Microsimulations

Product Design Microsimulation

Learning that sticks.

Help your students develop essential business skills through short, interactive exercises.

Try our Product Design Microsimulation to see how it would fit into your classroom.

Why use Marketplace Microsimulations?

Get started in minutes

  • Learn all you need and get set up in less than 10 minutes
  • No manuals, no downloads, no prep-work
  • Easy to add to your business course

Customize for your course

  • Build a custom set perfect for your curriculum. Or, choose from bundled Microsimulations, designed for common business courses.
  • Decide when each Microsimulation will be available to your students to fit your course syllabus.

Let us do the grunt work

  • No need to handhold your students. Our system guides them every step of the way.
  • No extra work to manage the exercise. It runs itself.
  • Easily monitor your students’ progress anytime, anywhere.

Add practice at the right time

Microsimulations add short, practical exercises at the most relevant points during your course. Each exercise lets your students apply a newly learned concept in a simple business situation.

Engage through experience

The game-like nature of Microsimulations entices multiple senses, thoroughly engaging your students. Better engagement increases their knowledge retention and desire to learn.

Make learning more effective

Purposeful visualization makes difficult concepts easier to understand. Your students experiment with different solutions to business problems, and they receive immediate feedback. This leads to deeper understanding of the presented material.

Focus on mastery of the subject

Students can spend as much time as they need to master the content of each Microsimulation at their own pace. They can repeat each exercise multiple times to improve their score.

Flipped classroom

Microsimulations can be used to facilitate the flipped classroom model. Your students can complete Microsimulation exercises at home before the class sessions, and you can spend more in-class time on projects or discussions.

Marketplace Microsimulations was a gold medalist in the 2023 International Serious Play Awards. It was judged on engagement, interactivity, learning objectives, orientation, assessment, aesthetics, and gameplay.

What are Microsimulations?

Microsimulations are 10 to 25 minute long, online, game-like exercises that help your students understand essential marketing and business concepts such as:

  • Product Design
  • Production Scheduling
  • Basic Accounting
  • Strategic Planning
  • Profitability
  • Internet Marketing
  • and more…
Have your students design a strategic plan for a startup with the Strategic Planning Microsimulation.

Each Microsimulation is a mix of brief animated lectures and bite-sized interactive challenges. While the lecture components explain the business concepts through meaningful visualization, the challenge elements let your students practice what they learn by solving practical business problems.

You can bundle Microsimulations to create a set of exercises that best fit the learning objectives of your marketing or business course.

How do you build Microsimulations into your business course curriculum?

  1. Pick one of our Microsimulation bundles designed for specific business courses or choose from individual microsimulations to build your own set.
  2. Set the schedule to match your syllabus – decide when each microsimulation will be completed.
  3. Share the access link with your students.
  4. Your students complete the Microsimulations (individually).
  5. Check the progress and performance of your students any time.
Production Scheduling Microsim
Production Scheduling microsimulation

Microsimulations help my students to better understand fundamental business concepts and develop business acumen.

Dr. Eva Cowell, Professor, University of Tennessee

Choose Microsimulations for your course.

Microsimulations


15 mins per student

This exercise 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.



20 mins per student

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.



15 mins per student

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.



15 mins per student

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.



15 mins per student

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.



25 mins per student

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.



25 mins per student

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.



20 mins per student

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.



20 mins per student

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.



20 mins per student

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.


Bundles


35 mins per student
  • Fundamentals of Product Design
  • Product Design and Market Response Functions


40 mins per student
  • Fundamentals of Pricing
  • Price Elasticity in Practice


140 mins per student
  • Fundamentals of Product Design
  • Profitability
  • Fundamentals of Online Marketing
  • Online Paid Advertising
  • Fundamentals of Strategic Planning
  • Fundamentals of Pricing
  • Price Elasticity in Practice


50 mins per student
  • Fundamentals of Online Marketing
  • Online Paid Advertising


85 mins per student
  • Fundamentals of Product Design
  • Fundamentals of Accounting
  • Fundamentals of Strategic Planning
  • Fundamentals of Production Scheduling
  • Fundamentals of Pricing


70 mins per student
  • Profitability
  • Fundamentals of Accounting
  • Fundamentals of Pricing
  • Price Elasticity in Practice


120 mins per student
  • Fundamentals of Product Design
  • Fundamentals of Production Scheduling
  • Profitability
  • Fundamentals of Accounting
  • Fundamentals of Strategic Planning
  • Fundamentals of Pricing
  • Price Elasticity in Practice


170 mins per student
  • Fundamentals of Product Design
  • Fundamentals of Production Scheduling
  • Profitability
  • Fundamentals of Accounting
  • Fundamentals of Online Marketing
  • Online Paid Advertising
  • Fundamentals of Strategic Planning
  • Fundamentals of Pricing
  • Price Elasticity in Practice