Organizational Leadership & Innovation

The Organizational Leadership and Innovation Game is a multi-session game in which students work in teams for the WISE Corporation, a large, diversified company. They are given the opportunity to join the WISE Accelerator, which helps the company launch innovative new products and services. Students take on a leadership role as they lead an internal venture – DX Technology – to success. As they run their venture, they make critical decisions that will affect their future: they will need to persuade customers to buy their product; conduct business experiments; and find and persuade critical stakeholders to fund their venture- all while managing key elements of hiring, finance, and marketing. The challenges are realistic and engaging, drawn from the experiences of successful managers and the latest research.

The Student Experience

In this multi-session game, students will enter a hyper-immersive world and work in teams leading an internal venture as they:

• persuade customers to buy their product
• conduct disciplined business experiments
• pitch key stakeholders
• negotiate with key stakeholders
• hire employees
• manage finances
• explore business models
• practice hypothesis-driven product design

Your Experience

The Organizational Leadership & Innovation Game is unlike any other simulation or game you may have previously run.

Here is how:

The game is effective

We designed the Organizational Leadership & Innovation Game to teach key concepts through a branching narrative in which students make increasingly consequential choices and are guided along the way via lectures, adaptive feedback, interactive videos, scoring, coaching, and gamified elements. We wanted to give students a chance to practice working in teams and navigate the tradeoffs involved in major startup decisions in an environment replete with narrative surprises, fast-moving events, and an uncertain future.

What does this mean for you?

You don’t have to focus on providing context, lectures, or feedback. You can focus on making the experience have meaning in students’ lives and future plans.

The game is adaptive

The game adapts to students at different levels and is built to support every student. Students who struggle get feedback and instructional material and can ask additional questions of in-game characters to help them make decisions. Students who need more of a challenge can opt for additional challenges. We have spent years assessing student reactions to every game element and have built support and additional challenges to adapt to every student.

What does this mean for you?

Students of different ability levels can still have meaningful experiences. You can use our reporting to understand where students are in the game, what they are struggling with, and where they may need additional discussion. The adaptive nature of the game means you don’t have to focus on how to teach different students; you can leave all of this work to the game.

Insights from our extensive instructor reports can help you with assessment and your debrief (should you choose to create one), and give you ideas for team coaching interventions and advice.

The game makes teaching easier

The game runs itself and includes instruction, feedback loops, expert insight, and adaptive storylines. Unlike other simulations, you don’t need to keep track of what happens in the game, and there is no daily management required.

What does this mean for you?

Depending on your workload, you can be as involved as you’d like to be, but you can shift your day-to-day class management to higher-order meaning-making for your students. You can focus less on grading and communicating basic concepts and more on having meaningful discussions about the experience.

For more on the story, how to create meaning for students, answer student questions, and a variety of workload approaches, see the Instructor Guide. For more on the pedagogical techniques, see our White Paper.

The Game at a Glance

What is an Alternate Reality Course (ARC)?

Built on our ARC platform, Alternate Reality Courses are a new breed of serious games. Every course combines world-class subject matter expertise, hyper-immersive interactive fiction, the science of learning, and innovative game design. ARCs are deeply engaging, teach through experience, and promote robust and enduring knowledge that learners will use beyond the course.

An ARC teaches learners in three ways:

• Learning objectives - skills learners will gain and use in the future
• Practice objectives - specific experiences learners will encounter, so that when they see them in the real world, they will know what to do
• Thinking objectives - mental techniques learners will develop that are applicable outside of the context of the simulation