Business Simulation: The Informatist Way

Well-known business schools have developed simulations of actual business plans for decades. The Harvard Business School-developed “Case Method” began in 1912, and has been honed to the point that there are over 30,000 business ‘cases’ which are in active use today at Harvard and many other business schools around the world.

The business simulation game presented at www.informatist.net does what the Harvard case method does, but in a way that involves thousands of high school and college business students in a fun, online, massively participatory way that allows many people from around the world to learn about business and have fun at the same time.

The Case Method—the First Business Simulation.

So how did the case method teach business to the last few generations? A business case developed an understanding of a particular business—the ‘set-up,’ which gave the business student a way to understand the business and environment. The case then developed a problem facing a particular manager—let’s call him Mr. Smith, who may be running a production plant in a facility far from headquarters.

In a typical case, Smith might be sitting at his desk at 10 o’clock at night, worrying about a problem that he must solve. It could be related to production problems, labor problems or a competitive onslaught that is difficult to respond to. The business school student must understand the problem, quickly evaluate the key factors of the business involved, and come up with a solution to the problem that makes sense to those in the business school class.

In many cases, the case was written based on actual decisions that needed to be made by mid-level and high-level managers in real companies. And many of these managers would attend the business school class in order to understand how the business school students would formulate, analyze and propose solutions for the problem.

The Informatist Mimics Business School Case Methods.

The developers of www.informatist.net developed a method that parallels the case method used at Harvard Business School and many other business schools around the world. They knew that in a game simulation environment the student would naturally take in the components that he or she needed to know in order to bring a solution to the problem. Unlike a business school case, where the student might have to read 50 or a hundred pages, the Informatist method allowed students to learn the data they needed to succeed almost by osmosis—they absorbed a lot of information without realizing that they were doing so.

Having fund and learning business at the same time—the Informatist is both fun and a learning experience at the same time.