CBSTeach at Copenhagen Business School is the brainchild of Ravi Vatrapu and is a part of the Technology enhanced Teaching and Learning (TeTL) project. Its objective is to provide a portal with technical and human resources for teaching with information and communication technologies.
In 2012, CBSTeach has set out to focus on the topic of teaching with business games, and collected a great selection of educational videos about the subject.
In the following interview, Karsten Bobek (External Lecturer at CBS) talks about his experience with business simulators:
Q: What are your experiences with business simulator games? Which business strategy games and disciplines have you used?
KB: "My experience with business simulation games originates from Nestlé, the Swiss food company that I worked at for many years, and here we used it to facilitate understanding so that people better understood the processes within the company. Here at CBS, I'm using it at Leadership and Strategy within Service Management where the students are using a hotel simulation game to better understand what is leadership and what is strategy and connect these two things together."
Q: Do you think that business simulations can be an effective learning tool?
KB: "Used in the right way, business simulations are very effective learning tools because they have the ability to facilitate the understanding amongst the students in a completely different way than if you just stand in front of the white board and you just tell that, or if you just read that. You actually are able to try the theories, try the models in a close to real environment."
Q: In your opinion, what are the immediate effects/benefits of simulation games?
KB: "There are immediate benefits and positive effects of using simulation games. The ones that I'm using are hotel sim, and also a number of simulations from the Finnish company Cesim, within marketing, management, service management and so on. The way the students are actually able to relate the theories and the models to the game, and try them out, it's pretty interesting to see. I also believe that by using these business simulations the students get a better overall understanding of how for instance a company is being run, they are better able to put into context the different courses that they have actually been going through. So thereby you get a more overall picture on how the real world looks like and that is in the end what they have to relate to when they come out of CBS."
Watch the rest of the interview in the video below:
