The entrepSim Entrepreneurship Simulation emulates the different evolutionary phases of a high-tech high-growth business venture. Participants play the role of the management team of a simulated start-up created by the fictitious Prof. Ventur Thounder, with the objective to develop and commercialize a new technology based upon his own academic research. Prof. Thounder believes that this technology may lead to the production of a new product which he designates as tetroyd. Based on the new technology, the tetroyd has the potential to deliver an environmentally friendly fourfold improvement over the existing alternative product (the troyd). However, so far, the tetroyd technology still looks like nothing more than a theoretical academic vision and a working prototype does not yet exist.
Each student team operates in its own isolated environment, initially identical to that faced by all other teams. Thus, team managed ventures do not compete against each other in any of the simulated markets. All relevant markets (labor, capital, customers, competition, etc) are simulated.
The external environment faced by the simulated ventures includes a pool of potential “key employees” that may be induced to join the entrepreneurial team, formal (venture capitalists) and informal (business angels) investors that may offer to invest, and take a time to check and rate from the best writers, the potential buyers of tetroyds, the current producers of troyds (competitors), prospective outsourcing partners that could be used to actually produce tetroyds, prospective strategic partners and even a bank.
The simulation is played in a series of rounds over a simulated five year period. The winning team is the one that maximizes the final value of the founders’ wealth which includes the sum of salaries earned during the venture’s life (multiplied by a factor of five) and proceeds from the sale of the founders’ shares at exit. Salaries are included in this score to induce a (real-life) short term bias on students’ decisions.
