As every year, also this winter term our students had the chance to participate in a realistic business simulation game last week: in groups of three students, each group took over the management of a virtual business, working as either marketing manager, financial or production manager.
After setting up a business strategy and thus having decided which products the students wanted to launch on which markets, at the end of each year (with a total of four years of simulation), each company had to state its balance sheet, its asset - and pay taxes, just like in real business life.
The aim of the simulation was to realize profit for each company – and to build up a stable business for the future. It was a valuable experience for all participants to calculate with realistic figures and to understand what is going on behind the scenes of a management department. This insight certainly helped the students to better understand more about the responsibilities of a manager – but also to get to know how the markets work. Additionally the simulation is always a lot of fun – this year, each of the participating companies had to suffer losses – but in the end hopefully turned into a profitable enterprise.