MSgames
2025 - 26
Designing Simulations for MBA Students
Three business simulations for MSgames, each built to teach a real management concept within a single 90-minute class session. Used across 80+ institutions and by more than 10,000 students.
Context
Management education has leaned on static case studies for decades, reading about a decision someone else already made, then writing about what you'd have done. That measures whether a student can write convincingly, not whether they can actually decide under pressure. As AI makes producing a written assignment nearly effortless, that gap has gotten harder to ignore.
MSgames, an IIT Bombay-affiliated, DPIIT-certified startup, builds experiential learning based simulations designed to measure decisions instead of just output. The platform is used by 80+ institutions, including several IIMs and other leading management schools.
Challenge
Each simulation had to work inside a hard constraint: a single 90-minute class session, run by a faculty facilitator, with no additional hardware or setup. That's a real design problem, not just a scope limit, a simulation complex enough to teach a real business concept, simple enough to run start to finish in one sitting, reliably, across many different institutions and facilitators with varying comfort with technology.
Solution
Three simulations, each covering a distinct business discipline.
Bottom of the Pyramid - a strategy simulation where students make pricing, product, or distribution decisions aimed at underserved, low-income markets, seeing the trade-off between profitability and reach.
Crustfield (Operations Management) - an operations management simulation where students manage orders or production across multiple rounds and see the cost and service-level consequences of their calls.
To Own or To Host (Capacity Management) - a build-versus-lease or own-versus-partner capacity decision, a classic operations question where students choose a capacity model under demand uncertainty and see how it performs over time.
Key Decisions
This project is protected under a non-disclosure agreement and cannot be shared with anyone.
If you’d like to learn more about the project, process, or my role, feel free to get in touch.
mrunalnehete17@gmail.com
Impact
Facilitators consistently complete a full run of each simulation within the 90-minute session. Reach is roughly consistent across MSgames' simulations, including these three specifically: 80+ institutions and 10,000+ students.
Reflections
This project showed me that good simulation design starts with understanding the concept it needs to teach. Designing pedagogically means the simulation itself has to teach something real, not just feel engaging, so I could not have designed these well without first understanding the concepts in depth. That understanding was the real foundation the design was built on.