The [MikesBikes] business simulation does a superb job of teaching students to link concepts with experience and motivating them toward their future studies in business.
COLBY, A., EHRLICH, T., SULLIVAN, W. & DOLLE, J. (2011) RETHINKING UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS EDUCATION: LIBERAL LEARNING FOR THE PROFESSION
Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession Textbook
What the book covers: Business is the largest undergraduate major in the United States and still growing. This reality, along with the immense power of the business sector and its significance for national and global well-being, makes quality education critical not only for the students themselves but also for the public good.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s national study of undergraduate business education found that most undergraduate programs are too narrow, failing to challenge students to question assumptions, think creatively, or understand the place of business in larger institutional contexts. Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education examines these limitations and describes the efforts of a diverse set of institutions to address them by integrating the best elements of liberal arts learning with business curriculum to help students develop wise, ethically grounded professional judgment. (Google Books)
MikesBikes at Santa Clara University
The textbook covered MikesBikes in Chapter 3 on “The Challenges of Undergraduate Business Education.” They interviewed a Santa Clara University instructor on how MikesBikes is currently used in the Contemporary American Business Course – a course that is required for all entering business majors at the Leavy School of Business.
MikesBikes in Contemporary American Business Course
[MikesBikes] provides a “liberal arts” experience in that it gives the “broad exposure” that is the aim of a survey course. And certainly we were impressed with students’ level of engagement, intellectual energy, and seriousness – qualities one wants to see in all aspects of a college education.
INSTRUCTOR FROM SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY
Santa Clara University has been using MikesBikes for many years now. The course is designed to provide an overview of business as a field.
The course includes standard classroom presentations, multiple choice examinations and one-third of the students final grade is dependent on their performance in the MikesBikes simulation. They run the simulation for the whole semester.
The first half of the semester allows the students to get familiar with the simulation and concepts through the Single-Player, practice phase. In the second half, they work in teams and compete against other teams in the course to achieve the highest Shareholder Value.
In MikesBikes, students are given an opportunity to work in marketing, production, product development, finance and accounting. Each member of the team are responsible in making decisions in these functions, allowing them to develop and make complex strategic decisions.
The course through the use of the MikesBikes business simulation provides students with an experiential learning environment, allowing them to take on realistic roles in a manufacturing bike company. They learn how to think critically and coordinate a management strategy. They experience the highs and lows of running a business, the excitement and risks all in a fun, and safe learning environment. In addition, working in teams allow them to learn about the importance of trustworthiness and integrity.
Reference: Colby, A., Ehrlich, T., Sullivan, W. & Dolle, J. (2011) Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession, Stanford, CA: Wiley.
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This article will be a three-part series introducing the market segments in Music2Go Marketing Business Simulation. In this article, we’ll be talking about the Standard Segment.
Market Segments in Music2Go Marketing
There are three market segments in Music2Go – Standard, Youth, and Sports (Multi-Player only).
These segments have different sizes, projected growth, sensitivity to price, advertising, distribution, and product specs.
You start with a single MP3 Player product in the Standard market segment. Starting in Year 3 (after 2nd rollover) you may improve your existing product and/or launch additional products into new market segments (up to a maximum of 4 products by Year 6). Part of the challenge of Music2Go is in being able to balance the needs of your products within your limited marketing budget.
Standard Segment
Consumers in this segment tend to be less active than those in the Sports segment and thus do not require the high level of technological specifications inherent in sports designs. While young adults in this segment share the purchasing ability of their sports counterparts, they are more price conscious, which is reflected in the relative pricing between these two segments.
Medium priced ($85 – $100) with high price sensitivity
Price range is $40 to $120, but the recommended range is $85 to $100.
Medium sensitivity to advertising
High sensitivity to distribution coverage
Low sensitivity to product specifications
Consumer style / tech spec preferences change slowly, so segment moves
slowly on perceptual map.
Since consumers in this segment are highly price sensitive, you can expect some price competition. Plan for this with cost reduction projects to maintain acceptable unit margins. However, be careful of engaging in a price war. No one wins a war. This is the slowest moving segment and has low sensitivity to product specs. So you may only require a single product spec improvement project midway through the simulation to remain competitive. It is the largest of the three segments but has minimal underlying growth.
You will be selling a single Standard Segment music player in the first two years of the simulation. After the 2nd rollover you may launch additional products into the Youth and Sports segments (Multi-Player only).
Making mistakes simply means you are learning faster.
Weston Agor
Who likes making mistakes? Majority of us probably don’t like making one or try our best to avoid it.
In school, we always thrive to do the best we can to avoid making mistakes in our exams or essays to avoid failing.
At work, would you hire someone who says they often make mistakes or promote someone who constantly does? Majority of employers probably wouldn’t.
Here at Smartsims Business Simulations, we believe that we often learn best and the most when we fail, and make mistakes. This allows us to look back, analyze what and where we have gone wrong and restart. If there’s an opportunity, we can also get feedback from our mistakes. This gives us a brand new start to take action and hopefully never make the same mistake again.
However, realistically, we seldom get a second shot to do all these, right? Professors in universities will rarely allow you to redo an exam you already failed. You won’t get another shot of winning that soccer match you already lost. You would lost an opportunity to get promoted if you missed your quota.
Good news is with Smartsims Business Simulations, failure and mistakes are encouraged!
The foundation of simulation-based learning is that we learn by doing. Our objective is to give students an opportunity to have their own business experience, and mirror what it’s like in the real world. This allows them to take responsibility over their own learning and become personally engaged with the content. They get to manage their own company in a fun and safe environment, while allowing them to learn through trial and error, testing different decisions and strategies.
Every business simulation includes a practice and competitive application. Once students are familiar with the simulation format, their teams develop strategy and make key decisions for their organization. Students use real-time market and business reports to effectively analyze market conditions; develop strategy; and, evaluate the impact of their choices.
All our business simulations provide students with a platform to develop an understanding of business concepts, make strategic and critical decisions, and allow them to see the immediate impact of their decisions.
Here, failure is encouraged and allowed, so that they can try better approaches and methods.
Provide your students with a unique learning opportunity and take your course to the next level with Smartsims. Contact us to learn more.
You want to get product development projects right the first time as this can be a costly mistake. It can mean either your Unit Prime Cost is higher than you want and/or your specifications are not as you wanted resulting in a lower demand for your product if they are wrong.
There could be two reasons why your project failed:
1. The project/budget expenditure was too low and/or 2. The requested unit prime cost was unrealistically low
As in real life, you do not want to commit to a product development project without checking that it was appropriately funded and that it would be able to provide an acceptable return on investment.
In addition, you have to be careful that the specifications you enter for your new product actually fall close to the ideal point of the segment you are targeting. Look under Key Reports for Perceptual Map of Market Segments to check this. Products outside the radius of influence (i.e. outside the circles) will not sell at all.
How do we conduct successful development projects?
We will walk you through an example where we develop the design for a racers bike. While the specifics and calculations may change, the steps you follow will be the same:
1. View the Indicative Values for Market Segments within the Product Development Scenario Information report to view the ideal product attribute levels desired by each segment.
(Note: These desired product attributes by each market segment change slightly from year to year so be sure to keep monitoring for the changes.)
2. Take the current Style/Tech Specs of your closest existing Design Project and calculate the required change in Style/Design and Technical Specs.
In our example, the closest existing Design Project is our Adventurer Bike. You can view the Product Development Project Results Report to view your closest existing design paying attention to the Style/Design and Technical Specs:
3. Calculate the difference in Style and Technical Specifications between the desired design and the closest existing design.
As you can see, in this example, our only and closest existing design project is our Adventurer product. This features specifications of 50 Style and 60 Technical. Our desired design project has targeted specifications of 20 Style and 86 Technical.
So the difference is 30 Style and 26 Technical.
We can see on the Product Development Scenario Information report that each unit of Style development costs $1000 and each unit of Technical development costs $20,000.
Our example calculation will be:
30 x $1,000 added to 26 x $20,000 = $550,000
Therefore, our design cost would be $550,000 on the new design to achieve 20 Style and 86 echnical.
4. Calculate your prime cost.
From the table above we can see that the prime cost will be calculated at roughly $0.1 to $0.15 per design and $4.50 to $5.00 per technical specification. We want a racers bike with 20 style/design and 86 technical specifications.
A conservative calculation would therefore be:
0.15 x 20 added to 5.00 x 86 = $433
If we enter any additional expenditure on to our design cost this will be used to further reduce the Prime Cost.
Note:This does NOT mean you should always aim super low with target Prime Cost. If you aim too low, then your project won’t have enough money to achieve its objectives and you will miss your style / tech spec targets as well as your prime cost target.
How do I correct a failed product design?
A failed product design is a design that shows anything less than 100% success rate within the Product Development Results Report. Unfortunately this means you will need to design the design again. However! The failed design is likely to be a lot closer to your desired specifications than the previous closest design, thus it means it is likely to be cheaper to invest in. Simply follow the process above again working off the new closest existing design (even if the closest existing design is a failure).
Three periods into the simulation and you will be given control of your firm’s Customer Relationship Management strategy. Customer Relationship Management or CRM is an approach to manage a company’s interaction with current and potential customers.
The purpose of a Customer Relationship Management strategy in the AdSim Advertising Simulation is to decide which policies you will implement to try and keep Existing Customers loyal to your brand.
In AdSim you are required to make decisions about four elements of your Customer Relationship Management strategy:
CRM SYSTEM
Decide whether or not you want to invest in a Customer Relationship Management database system? And if so what type? Entry level, Mid-Level or Custom Built.
WARRANTY
What length of Warranty that you want to offer your customers? 90 Days, 180 Days, One Year or Two Years.
SUPPORT
What level of a customer service do you want to provide? A manual, a knowledge base, Support Center, SmartCare.
LOYALTY
What type of customer loyalty program do you want to administer? A regular newsletter, a photo contest, video contest.
You are required to choose which option you think best targets your customers within your budgetary constraints.
You will be able to measure the effectiveness of your Customer Relationship Management strategy through the Market Demand report and the Market Survey of Customer Needs. These are available on the CRM decision screen.
Disruptor Daily featured Smartsims’ CEO, Dennis Gain to understand how Smartsims is using AI to transform education, and what the future of the education industry holds.
Smartsims began as we wanted to provide students with an experiential learning environment to bridge theories and concepts taught in class with real-life experience (you can read more about our history here).
We use Artificial Intelligence in our simulations through our use of robot competitors to replicate human competitors. This is most especially helpful in online courses that want to replicate a similar experience to students in campus.
One of the benefits of this for students is they are able to demonstrate working in team environments, exemplify an understanding of business problem-solving and fully represent themselves as capable professional candidates.
Your objective is to create wealth for shareholders and so you will be evaluated on the cumulative change in Shareholder Value that your firm generates.
Being evaluated on shareholder wealth is significantly different from evaluation based on net profit, market share, or earnings per share.
Your Aim
You should aim to:
Maximize net profit
Minimize shareholder investment
Minimize risk (associated with high levels of debt)
Due to these multiple objectives, a small niche marketer consistently earning good margins and without much debt may outperform a large heavily-indebted firm with earnings several times greater.
Firms will need to carefully consider these objectives when developing their overall strategy, their marketing, operational and financial plans. Simply increasing in size will not necessarily lead to an increase in shareholder value. You should only invest money (for example in new plant, new product development, or on factory improvements) if you believe that the return on these investments will be greater than what shareholders could achieve elsewhere at the same level of risk (e.g. shareholders can earn returns of 8% by investing in a term deposit). If not, you should instead consider repaying debt, paying a dividend, or repurchasing issued shares.
Devon Palmer (pictured above), a student of Professor Harold Lowe from Nova Scotia Community College has previously used our MikesBikes Introduction simulation in his Business course. Upon completion, he was asked by Professor Lowe to also trial both Music2Go Marketing and AdSim Advertising simulations for his work placement.
The review below is written by Devon. He shares his point of view on the AdSim Advertising simulation and some advice on how to do well in the simulation. He also created a few videos on both Music2Go and AdSim business simulations, which you can watch at the end of his review.
“AdSim is a computer-based Advertising Simulation of the Digital Camera division of a Consumer Electronics Corporation. You get the opportunity to experience and understand many of the key decision required to plan and implement an Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) Plan.
AdSim will give you the opportunity to have practical hands on experience at making critical advertising decisions and seeing the outcome in a live, interactive case study.”
The goal of the AdSim simulation is to maximize your Cumulative Net Marketing Contribution.
How do you do this?
The first step is renaming your firm. This is available to you both in Single-Player as well as Multi-Player. Being able to make this decision gives the simulation a personal feel, rather than just being “Company #12452”. Your two market segments that you get to advertise and sell your product to are the Existing and New markets. Unlike other simulations that allow you to have multiple products in multiple market segments, AdSim only has the one camera that goes into the two segments.
Media Planning
As this is the advertising simulation, your main contribution is the Advertising Plan. Your main goal is to set your advertising budget and allocate it among the five areas; TV, Radio, Magazines, Newspapers, and Interactive Digital Media. While other simulations, like MikesBikes or Music2Go, also give you this option, AdSim goes a step further allowing you to allocate within those five areas. This is more in-depth and a great addition, especially for an advertising class.
Within the TV advertising you may allocate to four segments, Network TV, National TV, Local Spot TV, and Cable TV. Even further, you can allocate your budget into the Network TV segment into six more segments. These range from Early Morning to Late Fringe times of day.
Newspapers have four segments as well, which include, General, Business, Tabloid, and Sunday.
You can also further allocate within the General segment to five geographical regions such as North and South East, North and South West, and Central.
Magazines have five categories that you can advertise in, Women’s Lifestyle, Men’s Lifestyle, Entertainment, Family, and News.
The Women’s and Men’s Lifestyle choice further breaks down into four more choices based on the age of the customer. These are, Youth 12-17, Adults 18-34, Adults 35-55, and Adults 55+.
Radio gives you six station formats to choose from, these are, Contemporary Hit Radio, Urban, Country, Rock, Adult Contemporary, and Newstalk.
The Country Station gives you the option of allocating your budget between the five geographical regions.
The Adult Contemporary Stations allocated between various peak listening times ranging from Morning Drive to Nighttime.
Finally, the Interactive segment is new and unknown in this simulation. It gives you two choices of allocation, Direct Mail and Internet. They recommend experimenting within this segment to see how effective it is.
After doing multiple simulations and seeing how the advertising plan selections work, I find that AdSim does it best out of all other Smartsims simulations I have used. The option to further allocate my budget into different areas is a great choice and would greatly benefit any other simulation. It is also very easy to use and understand as you just need to make sure your “pie-chart” equals 100%. Reading the reports for Chapter 2 of the Player’s Manual will put you in the right direction on how to effectively use each segment to their absolute best.
Agency Selection
Another part of the AdSim simulation is the Agency Selection. Here you decide on either trusting yourself to choose your media selections in a custom plan. This is a high-risk, high-reward option in my opinion. As you may select the right numbers in the right segments, but if you don’t do that it can be disastrous. I recommend only using a Internal Plan if you do the research beforehand. The other three options for your agency include TV Magic, Print Works, and Radio Can. These have their obvious strengths in one area, or two in the case for Print Works, but are still better than the default plans for each segment. I recommend picking one of these three agencies as they will give you good results when used correctly.
Message Strategy
This is where you pick how you want your digital camera to appear on the market, as well as who you want to target. You have four decisions to make in each of the four categories, Target, Benefit, Proof, and Personality.
To make these decisions all you have to do is click the one you want and then click “Apply.” Target is who you are targeting to sell your camera to – Professional, Amateur, Recreational, or Family. Then you select the Benefit of your camera, Simplicity, Small Size, Picture Quality, or Feature Packed. After selecting your Benefit, you will need to select the Proof, which are, Lens, Focus, Digital Chip, or Direct Printing. The final message you will convey to your customers is the Personality of your camera. The options include Simple and Reliable, Fun and Exciting, Precise and Efficient, or Thoughtful and Nostalgic.
There are reports you can read that give you an insight on which choices to make to maximize in your desired market. Like the other choices you are able to make, these are extremely easy to make and understand as its just a simple click to decide.
Customer Relationships
Customer Relationships is another feature made available during the simulation. The options for these screens are: CRM System, Warranty, Support, and Loyalty. When choosing your CRM System, you are given four options, to not have one at all, an Entry-Level, a Mid-Level, or a Custom system. These decisions require a bit more research than others, but by reading the chapter section about CRM, as well as the reports about it, will help you in making your CRM, if you choose to have one.
The Warranty selection give you the choice of what kind of warranty you’d like to offer to your customers: 90 days, 180 days, 1 year, or 2 years. Support is how your customers will go about fixing any issues with the product. This is offered by a manual, a website tool, an email helpdesk, or a telephone helpdesk. The last option is the Loyalty program. You can choose not to have one, having a regular newsletter, a regular photo contest, or offering a Photo School. Information on making these decisions are available in various market research reports.
Marketing Communications
Later in the simulation, you will be given the opportunity to make the Marketing Communications decisions. This gives you the option of four choices, Sales Promotions, Trade Promotions, Sponsorships, and Public Relations.
Sales Promotions give the customer something a little extra when purchasing your product over the competitors, for example a bonus memory card. Trade Promotions are similar to Sales Promotions but give benefits to a Retailer instead. Sponsorships are a way to boost exposure for your product at a specific event. Public Relations is hiring PR consultants to attempt to promote towards journalist interest into writing reviews about your product. Again, there are reports you can read to give insight into which options to choose and when choosing the options, they are straightforward and simple to make.
Market Research
Market Research reports are available to purchase every year, with new and updated reports available every year. The price of these reports vary from $25,000 to $50,000 and can give you very valuable information that can help you win. Some reports are more important to buy than others, while some are not worth buying at all, so make sure you know what you’re looking for before purchasing.
I feel the price for these reports are very worth it, especially if you were to purchase a report you didn’t need or felt didn’t give you the right information. There are reports that the Player’s Manual recommends purchasing, and I completely agree as the information that is given is highly useful in dominating the market, especially early on.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, I highly recommend the AdSim simulation by Smartsims for any class or business looking for business simulations that have a focus on Advertising. It gives you the right amount of content where it feels complete and spreads it out evenly throughout the rollovers.
For me personally, my class at NSCC Pictou would have greatly appreciated using this simulation during our first semester in our second year, as we had both an Advertising class as well as a Market Research class. It would have fit perfectly in our schedule as well as setting us up for our final semester where we challenged our Management counterparts to the MikesBikes simulation.
I give this simulation a 9.5/10 and again, highly recommend it to any classes or business that would like to use a business simulation to teach the fundamentals of advertising and its affect on the business.
Here are the videos that Devon created for both AdSim and Music2Go:
When you repeat a mistake, it’s not a mistake anymore. It’s a decision.
-Paulo Coehlo
Over the years, we have noticed a few common mistakes that students make in the simulation that will be reflected in real-life if not learned from. We want you to learn from these mistakes and know how to resolve them.
Here are three of the common mistakes we see AdSim users make:
Mistake #1: Not getting your Brand Positioning strategy right
Getting your Brand Positioning strategy right is vital. Brand position ensures that you are effectively targeting your customers through media advertising with a message that they will respond to. You should purchase the Market Survey of Customer Needs and Brand Positioning Strategy reports.
Mistake #2: Not making customer-focused CRM decisions
The purpose of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy in AdSim is to decide which policies you will implement to keep customers loyal to your brand.
You should view the Market Survey of Customer Needs report to determine which options best meet your target audience.
Mistake #3: Not spending all of your budget
You need to ensure that you spend all your budget. These funds do not carryover to the next year if left unspent.
Do not undervalue the investment in information. Use your budget to purchase the additional reports available through each decision screen.
Adrian Cenon is a Master’s student and MikesBikes Mentor from The University of Auckland. He was also recently invited by Audrea Warner, professor at the Graduate School of Management to share his experience using MikesBikes Advanced in the Managing People and Organizations course. We thought it would be a great idea for Adrian to share his experience with all of you.
Get to know Adrian more in our interview below as he shares his MikesBikes experience, the challenges and lessons he learned from the simulation.
Tell us about yourself
Adrian: I’m currently a Master of Management, major in International Business student at The University of Auckland. I have finished a degree in Economics and Education, major in History at De La Salle University.
I have worked in Singapore as an Organizational Development Analyst and as a Global Learning Support Executive. In addition, I was also a Training and Research Officer.
What was your first impression about using a business simulation in the course?
Adrian: I was impressed that my first course in University of Auckland recognized that learning is enhanced by connecting the management theories discussed in class with the dynamic interactions within a team. As well as how they respond to real-life challenges and scenarios incorporated in MikesBikes. Through my previous work experience, I have been an advocate of the 70-20-10 model (by Eichenger and Lombardo) that has been widely used by management consultants and talent development professionals.
Furthermore, I heard a lot of feedback from the previous Cohort that the MikesBikes experience will be a challenging, fun and effective way to enhance my business acumen and leadership skills.
Did your impression of the simulation change as the course progressed?
Adrian: Yes, the whole learning journey was more immersive and challenging than what I expected. The level of competition among teams was intense and it required a lot of effort and focus to adapt our strategies based on market trends so we could gain an edge. I also didn’t expect that it would elicit extreme levels of happiness, excitement and sometimes disappointment as you view the results after each rollover.
How was your experience working on the simulation on your own and eventually with a team?
Adrian: I would say that MikesBikes engaged my team on a level where we felt that we were running our own company and were accountable for our roles. When I reflect on the experience, I am extremely proud of how our team performed because of four reasons:
We were genuinely passionate about our brand – WindChaser, and how it stood for “Chasing the Right Things” – identifying what is important and chasing it with the best of our abilities. Everyone participated in formulating our Team Goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and strategies.
We had a great team culture and believed in the capabilities of one another. The rigor of analysing various reports (eg. Marketing, Finance, Manufacturing, Research and Development and Human Resources), making decisions, and competing with other teams strengthened our realization that we could only achieve our goals if we functioned as a high performing team. We learned to foster interdependence by aligning our actions with our core values of Passion, Accountability, Respect and Trust.
Third, we dealt with conflicting priorities the right way and demonstrated integrity in how we competed with the other teams. Our team was aware of numerous “strategies” that we could pursue to get ahead and maximise our Shareholder Value (SHV) at all costs. But just like in the real world, you are sometimes faced with a choice to focus on the bottom line or preserve your reputation and relationship with others.
For example, heading to the final rollover, we had the option of extracting as much capital from our partner firm/ subsidiary. The problem was that applying this tactic would hurt their final SHV. Instead of taking full advantage, our team agreed to a reasonable rate with our subsidiary to ensure a sustainable SHV growth for both teams. In the end, this decision came at the expense of our team losing the European market by a narrow margin. However, we didn’t treat this as a setback because we stayed true to our values and enhanced our reputation and credibility among our peers.
4. Even though we didn’t win our market, we believed that the MikesBikes experience brought out the best in each one of us. As the CEO, I learned the importance of empowering your team members to perform their roles but at the same time providing guidance and support when they experience challenging situations. I am grateful to my team for believing in my capabilities and trusting me that we would become better individuals as a result of this learning journey.
Please share your experience in the course as a whole and how the simulation added value and impacted your learning.
Adrian: I consider MikesBikes as an effective platform that maximised the learning from the “Managing People and Organisations” course. The different scenarios and complexities provided various opportunities. I was able to utilise my previous work experience and theories I learned in class, and apply them in a simulated business environment.
The experience took me out of my comfort zone as it brought a lot of high and low points which required me to reflect and adapt to changes to effectively lead my team. I consider the lessons learned from the simulation and the course as vital “Deep Smarts” which I would be able to leverage when I continue my career in Organizational Development and Talent Management.
What advice would you give your past self (go back to the time when you were still doing the course and the simulation)? What do you wish you knew back then when you were doing the simulation?
Adrian: I would prefer not to give my past self any advice about the course and the simulation. I believe that the process of dealing with uncertainty provided the best opportunity to learn and more importantly, build character. There were several instances where our team spent a lot of time in figuring out how to drive our strategies because we recognized that a wrong move can have significant consequences. Ultimately, the ability to handle pressure, evaluate the effectiveness of decisions, and manage our mindset proved to be excellent learning points which are applicable in the real world.
