Practicing ˿Ƶ Tech’s hands-on, applied education approach, students in its Business Management program compete each year in a term-long, highly competitive simulation called the Business Strategy Game. This spring, after competing in seven decision rounds, the ˿Ƶ Tech management teams outranked in overall scores, as well as several other performance results, when compared against 310 universities in the U.S. and 426 schools worldwide.
The ˿Ƶ Tech student team of Paul Davitt, William Rutledge and Teigen Winsted made their mark by scoring in the Global Top 100 over a number of weeks in several categories such as game-to-date score, best return on equity and highest stock price.
Students from universities around the world compete in a simulated environment, applying their business education, as well as strategy tools, to run a global shoe corporation. Not only do students have to consider matters of marketing, finance and operations, but they have to balance these within a culture of ethics and corporate social responsibilities. They do all of this while competing head-to-head against other teams in a true-to-life uncompromising business environment. At the end of the term student teams present their results in a stock-holder meeting.
“The Business Simulation Game requires the player/student to balance all facets of a business,” said Davitt. “The secret of a business, and this simulation, is to understand the balance between what you can afford to spend, what you have to spend, what you will earn, what you may earn, what you can produce, and realize that by changing one spending or production area it will have wide reaching effects on the business. Our team succeeded by working together and pooling our knowledge and experience, and by drawing on what we learned as ˿Ƶ Tech students.”
As the class winners and “Industry Champions,” these students are invited to compete in a Best-Strategy Invitational starting on August 3rd, where they are teamed up with students from around the world to participate in a “best of the best” business strategy simulation, with the possibility that each student could be on a different team from one another. The two-week invitational contains 10 decision rounds, each due at 10am each weekday of the event.
The teams’ faculty advisor and Management Assistant Professor Sharon Beaudry was pleased with their results.
“This is a challenging class that requires students to work in teams to utilize all of their business education in an environment that closely simulates the real challenges that business leaders face on a day-to-day basis,” said Professor Beaudry. “As in the real world, many teams had their struggles, but it was great to see as they learned from mistakes, adjusted their strategies when necessary and succeed in the end.”
To learn more about the competition, visit or contact Sharon Beaudry at 541.885.1575; sharon.beaudry@oit.edu.
