
overview

educational value

business schools

corporations

Educational value of Marketplace

Let your students plunge into the real world of business management.

Understanding the "big picture": Marketplace integrates all functional areas of business. It enables students and managers to understand how the pieces fit together as a coherent whole. In six to twelve decision rounds representing quarters of compressed time, teams choose a business strategy, evaluate tactical options, and make a series of decisions with profitability in mind. Each decision period has a dominant activity linked to a set of decisions which take the simulation participants through the business life cycle.

"The students found the simulation more effective than case analysis assignments that they had in other classes. They felt the simulation was very effective in their learning how the functions of marketing fit together."
Warren Brown, Management Program, School of Extended Education, St. Mary's College, Moraga, CA
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Strategic thinking and competitiveness: Marketplace requires strategic thinking and team dynamics while using a combination of strategic business instruction, compelling market challenges, and a true-to-life simulation. The consequences of the students' decisions are quickly reflected in the simulated marketplace. Students learn to adjust their strategy to become stronger competitors.

Experiential Learning: Through the experiential learning approach, Marketplace enables students to develop hands-on skills in marketing, management, finance, accounting, and manufacturing.

Extended Case: The exercise is actually a series of related decisions (cases) that extend over time and organizational function.

Accountability and Forward Thinking: Students live within a business world of their own making. Today's decisions were shaped by yesterday's decisions, and tomorrow's decisions will be shaped by today's.

Interconnectedness of the Disciplines: The marketing decisions affect and are affected by the manufacturing decisions which are related to the finance decisions; the accounting information facilitates (or constrains) all decision-making; and team management issues affect everything.

Disciplinary Detail: The decisions and issues the students encounter are at the tactical level of an organization. This detail provides disciplinary depth as well as cross-functional breadth to the learning experience.

Financial Responsibility: The aspirations of the students are always constrained by the availability of cash and the firm's profitability. By dealing within these constraints, students discover how their decisions affect the firm's cash flow and profitability. This also motivates them to search for ways to expand cash and profit. As a result, they develop a keen understanding of financial management.

Customer Driven: Financial success can only be attained by fulfilling the needs of the customer. Customer satisfaction does not guarantee financial success, but financial success is not possible without customer satisfaction.

Meaningful Context: Business terms, principles, practices, and ways of thinking are employed within the natural context of starting up and running a business. Abstract ideas become grounded in real-to-life decision-making.

Critical Thinking: Students discover, and are forced to consider, the many tradeoffs inherent in every decision. They also find that "correct" answers do not exist and what is a "good" decision depends upon the circumstances at the time.

Teamwork, Interpersonal Skills, Leadership: The complexity of the simulation requires a division of the tasks and coordination among the team members; the many tradeoffs force debate where students must learn to communicate effectively and fight for their ideas.

Just-in-time Delivery: The disciplinary content is delivered at the point in time when students are faced with a new decision, thus increasing its relevance and the students' motivation to acquire this new information.

Repetitive Exercise: Each quarter's activities not only result in new decisions and new material being introduced, but also build upon the prior content. The repetition ensures that difficult concepts, principles, and practices are assimilated into the natural thinking of the students.

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