management, with a strong focus on talent development, leadership team support, executive assessment and coaching, organizational transformation, and HR digitalization.
Recently, he founded Lumen Human Solutions, a boutique consultancy dedicated to helping leaders and organizations navigate transformation by combining strategic HR expertise with tailored leadership development, high-performance team coaching, and the integration of innovative human capital solutions.
Passionate about personal development, psychology, and sports, Diego has also collaborated with Olympic athletes and their teams, supporting their mental preparation to achieve peak performance.
About Barbara Stöttinger
With over 25 years of experience in academia and academic management, Barbara Stöttinger most notably served as Dean of WU Vienna’s Executive Academy. In this role, she oversaw a diverse portfolio of post-experience education, including EMBA, LLM, specialized master’s programs, and the Executive Education division. She played a pivotal role in expanding the institution's executive education programs.
Barbara holds a PhD and has held visiting professorships, as well as research and teaching collaborations with various universities such as University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management, or the University of Victoria, Canada. She has extensive experience as an (executive) educator in Marketing and International Marketing in North America, Europe and Asia for which she also received several outstanding teaching awards.
Her research interests focus on international marketing topics in the B2B sphere (global pricing in SMEs), as well as in international B2C contexts, (e.g., international consumer behavior of counterfeit products).
Contact
Elodie XU
Director - HEC Paris China Office
