How to Play

Design Your Selection Process

Choose how project funding decisions will be made. Options include deciding alone, assembling a selection committee, using a staff jury, or random selection. Each approach has trade-offs between speed, expertise, bias, and buy-in. Decide whether to deploy an AI advisor—Devi—across the game or only for project selection.

When forming a committee, you select from ShieldTech's leadership team. Each person brings different expertise, perspectives, and biases—the CTO sees risk differently than the CFO. You also choose evaluation criteria and approaches: structured scoring matrices, intuitive expert judgment, or staged gates.

Handle Legacy Projects

The previous R&D leader left behind ongoing projects in various states. Review each project's history, spending, progress, and political context, then decide whether to continue, pause, or kill. Past spending is sunk—but stakeholder relationships complicate decisions.

Committee Dynamics Mini-Game

Chair a budget committee meeting where you must secure funding for new projects. Committee members debate, advocate, and react to how you facilitate the meeting. Your performance determines the budget available—ranging from $34M to $44M.

Build Your Portfolio

Evaluate 10–12 project proposals. Each comes with rich information: project overview, development milestones, team profiles, technology readiness level, IP position, competitor analysis, financial projections, and risk assessment.

Categorise projects as Fund, Consider, or Stop, then build a portfolio within budget constraints using matrix visualisations to assess balance across risk levels and strategic priorities.

Manage Through Time

The simulation runs for 8 quarters (2 years). Each quarter you review progress reports, respond to management dilemmas, and make portfolio decisions—continue, accelerate, reduce, or kill each project.

Over 60 scenarios involving team conflicts, technical setbacks, competitive threats, resource constraints, and stakeholder pressures.

Year 2 Opportunities

At the end of Year 1, new project opportunities emerge. Before evaluating them, you can optionally play the Resource Run mini-game—a logistics challenge that can provide bonus budget for Year 2.

See the Results

The board evaluates your performance across multiple dimensions: selection accuracy, portfolio returns, risk balance, strategic alignment, portfolio management, active leadership, and how accurate your AI advisor was. Career outcomes range from Promoted to CTO down to Position Eliminated.

Download Your Case Study

Generate a professional PDF documenting your tenure. Includes an executive summary, portfolio composition, narrative of difficult decisions, detailed scorecard, counterfactual analysis, and lessons learned.

Use this for classroom discussion, reflection assignments, or portfolio building.