Interactive spreadsheets focus on abstract business school issues such as supply chain management, product lifecycle, accounting, and general cross-functional business acumen. Students allocate finite resources along competing categories at successive turn-based fixed intervals, and each time they watch their results play out on dense graphs and charts.
This is often done in a multi-player or team-based environment and often with facilitators.
The subtlety, unpredictability, and variability make them appropriate for training b-school students and high-potential supervisors through the direct reports to the CEO. They are often the cornerstones of multi-day programs to align a fractured department or organization by building shared knowledge and understanding.
- One authoring tool is:
Forio Broadcast
Do people know of other great authoring tools?
At Enspire we tend to build our finished simulations with Flash clients (and, when necessary, Java backends). But, we prototype several different ways:
ReplyDelete-We often prototype using Excel and Visual Basic especially for data driven simulations.
-For process driven simulations, we often paper prototype. Click here to see an example of this.
-Shon Bayer (shon@enspire.com)