What are Marketplace Simulations?
Let your students experiment with entrepreneurship strategies in an engaging game-like exercise. They launch new products to the market and manage the entire product life cycle, from introduction to growth to maturity. Learning content is gradually and purposefully introduced as the market evolves.
Core Learning Content
| Marketing | Develop, price, and promote a portfolio of brands to targeted market segments. Advanced options include 5 diverse segments, refined needs and wants, more brand features, and extensive ad design and media options with evolving market preferences. |
| Sales | Create global expansion strategy based on market potential, costs, and available resources. Advanced options include more sales outlets, regions, and channels, plus options to incentivize sales people. |
| Manufacturing | Project demand, schedule production, and invest in capacity expansions. Manage inventory, lost sales, and excess capacity. Advanced decisions include target and replenishment points, changeover issues, and quality control. Decisions are substantially impacted by marketing and sales channel decisions. |
| Accounting/Finance | Review detailed financial statements, brand profitability reports, and industry financial ratios in order to manage operations. Advanced decisions include extended financial planning and capital structure decisions (equity and debt management). |
| Human Resources | Create compensation packages, including employee benefits that affect employee productivity at a regional level. |
| Business Negotiations | Negotiate R&D license agreements. |
| Entrepreneurship | Start up and run a new venture. Students face new issues, decisions and information as they naturally unfold over the life-cycle of a company/product. A pitch to outside investors is encouraged for a stimulating and highly realistic challenge. |
Key Differences Between Capstone Simulations
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| Description | Provides a deep understanding of the entire business enterprise in the global market. Students must deal with complex strategic and tactical issues across all functional areas. This is a well-rounded management and strategy simulation that can provide a good challenge at all levels. | Builds on Strategic Corporate Management except that it boasts one additional challenge, the interjection of evolving international issues (political challenges and exchange rates considerations). | Combines the breadth of International Corporate Management with formal strategic planning templates based on the OST (objective-strategy-tactic) mental framework. | Based on International Corporate Management but with real exchange rates, economic conditions, and industry news. Hedging and speculative investments in foreign currencies are available to respond to real-life economic uncertainties. | Builds on International Corporate Management, adding advanced supply chain options, including outsourcing and complex negotiation. This is the most advanced simulation available. |
| Typical courses | Capstone, integrative business courses | ||||
| Educational level | Advanced undergraduates; MBA / EMBA‘s | MBA and Executive MBA students, undergraduate honor students | MBA and Executive MBA students | ||
| Decision rounds | 8 to 12 decision rounds of 4 to 5 hours, 8 decision rounds are recommended. | 8 decision rounds of 4 to 5 hours | Up to 12 rounds (8 recommended) of 4 to 5 hours | ||
| Class size | 20 to 40 students. The optimal game size is 4-6 teams of 4-5 students, up to 8 teams are possible. Parallel games work well with larger classes – as many as 20 games of 25 students have been played simultaneously. | ||||
| Languages | English, Spanish | English, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil) | English | ||
Instructor Involvement
Instructor-student interaction is strongly recommended because of the depth and breadth of the decisions and the sophistication of the student participants. A variety of presentations, coaching tips, and exercises are provided. To keep the focus on theory and practice, all simulations are designed to be self-study exercises. Student work is self-guided with an intuitive interface, lectures, contextualizing videos, and detailed help files. A Balanced Scorecard is used for student feedback, management by the numbers, and grading.
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