For your team · Innovation Lab

Innovation Lab

Creativity & Change · Creativity & Change

Lead an established company through 5 years of creative reinvention and organizational change.

Innovation Lab puts each team in charge of an established company that's slipped behind on innovation. Over 5 simulated years, students make decisions across R&D, market entry, talent, ethics, and capital allocation while a steady drumbeat of disruption (new entrants, regulation, talent attrition, capital squeezes) forces them to adapt. Each year ends with a Critic — an LLM that reviews their decisions against the year's events and writes feedback. The arc is the classic Christensen-Schein-Kotter sequence: see the change, decide what to keep, lead the org through.

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Learning objectives

  • Diagnose when an organization's current strategy has stopped working and explain why.
  • Apply core frameworks (Christensen disruption, Schein culture, Kotter change) to specific decisions, not just essays.
  • Make tradeoffs across innovation, stakeholder trust, and financial discipline under real time pressure.
  • Lead through ambiguity — defending decisions when outcomes are messy or politically loaded.
  • Reflect on team dynamics: how decisions emerged, who got heard, what would change next time.

The loop

  1. 1
    Year briefing
    The year opens with a recap of last year's outcomes and a fresh set of decisions to make.
  2. 2
    Decisions
    Each team picks from 5 strategic options across the four pillars. Each option has tradeoffs.
  3. 3
    Random event
    A disruption hits (new competitor, regulation, key hire leaves). Teams choose how to respond.
  4. 4
    Results
    The engine scores the year's decisions. Pillar scores move, the leaderboard updates.
  5. 5
    Critic feedback
    An LLM Critic writes 2-4 paragraphs about what worked, what didn't, and what to consider next year.
  6. 6
    Reflection
    Each student writes a short reflection that's graded for individual contribution.

Pillars & scoring

Every team is scored on four pillars that compound across the sim. They aggregate into a composite the leaderboard ranks by, and the professor can see per-pillar deltas in the gradebook.

Innovation

How boldly the team is investing in new bets vs. defending the legacy business.

Adaptability

How well the team adjusts to disruption — speed of response and quality of pivot.

Stakeholder Trust

Whether employees, customers, and the board still believe in the direction.

Financial Health

Profitability, runway, and ability to fund future moves.

Hero features

  • LLM Critic

    After each year, an AI critic in a professor-tuned persona reviews the team's decisions and writes substantive feedback — not a grade, a perspective.

  • Industry tracks

    Same simulation engine, different companies: SaaS (NovaTech), Healthcare (Meridian), Financial Services (Crestline), Retail (Harbor & Main).

  • Reflection grading

    Each student's individual contribution is scored from their written reflections, not just the team result.

Fit & format

Pacing

5-week intensive · 8-week standard · 14-week semester. All three durations cover the same 5-year scenario; only the calendar pacing differs.

Cohort shape

Designed for ~15-30 students in teams of 4-6.

Best for

Undergraduate or MBA courses on creativity, change management, organizational behavior, or strategy capstones.

Differentiator

The only sim with an LLM Critic that reviews decisions narratively — students must DEFEND their choices, not just optimize numbers.

Sample discussion prompt

One of many pre-authored prompts from the sim’s Year 1 closelibrary. Grounded in the team’s actual decisions and used as a scheduled teaching moment.

Year 1 close

The first bold call

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?

LMS

Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle via LTI 1.3. Students launch from your LMS with single sign-on; one-click grade publish posts scores back with the rubric breakdown as the comment.

Pricing
$20 / student
$10 / student for Founding Faculty, locked 2 years

Per semester. No platform fee, no per-section charge, no seat minimums. Institutional invoicing available.

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