This microsimulation helps your students understand the basics of product design. It focuses on the idea that customers buy benefits and not product components. Your students will learn how to identify both the components that satisfy their target customer’s desired benefits, and those that take away from the benefit satisfaction. In the final challenge, they will use their new knowledge to design a bicycle that meets the needs of the target customer.

This exercise builds on the concepts covered in the Fundamentals of Product Design microsimulation. Your students will explore the most common market response functions. They will discover how to identify market response functions for specific product features. In the final challenge, they will put this new knowledge into practice and design a backpack that meets the needs of a specific customer segment.

This exercise introduces the fundamental concepts of production scheduling. Your students will learn about fixed capacity, operating capacity, and inventory. They will learn how to work with these production parameters to ensure their production facility can produce enough units to satisfy the demand, while avoiding stock outs and excess inventory. They will discover how production parameters affect a business’ bottom line.

In this exercise, your students will learn about the fundamental principles of accounting. They will discover how accounting helps keep records of a business’ property and transactions and keep track of profits. They will learn about the basic accounting equation, accounting transactions, and double-entry accounting. To put these principles into practice, your students will conduct a simple accounting audit to help the owner of a small business discover the cause of certain discrepancies in the firm’s accounting books.

This exercise helps your students learn about the fundamentals of strategic planning. They will explore the concept of strategy and the building blocks of a strategic plan. They will become familiar with strategic analysis, business opportunity analysis, strategic objectives, strategic thrusts, and tactics. Before they are done, they will test their new skills by developing a simple business strategy for a start-up firm.

In this exercise, your students learn about fundamental pricing concepts. They will find out how price affect profits. They will explore the relationships between price, demand, and costs. They will learn about pricing surveys, demand curve and economy of scale. To put this new knowledge in practice, they will step into the shoes of an owner of a small coffee roasting business and tackle the task of setting a price for a new product.

In this exercise, your students explore the price elasticity of demand. They learn about the price elasticity formula and use it to determine whether a price-demand relationship for a specific product is elastic or inelastic. They test this new knowledge in practice by taking on the role of the owner of a coffee roasting business. They use the price elasticity of demand concept to decide how to change the price of two products to maximize profit after their supply cost increases.

In this exercise, your students will learn about profitability analysis. They will delve into the concepts of activity based costing and cost objects. They will learn to link revenues and costs to cost objects in order to determine their profitability, and they will evaluate the profitability of products and regions. They will then use this newly acquired knowledge to help a business optimize its spending in marketing, sales, and HR with the goal to increase the bottom line.

In this exercise, your students learn about the fundamental principles of internet marketing. They will start with basic concepts such as search engines, search terms, and search results. Then they will learn about search engine optimization as a way to increase the number of visitors to a website. They will learn how to turn website visitors into sales leads. Over the course of the exercise, they will learn about search engine rankings, web analytics, bounce rates, and the web sales funnel. To put this new knowledge into practice, they will help the owner of a small business increase the number of leads from a website.

This exercise builds on the concepts covered in the Fundamentals of Online Marketing microsimulation. Your students will learn about paid Internet advertising and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. They will experiment with bids and budgets. They will learn about impressions, actual cost-per-click (CPC), click-through-rate (CTR), and landing pages. They will then use their new knowledge to help the owner of a small business increase sales and profit by improving the business’ online ad campaigns.