Management education is all about looking beyond books. Conceptual knowledge is still vital but it is not all. The very concepts of management have been developed by observing and studying generations of successful managerial professionals so that the students of management can absorb the relevant qualities that can help them excel in their profession.
-What makes management education unique and sought after?
-What makes the management candidates command higher salaries as compared to other candidates?
The answer lies in the way management students learn. The process is highly practical oriented or experiential in nature. Most of the teaching tools adopt ‘Learning by Doing’ approach to enable the students to develop critical thinking, problem solving, creativity and innovation, leadership and team skills. One of these tools more increasingly used by many top business schools is Business Simulation Games.
What are Business Simulation Games?
Keys and Wolfe (1993) have defined a management game as a simplified simulated experimental environment that contains enough illusion of reality enabling real-world-like responses by those participating in the exercise. These games focus on simulating management or business processes and involve a series of decision-making exercises structured around a model of a business operation. The participants assume the role of managing the operation simulated in the game. They may be web-based and played online or downloadable and played offline. Now some such games are available in Apps also.
The simulation games come in two variations: single player or multi player. The single player game can be downloaded and played in desktop whereas the multi player games are played online by connecting to a central game server.
The educators can conduct business simulation exercises with the help of these games which are available almost at no cost. As most of the students have access to internet, these games can be made part of teaching many topics and skills. Some of the Massive Multi- Player Real time Online Games (MMOGs) are played by students through social media sites where they connect with other players.
Why Business Simulation Games?
As these games expose the students to
situations and challenges which they may encounter in real life, they are more
engaging and effective as teaching tools.
Most of the outcomes of these games are:
Decision making experience
Better Learning outcomes
Developing soft skills such as Communication Skills, Inter-Personal Skills, Negotiation skills, Team building Skills and creative thinking
Developing product product/service knowledge, selling skills, customer service and more functional skills.
These games help rapid learning, give a practical orientation and can give the student wide exposure to many domains and aid in self discovery. There are plenty of free as well as priced business simulation games around. Here are some of the freely available games on the internet. However some of them have paid versions for academic use:
INNOV8
INNOV8 is an interactive, 3-D business simulator designed to teach the fundamentals of business process management and bridge the gap in understanding between business leaders and IT teams in an organization. It is developed by IBM and is available free of charge.
Sim Companies
The goal of the game is to create a profitable and competitive business. Each player receives a starting capital and few assets. Players' day-2-day tasks consist of managing the resource supply chain, from production to selling in retail, procuring business partners, ensuring financing, etc.
Virtonomics:
Virtonomics is a series of multiplayer business simulation games consisting of Virtonomics Entrepreneur, Virtonomics Business War and Virtonomics Tycoon. In the Virtonomics series, there are no predefined rules to winning or losing, and the game does not end. Although users choose their own goals in the game, the most common goal is to build a successful business in a competitive society.
Stock Market Games:
There are a number of stock market simulation games offered for free by trading platforms. ‘MoneyBhai’, ‘Wall Street Survivor ‘ , ‘HowTheMarketWorks’ ’Virtual Trading by ICICI Direct’ and more where a player gets knowledge of the functioning of stock market and also the mechanics on investing.
Author
Dr. Swarnalata Philip is head of Department of Management in JDCOEM. She has served in a nationalized bank for eighteen years and has a teaching experience of fourteen years. Her areas of interest include Corporate Finance, Equity and Derivative Market and Behavioral Finance. She is also interested in creative writing and has written many newspaper articles and poems.
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