Entrepreneurship Game

Entrepreneurship Strategy (new)
For educators
Learning time
Varies, but usually 6-7 sessions of 60-90 minutes each
Authored by:

Give students the experience of running a high growth startup

What you'll teach

  • Building a founding team and scaling and growing a company

  • Approaches to finding product-market fit

  • Pitching and selling to customers and investors

  • Managing entrepreneurial finances

  • Negotiating with potential business partners and investors

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About Entrepreneurship Game

The Entrepreneurship Game is a complete entrepreneurship educational experience that is impactful, engaging, and easy to run.

The Student experience

In this multisession game, students will enter a hyper-immersive world and work in teams taking on the role of a founding team of a startup and experiencing the challenges of leading a business to success as they:

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

Your Experience

The Entrepreneurship Game is unlike any other simulation or game you may have previously run.

Here is how:

The game is effective

We designed the Entrepreneurship Game to teach key concepts in entrepreneurship 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 element of the game 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 get a good sense of 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 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 entrepreneurial 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 the game uses, see our White Paper.

Entrepreneurship Game: At a Glance

Learning Time (12-18 hours)

-In-Class Live Team Sessions: 6-7 Sessions, 60-90 minutes each

-Out-of-Class Asynchronous Strategy and Review Sessions: 6-7 Sessions, 60-90 minutes each

Bandwidth Requirements

-At home/office: 30 megabits per second

-Classrooms/larger settings: 100 megabits per second, ideally with multiple access points

Learner Requirements

-A computer with internet access; the game works best in any modern browser, including the latest Chrome, Firefox, or Safari

-If they are playing in person, headphones for watching videos

-If they are playing remotely, a way of connecting with their team during Live Team Sessions (a video chat is preferable for remote groups)

-VPN (Virtual Private Network) should be turned off

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

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What you'll teach

  • Building a founding team: equity agreements,
  • Financing a venture: cash flow, funding choices, terms, sources of capital
  • Business experiments: data gathering, hypothesis testing, pivoting
  • Hiring and scaling: candidate screening, interviewing, selection
  • Sales and marketing: selecting product features, securing sales, selecting key customers
  • Negotiations: establishing positions, analyzing bargaining power, conducting high-stakes negotiations
  • Pitching and persuasion: building pitch decks, giving elevator pitches, explaining a startup
  • Leadership: inspiring a team, avoiding common pitfalls, achieving consensus
  • Experiencing the types of data that are generated by business experiments: surveys, market tests, and interviews
  • Encountering key documents used by startups: pitch materials, legal agreements, and market research
  • Engaging with critical stakeholders in high-stakes settings: funders, customers, and employees
  • Navigating through common points of failure for startups: team conflict, scaling, and process loss
  • Perspective-taking and the ability to analyze multiple viewpoints
  • Improvisation and bricolage; making do with what you have to solve novel problems
  • Self-monitoring and metacognition
  • Self-efficacy and the confidence to accomplish entrepreneurial challenges
  • Building a founding team: equity agreements,
  • Financing a venture: cash flow, funding choices, terms, sources of capital
  • Business experiments: data gathering, hypothesis testing, pivoting
  • Hiring and scaling: candidate screening, interviewing, selection
  • Sales and marketing: selecting product features, securing sales, selecting key customers
  • Negotiations: establishing positions, analyzing bargaining power, conducting high-stakes negotiations
  • Pitching and persuasion: building pitch decks, giving elevator pitches, explaining a startup
  • Leadership: inspiring a team, avoiding common pitfalls, achieving consensus
  • Experiencing the types of data that are generated by business experiments: surveys, market tests, and interviews
  • Encountering key documents used by startups: pitch materials, legal agreements, and market research
  • Engaging with critical stakeholders in high-stakes settings: funders, customers, and employees
  • Navigating through common points of failure for startups: team conflict, scaling, and process loss
  • Perspective-taking and the ability to analyze multiple viewpoints
  • Improvisation and bricolage; making do with what you have to solve novel problems
  • Self-monitoring and metacognition
  • Self-efficacy and the confidence to accomplish entrepreneurial challenges

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