What You'll Do
Design, build, and manage a portfolio of R&D projects across two years
Design Your Selection Process
Choose who makes funding decisions—decide alone, assemble a committee from ShieldTech's leadership, convene a staff jury, or try other approaches. Decide whether to deploy an AI advisor—Devi—across the game or only for project selection. Then select your evaluation criteria, weighting schemes, and review methods: scoring matrices, expert judgment, or staged gates.
Handle Legacy Projects
Your predecessor left behind ongoing projects in various states. Review each project's history, spending, and political context, then decide whether to continue, pause, or kill.
Navigate Committee Dynamics
Chair a budget committee where members advocate, debate, and react to your leadership. The outcome determines your budget—from $34M to $44M.
Build Your Portfolio
Evaluate projects drawn from a deep database of proposals. Each comes with detailed materials: project overview, development milestones, team profiles, technology readiness levels, IP position, competitor analysis, financial projections, and risk assessment. Each proposal is tagged with the strategic priority it serves, so you can balance the portfolio across the board's four goals as well as across risk.
Manage Projects Over Time
Review quarterly progress reports and decide each project's fate: continue, accelerate, reduce, or kill. A project burning budget faster than it makes progress turns amber, then red. Kill early and you recover budget to redeploy into new opportunities; hang on too long and it costs you.
Respond to Events & Dilemmas
Over 60 management dilemmas: team conflicts, technical setbacks, competitor moves, resource constraints, and stakeholder pressures. Every choice has consequences.
Year 2: New Opportunities
A mid-term review adds funding at the start of Year 2, and fresh project proposals emerge. Play the Resource Run mini-game to unlock bonus budget, then decide whether to expand your portfolio or stay focused. Spare or freed-up budget lets you fast-track new projects any quarter.
See Your Results
Each project's outcome lands the quarter after it completes, bringing revenue and market share. At the end, the board weighs your hit rate, ROI, market share, risk balance, strategic alignment and management discipline, with projects still in flight counting their expected value. It judges the quality of your decisions, not just your luck. Download a professional PDF case study of your tenure.
Four Strategic Priorities
The board wants all four. Your budget can't cover them all, so your portfolio is your strategy.
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For Educators
A full teaching pack (teaching note, assignment bank with rubrics, exam and question bank, slides, a student onboarding sheet, and the written case study) is available to instructors on request. Email ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk, or see the For Educators page.