Northwestern University
PriSim® Instructors are on the faculty in two Northwestern University Professional Masters Programs. In each Program, they guide students through a 10-week challenge using a business simulation. The challenge includes creating and executing a detailed business-plan and reading and presenting case studies and research articles. Final team-presentations are critiqued for both content and delivery quality.
“I want to thank you and your partners at PriSim for once again hosting the Business War Games Competition with the MEMPC institutions. As this is our second year participating in the exercise, I can tell you that we find it to be a substantially value-added experience for our student team. I am so proud of their performance, even though they did not secure the top finish. Fortunately, your Northwestern team brought the title back to the Big 10 – congratulations!”
– Associate Director, Engineering Management Master’s Program, Purdue University, March 2018
“The MEMPC PriSim Business War Games Competition, celebrating its 5th year, continues to underscore the unique value of an MEM education. The competition provides experiential learning outside the typical classroom environment and reinforces a student’s need to utilize a combination of professional engineering practice with core business and management education to make effective business decisions. I also want to thank PriSim Business War Games for continuing to support the MEMPC year after year in managing this incredible business simulation event.”
– Associate Director, Master of Engineering Management at Northwestern University, January 2017
“It is really challenging to make it all work, and requires constant attention from all team members. One needs to be aware of the fact that people can face different situations; not assume anything without talking about it first; go out of his/her way to OVERcommunicate and build emotional rapport; do small talk, do video calls. Many things that are natural when you meet face to face are actually hard to get right when you do it remotely, and are as important as decision-making itself for the first few meetings of a group.
The simulation was amazingly well organized and we learned a lot about applying what we studied in a real-company context. But we believe other long-term lessons come from the experience we had working with each other. Good or bad, in the end we all came out more knowledgeable than we were and hopefully made new friends.”
– Stanford Student participating in MEMPC competition hosted by PriSim and Northwestern University
“For a couple years the MEM Programs Consortium (Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, MIT, Northwestern, and Stanford) had been looking for a way to engage our students across the different universities. PriSim’s business simulation offered exactly what we were looking for: it provided an academically challenging environment in a virtual world, allowing our students (working from six different locations) to interact with one another and share their engineering management knowledge.”
– Associate Director, Master of Engineering Management at Northwestern University
“I did not just learn about business and a new piece of software… I learned about teamwork, how to create trust with my peers, and how to make decisions under pressure. This game changed my perception of how to work in the real world.”
– Northwestern Student
“It’s not everyday you have the opportunity to simulate a business environment, and in this competition we were able to apply our analytical skills and business ideas to understand the impacts of our decisions as well as our competitors’ strategies.”
– Northwestern Student
“PriSim’s expert teaching combined with a realistic simulation solidifies key business topics through running your own company to achieve profitability while competing with other teams. The dynamic teaching of PriSim’s professors lays the business knowledge of R&D, product development, manufacturing, sales forecasting, marketing, pricing, finance, market forces, and their interdependencies. The competitive simulation and decision making hammered home these concepts by enabling us to put them into practice and view how our decisions affected our company’s products, sales, profitability, market dominance, and preference vs. the competition.”
– Northwestern Student
“We have all learned so much from this class and competition. We are aware of and have learned about each of our weaknesses, mistakes, and team dynamics in making decisions. This is one of the best classes that I have ever taken throughout the program. This course gave me an overview of how tough it is to run a real company in a real business environment where we should look at each of the business components such as strategy, marketing, finance, distribution, and production and how they impact the bottom-line and market-value of the company. I wanted to take the opportunity to thank you for teaching this course to us. I have also really enjoyed your teaching style where the environment is very motivated and full of energy. I want to thank you for your time, feedback, techniques, and guidance throughout the course. I hope to apply this valuable experience in the real world after I graduate this quarter.”
– Northwestern Student
“PriSim’s® approach to business education starts with the fundamentals, and then brings those fundamentals to life with hands-on P&L responsibility, resource allocation decisons, and marketing planning. The things that I learned from participating in the simulation at Northwestern University were two-fold: 1. Decision Making: Deciding what to fund in any business is an incredibly tedious task. Learning methods of project evaluation and payback, cash flow analysis, and most importantly picking the right projects to fund were all covered and left the students in a position where they were empowered and informed. 2. Taking Action: A simulation environment allows the student to experience first-hand how to make tough decisions. The competition that is developed within the ‘game’ is the same competition that my company feels from peer companies. Gaining the experience of mining the correct data, reacting to it, and deciding how to to be proactive to it in the future was a key takeaway for my team. I can speak first-hand about ‘losing the game’ but in turn still learning how to win. Making mistakes in a simulation is fairly inexpensive. In real life the expenses add up quickly.”
– Northwestern Student
“The PriSim® business lab at Northwestern was, for me, a culmination of my education for my master’s degree. It took the finance, strategy, planning, and execution principles I had learned, and allowed me to practice applying them in a simulated business setting. It also allowed me to view my business from all perspectives – R&D, manufacturing, retail, external market forces – and your decisions at each level affect your business performance. The PriSim® tool was a fun, competitive way to bring all the principles of running a business together.”
– Northwestern Student
“Congratulations and thank you for such a great job! The course evaluations are probably the best I’ve seen in the 9 years this program has run. I’m glad our students ended on such a high note.”
– Director, MCS Masters Program
“This has been the most challenging yet interesting class I have taken so far in the Program. (The Instructor) manages to stretch everyone in the class with the volume of information being thrown at you, yet is still able to keep us coming back for more.”
– NU Graduate Student
“Executives learn best by doing. PriSim® Business War Games has measurably enhanced our training programs for media executives by presenting them with simulated business challenges where their management decisions have high-fidelity outcomes. Whether acquiring and running a magazine or rescuing a failing online business, our program participants tackle problems they will surely face in real life, all in a risk-free learning environment. PriSim’s® business knowledge, skill at facilitation, and user-friendly software make them the premier provider of business simulations.”
– Director, Seminars, Media Management Center at Northwestern University