For your team · Strategy Arena

Strategy Arena

Strategy & Competitive Advantage · Competitive Strategy

Compete in a dynamic market — positioning, pricing, and timing against rival teams.

Strategy Arena is a head-to-head competitive simulation: every team competes in the same five-segment market (Traditional, Low End, High End, Performance, Size) against every other team. Each round, teams set decisions across R&D specs, price, marketing (promo + sales budget per product), production, capacity + automation, finance (debt, equity, buybacks, dividends), and HR, plus a unit-sales forecast. A fully deterministic engine reconciles the cohort's decisions against segment demand — same inputs always yield the same outputs, no randomness in the core engine. Rounds move open → closed → published, and results (revenue, net income, stock price, ROS/ROA/ROE, segment shares, perceptual map) only appear once the round is published. After each publish, teams can convene an LLM Boardroom Q&A: three independent personas (CEO peer, CFO, activist investor) grill the team using its actual numbers and issue one pointed question. The engine is deterministic; the Boardroom advisors are LLMs on top. The interface is Bloomberg-terminal-style: dense, fast, focused on numbers and standings.

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Learning objectives

  • Read a five-segment market with drifting ideal specs and pick a position that's defensible.
  • Make pricing, R&D, and marketing decisions when every rival's move affects yours.
  • Sequence moves — what to reposition first, when to follow vs. lead the segment drift.
  • Manage brand equity and cumulative profit as multi-round compounding assets, not single-round moves.
  • Respond to competitor pricing and R&D moves without overreacting.
  • Defend strategy to a skeptical LLM board using specific numbers from your own snapshot.

The loop

  1. 1
    Round opens
    Standings from last published round are visible. Decision sheet unlocks for the new round.
  2. 2
    Decisions
    Each team sets Products (price, R&D targets, promo/sales budget, production), Capacity, Finance, HR, and a unit-sales forecast. Save as many drafts as you want; resubmit until round close.
  3. 3
    Round closes
    Professor closes the round (or auto-advance fires). The deterministic engine reconciles every team's decisions — defaults fill in for anyone who didn't submit — and publishes results.
  4. 4
    Results
    Full financials, segment market share, perceptual map, per-product breakdown, forecast delta. Available on Results, Leaderboard, and inside the Boardroom.
  5. 5
    Boardroom
    Convene the board: CEO peer, CFO, and activist investor grill you using your actual numbers. Aggregate stance runs standing-ovation → cautiously-supportive → losing-patience → demanding-change.

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.

Market Position

Average of your top-2 segment shares — rewards focused positioning over trying to be everything to everyone.

Strategic Agility

How much your product positioning moved toward each segment's drifting ideals between rounds, weighted by demand. Stock delta is a small tiebreaker.

Brand Equity

Segment shares weighted by each segment's ideal price — winning richer segments (High-End) counts more than winning cheaper ones (Low-End). Textbook willingness-to-pay definition.

Profitability

Return on sales this round plus a bonus/penalty from the sign of cumulative profit across all rounds.

Hero features

  • Live standings

    Bloomberg-terminal-style dashboard + persistent ticker shows where every team stands round-by-round on stock price, revenue, net income, cumulative profit, ROS, and segment shares.

  • LLM Boardroom Q&A

    After each round publishes, three independent LLM personas (CEO peer, CFO, activist investor) grill the team using its actual numbers and issue one pointed question for next round. Aggregate stance across the three (standing ovation → demanding change) drives the summary card.

  • Perceptual map

    Cohort-wide performance × size scatter shows where every team's products sit relative to each other and to each segment's drifting ideal. Your products in orange, cohort in slate.

  • Deterministic engine

    Reconciles the cohort's decisions with no randomness — same inputs always produce same outputs. Repeatable, explainable, defensible when a team asks "why did our decisions produce this result".

Fit & format

Pacing

5 rounds in the five-week format · 8 rounds in the eight-week or 14-week semester format. Same engine and segments; more rounds gives more time for the drift-and-reposition arc to play out.

Cohort shape

Designed for ~15-30 students in teams of 4-6. All teams compete in the same market.

Best for

MBA strategy courses, business policy capstones, executive education in competitive strategy. Especially strong for groups who want measurable, repeatable competitive outcomes.

Differentiator

The only head-to-head competitive sim — every team's decisions affect every other team's outcomes. Deterministic engine (no randomness, no LLM Critic on the outcome) plus an LLM Boardroom Q&A layered on top for narrative feedback.

Sample discussion prompt

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

Round 1 close

Where did you plant your flag?

Each team: in one sentence, which two segments are you playing for by R5, and which decision in R1 proves it? Point to the R&D target or the price you set, not the memo.

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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