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 using strategies based upon segment needs, market size, price points, competition, and ability to adapt. |
| Sales | Create global expansion strategy based on market potential, costs, and available resources. |
| Manufacturing | Project demand, schedule production, and invest in capacity expansions. Manage inventory, lost sales, and excess capacity. |
| Accounting/Finance | Review intermediate level financial statements, brand profitability reports, and industry financial ratios in order to manage operations, cash, and profits. Plan ahead with multi-period pro forma accounting. Work with capital structure with equity and loans options. |
| Human Resources | Create compensation packages, including employee benefits, and affect employee productivity. |
| 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 can be added to further contribute to entrepreneurial insights. |
Key Differences Between Strategic Management Simulations
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| Description | Focuses on the development and management of business strategy across all functional areas and over time. Extensive use of the tools of management is required for success. | Builds on Strategic Management with a focus on formal strategic planning. Templates are provided for strategic analysis, strategy specification, tactical execution, and real-time tactical control. | Builds on Strategic Management with a focus on Conscious Capitalism. Students consider all of the firm’s stakeholders and deal with HR, ethical, environmental, and sustainability issues. | Business Management includes all of the decisions of Advanced Strategic Marketing. Its differentiating feature is that these decisions are within the context of a full enterprise to break down the silo mentality. Students learn how marketing coordinates with all of the functions of a complete business by making financial and manufacturing decisions. | 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. Success requires the use of a wide variety of business concepts and analytics. |
| Typical courses | Capstone business courses | Capstone business courses with a strong strategic focus | Corporate governance, capstone, and entrepreneurship courses | Capstone, integrative business courses | |
| Educational level | Third and fourth year undergraduates. Introductory courses at the master’s level are also viable. | ||||
| Decision rounds | 6 decision rounds of 1.5 to 2 hours | 6 decision rounds of 2 to 2.5 hours | 6 decision rounds of 2 to 3 hours | 8 decision rounds of 2.5-3 hours | 8 decision rounds of 3 to 3.5 hours |
| Class size | 20 to 40 students. The optimal game size is 4-6 teams of 3-5 students, up to 8 teams are possible. Parallel games work well with larger classes, as many as 30 games of 30 students have been played simultaneously. | ||||
| Languages | English. Other languages and compete against the computer option available in the Personal Computers edition. | English | English. Other languages available in the Personal Computers edition. | English, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Polish | English, Polish |
| • Compete against classmates or computer (all games playable against classmates) | |||||
Instructor Involvement
Instructor/student interaction is encouraged. Students are highly receptive to coaching, targeted lectures, and exercises that enhance their business acumen. A variety of these resources are provided to help instructors. In contrast, little effort is required to help students with Marketplace Live. 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.
Marketplace Simulations