For your team
Vanguard SIM is a business-simulation platform for higher education — ten simulations, one shared team + gradebook layer, LMS-native via LTI 1.3. Students run real businesses under real constraints; their grade reflects the decisions they made, not their ability to describe someone else's. This page is intentionally printable so it fits in a procurement folder.
Ten simulations, each priced for individual course adoption. The flagship (The Boardroom) runs as a 4-role C-suite team; the other nine are single-competency sims — five batched-round, four continuous in-tray.
Creativity & Change
Lead an established company through 5 years of creative reinvention and organizational change.
Strategy & Competitive Advantage
Compete in a dynamic market — positioning, pricing, and timing against rival teams.
Entrepreneurship & Startup
Build a startup from idea to Series A — pivots, hires, fundraising, and the death march.
Leadership & Organizational Behavior
Navigate leadership transitions, organizational dynamics, and ethical pressure across 5 high-stakes years.
Marketing & Brand Management
Build, position, and defend a brand through 8 quarters of campaigns, crises, and cultural moments.
General Management & Continuous Operations
Run a company day by day, in-tray by in-tray, decision by decision.
Corporate Finance / CFO Operations
Sit in the CFO chair — covenants, audits, M&A inbound, board questions — day after day.
M&A / Investment Deals
Run a fund. Source, diligence, value, negotiate, close, integrate — deal by deal.
Accounting & Monthly Close
Run the monthly close. Accruals, reconciliations, judgments, audit asks — period after period.
Integrated Business Strategy — 4-role C-Suite Team
Run a real DTC brand as a 4-person C-suite. Distinct roles, shared P&L, per-cycle decisions, live leaderboard.
Per student, per semester. No platform fee, no per-section charge, no seat minimums. Institutional invoicing available.
$25 for Founding Faculty, locked for two years. Full platform, instructor dashboard, grading, LMS publish.
$10 for Founding Faculty, locked for two years. Any single-competency sim — strategy, marketing, entrepreneurship, leadership, finance, ops, accounting, deals.
Five to eight institutions by invitation. Unlimited faculty, full platform, case-study collaboration. Contact for consideration.
Accessibility promise: if standard pricing does not fit your semester budget, email jeff@vanguardsim.com. We'll find a way.
Installs as an LTI 1.3 tool. Students launch from your LMS with single sign-on; the professor clicks Publish to LMS to post per-student scores back with the breakdown as the comment.
Install takes about five minutes on the LMS side. For an institutional review or a walkthrough call, email jeff@vanguardsim.com.
Vanguard SIM is a school records processor under FERPA. Student data is collected only for course participation and grading, stored encrypted in transit and at rest, and returned or destroyed on institutional request.
Five pre-authored prompts from Innovation Lab’s Year 1 close library. Every sim ships a full library of prompts — these run in the classroom as scheduled teaching moments, grounded in the team’s actual decisions.
Every team wrote a Y1 reflection about 'why change is needed.' Pick two teams that answered the same briefing very differently. What signal was each one privileging — revenue trend, customer sentiment, competitive threat, employee tone? Which read was closest to what the year actually rewarded?
What was the boldest of your three Y1 decisions — the one that felt most likely to be wrong? What convinced you to make it anyway? What would have had to be true for you to have chosen the safe alternative instead?
Look at the class leaderboard on Financial Health after Year 1. What did the top team defer or refuse to spend on that others funded? Is that discipline, or is it under-investing in the change you say you believe in?
Y1 usually asks teams to pick between an employee-cost move and a customer-cost move. Which did you pick, and what did you tell the group that took the hit? Would you tell them the same thing if there were no leaderboard?
Read your team's Y1 Critic feedback aloud. Name one sentence that stung, and one that felt unfair. Which one turned out to be the more useful piece of feedback by end-of-year? What did you dismiss that you shouldn't have?
Source: Innovation Lab — Lead an established company through 5 years of creative reinvention and organizational change.
Adopt any live simulation for a semester. Onboarding is a 30-minute call: pick the sim, pick the industry, set your pacing, load your roster. LMS install typically takes 5 minutes on the admin side.
Same-day response during your active semester. Founding Faculty get a direct line and weekly check-ins with the founder.
Flagship reference: /for-your-team/the-boardroom