New entrepreneurs encounter some of the toughest lessons in the business world. Failing early and often helps expedite the learning curve, but many entrepreneurs struggle to recover from such setbacks. Here are six hard lessons that your students can and should learn in the safety of a business simulation game and not in the real world.
The Answers Aren’t Always Textbook
Technology is constantly evolving and disrupting the status quo. To stay ahead of the competition, all business professionals need to learn how to adopt changing technologies and adapt their business strategies. Our newest simulation, Venture Strategy Bikes, can provide your students guidance on how 3D printing disrupts a bicycle business’ market, finance, and supply chain – a lesson most textbooks don’t yet touch on.
The Big Picture is Important
Entrepreneurs need to see how their business functions as a whole and how optimizing for profit might not necessarily mean running every area at top speed. A game by Marketplace Simulations lets students practice the different areas of business. Learners experience how these disciples can affect each other, all while developing a cohesive strategic plan to launch their new venture.
Get Perspective on Your Strategy
Every business professional has team members they rely on and supervisors or board members they report to. A simulation by Marketplace gives students experience solving critical problems as a team and reporting and defending their strategies to their business coach (professor) and potential investors (guest business executives). Students are challenged every step of the way to examine their knowledge, analysis, assumptions, and projections. This trains the student learner to get multiple perspectives and find knowledge gaps.
Practice Makes Perfect or at Least Builds Confidence
The only real way to get good at something is to practice. While there is no such thing as business perfection, experience improves decision making and confidence. Marketplace business games allow students to gain the experience of running a business, with the pedagogy of reputation, reflection, and testing woven into the simulation. The students’ successes, small and large, lead to a realization that they have what it takes to be an effective business leader.
Business is Messy and Unpredictable
The real business world presents problems that cannot be described completely or resolved with certainty, and experts often disagree about the best solutions. During a Marketplace simulated game, students deal with unstructured, ill-defined issues that crop up as the business evolves. They learn to manage scarce resources across many competing and often contradictory priorities and even how to thrive on the unexpected, uncertain, and unpredictable.
Continuous Improvement Wins the Day
Venture creation simulations recreate the competition of the marketplace, where entrepreneurs need to constantly build upon their achievements to stay ahead. Rather than simply finding the correct answer, students are expected to push the bar higher than their competitor and in doing so, push themselves to continuously improve. Even students that don’t reach the top of their segment typically show performance gains quarter over quarter.
Teaching students these lessons with the new Venture Strategy Bikes simulation by Marketplace provides them with real experience, best preparing them for the challenges of the business world. Help your students become better prepared and more confident with an experiential learning game by Marketplace Simulations.