How Does a Strategy Simulation Fit With My Curriculum?

THE SHORT ANSWER:

The Sims are very flexible and can be adapted to most up-to date course curriculum being taught worldwide.

The Strategy simulations can easily be adapted to and integrated with most modern course curriculum. From articles, books, HBR case studies or recent news stories, we find that most relevant readings can easily be integrated with the Strategy simulations. Below is a selection of examples of how the sims can be fit into the most popular courses.

Strategy

Modern text books like Exploring Strategy, Fundamentals of Strategy or Strategic Management are all perfectly aligned with the Transform! simulation.

At Executive level, more specialized books like the End of Competitive Advantage (McGrath), Seeing around Corners (McGrath) Blue Ocean Strategy (Kim, Mauborgne),Reinventing Giants (Fischer), Business Model Generation (Osterwalder, Pigneur), The Innovators Dilemma (Christensen), the Future of Management (Hamel) and Dual Transformation (Anthony, et.al) are all deeply integrated in the simulation.

Innovation

Innovation textbooks like the Oxford Handbook of Innovation, Innovation Management or Diffusion of Innovations are all very well aligned with Transform!.

Doing Both: Capturing Today’s Profit and Driving Tomorrow’s Growth (Sidhu) is a great fit on Cisco’s innovation strategy.

At more advanced levels, readings like Creativity Inc (Catmull, Wallace), Ten Types of Innovation, Only the Paranoid Survive (Grove), the Ten Faces of Innovation (Kelley) and the Innovator’s DNA (Dyer, Gregersen, Christensen) fit well with the experience and learnings from Transform! simulation.

Corporate Finance

Corporate finance is deeply integrated in the Transform! simulation. As such, most introduction level readings in corporate finance fit well.

A handful of suggested readings include Corporate Finance (Hiller, et.al),  Fundamentals of Corporate Finance (Ross, et.al)  Lessons in Corporate Finance: A Case Study Approach to Financial Tools, Financial Policies, and Valuation (Asquith), Valuation (Koller),

How finance works (Desai) and finally

Barbarians at the Gate( Burrough Helyar)

Leadership & Change Management

The leadership and team dynamics of a simulation can be covered in many different readings. Some of our examples are Good to Great (Collins),

Start with Why (Sinek), Mindset (Dweck) and

The Future of Management (Hamel). On teams, we like Leading Teams (Richard) and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Lencioni). 

The entire series on emotional intelligence from Goleman and John Kotter’s work on change are all a great fit.

Finally, Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman) drives home the importance of thinking modes and mindset.

Entrepreneurship

Most entry-level textbooks, like Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Bessant, Tidd) work very well with Scale Up!

Steve Blank’s classics The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup Owner’s Manual are both great readings for the Scale Up! sim.

Modern classics like Blitzscaling (Hoffman, Yen), The Lean Startup (Ries), Zero to One (Thiel), The Hard Things about Hard Things (Horowitz), The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development (Cooper, Vlaskovits) and Disciplined Entrepreneurship

(Aulet) are also great fit with the key topics in the entrepreneurship simulation.

Entrepreneurial Finance

Entrepreneurial finance is an underdeveloped academic discipline in many parts of the world.

In terms of literature, we find a great fit with

Slicing the Pie (Moyer), The Art of Startup Fundraising (Cremades), Venture Deals (Feld, Mendelson), and Entrepreneurial Finance (Smith, Smith)

We are also big fans of the entire Founder’s Pocket Guide Series by S.R. Poland, including Cap Tables, Term Sheets, Startup Valuation, Founder Equity Split, and Raising Angel Capital.

More recently, we have also taken a strong liking to Thomas Hellman’s Fundamentals of Entrepreneurial Finance (Rin, Hellman)

In most simulation sessions on Scale Up!, we use examples and case studies to teach the topics, with books rarely used as a part of the curriculum.

Venture Capital

Venture capital is not often taught as a business school course, and if it the course typically use a mix of guest speakers and case studies.

With the Fund Manager! Simulation, we find a great fit with literature like How to Raise a Venture Capital Fund (Mead), The Business of Venture Capital (Ramsinghani ), Mastering the VC Game (Bussgang),  Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups (Calacanis), The Entrepreneurial Bible To Venture Capital (Romans) Venture Capital Deal Terms (Vries, Mol) and The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, (Stross).

Innovation Clusters
and National Competitiveness

Few business schools teach innovation clusters as a separate course. The ones that do frequently make use of local cases and local speakers.

Two classic textbooks, that fits very well with the Supercluster! Simulation is Global Clusters of Innovation (Engels) and Competitive Advantage of Nations

(Porter) In Norwegian, we may use Et Kunnskapsbasert Norge (Reve, Sasson) and Et Verdiskapende Norge (Reve, Jacobsen).

When running education and training programs, we frequently use our own work and publications, including Building Innovation Superclusters (Rangen), Cluster Business Models (Haze, Rangen) and National Cluster Programs (Rangen, forthcoming)

 

“A Great Match…

“The strategy sim fit perfectly with the course curriculum we teach. The simulation covers a wide range of academic topics, all of them aligning very well with the readings we have in the course.”

Bring Strategy Simulations Into Your Classroom