The Disruptor is built to create a richer educational experience for students in corporate entrepreneurship and innovation management. Students take the CIO role themselves, make consequential decisions under uncertainty, and live with the knock-on effects quarter by quarter. The field is presented as an integrated system — portfolio, strategy, people, IP, platform, partnerships, investing — rather than a string of isolated frameworks. The game works from zero prep to full semester integration, with flexible modes and the Incubator's progressive unlock so you can match it to your course rather than the other way around.
The game is built around principles that make it effective in the classroom — not just engaging.
The game includes a dedicated Learning Objectives page that maps every system to specific intended learning outcomes aligned to QAA Master's Level 7. You can point students — and external examiners — directly to these mappings. No need to create separate learning outcome documentation; it is built into the experience.
Students experience consequential decisions under uncertainty — the central teaching goal. Running an alliance negotiation yourself teaches the trade-offs better than any lecture. Portfolio trade-offs become visceral when you watch your best project fail because you launched too early. Theory is embedded in systems, not delivered as text.
The game levels the playing field: no verbal negotiations (helping non-native speakers), no group airtime competition (helping introverts), and multiple engagement channels — visual, numerical, narrative, and interactive — so different learning styles all find a way in. Students who would never raise their hand in a seminar will spend an hour exploring alliance strategies.
Not every system requires equal attention. Core gameplay is playable without mastering every panel. Deeper systems — standards engagement, IP strategy, corporate venturing — reward exploration but do not punish ignoring them. Different students engage differently, and that is fine. The debrief is where you surface what each student discovered.
Innovation management and corporate entrepreneurship are the overarching frame: leading the innovation function of an established firm. Within that frame, around twenty-five concepts from the innovation-management literature are wired directly into game systems. The scholars behind each idea live in the Pantheon, available to players in context. Below is a taste of the concepts themselves, and where students meet them in play.
How the firm connects to outside knowledge — universities, standards bodies, scouts, alliance partners, crowdsourced ideas — and what it takes to convert that connection into actual learning inside the firm.
External knowledge cannot be exploited without internal R&D to decode it. Starve the University, Scouting and R&D systems and alliance outputs come back thin even when partners are strong.
Firms innovate through networks, not alone. Alliances, Universities, Standards and Scouting form one interconnected flow; underinvesting in any one thins the others.
External information enters the firm through a small number of individuals. Scouts with diverse specialisations and strong external networks bring back richer findings than generalists.
Brokers spanning disconnected communities access non-redundant information. Alliance portfolios that bridge distant partners outperform dense, clustered ones in the alliance-value calculations.
Firms fund basic research partly to stay on speaking terms with the academic world. University partnerships unlock early access to findings; disengagement leaves the firm informationally isolated.
The Capabilities map is the firm's operating muscle — eleven domains (biomechanics, electronics, software, materials, design, manufacturing, data analytics, connectivity, sustainability, VR, open innovation) that must be built, balanced and sustained.
Sustained advantage comes from resources that are Valuable, Rare, Inimitable and Non-substitutable. The Capability Assessment rates each capability on those dimensions.
Firms grow only as fast as their managers can absorb new activity. Senior-staff shortages cap how many active projects the Director can actually run.
Firms need to know more than they make. A narrow capability base restricts the innovation types you can propose; breadth opens new categories of project.
Strong capabilities become traps. Over-investing in one domain slows the firm's response to paradigm shifts; imbalanced portfolios surface as capability-risk warnings.
Sense, seize, reconfigure. Capabilities that are not actively used decay; continuous reinvestment is needed just to hold level. The whole game re-plays this loop quarter by quarter.
The landscape shifts under your feet. Technological paradigms come and go; incumbents get disrupted; dominant designs set, then unset. The R&D portfolio, Competitor and Scouting systems stage these dynamics.
Innovation disrupts existing markets and destroys incumbent advantages. The competitor system plays this out live — competitor moves erode margins and share unless matched.
Innovation is cumulative and path-dependent. The three-horizon portfolio (H1 incremental, H2 adjacent, H3 breakthrough) models trajectory choice directly.
Low-cost, lower-performance entrants nibble at the base of the market. Scouting flags these threats; the R&D decision is whether to respond or let the low end go.
Some innovations make incumbent know-how worthless. Betting the firm on legacy capabilities leaves it exposed to paradigm-shift attackers.
Reconfiguring how components connect is a different problem from improving the components themselves. Proposal types and team requirements differ accordingly.
Products pass from fluid, through transitional, to specific phases. Home fitness is post-dominant design (incremental); AI coaching is pre-dominant (radical). R&D strategy should match.
Innovation without appropriation is charity. The Platform, Standards, IP Management and Alliance systems ask how the firm captures value from what it creates — and who it shares it with.
Stable interfaces at module boundaries let a complementor ecosystem innovate independently. The Vélox+ Platform modal makes design-rule stability a live decision.
Early standards lock in trajectories — QWERTY does not go away. Early participation in the Standards system shapes the whole industry; late entry is costly.
Value capture depends on who controls the supporting assets — manufacturing, distribution, brand. The IP Management and Alliance systems ask which assets you own and which you need partners for.
Grants, R&D tax credits and patent strategy interact. The Grants, University and IP systems operationalise the public-policy side of innovation economics.
None of it works without an organisation that can hold it together. The Org Structure, Staff, Corporate Venturing and Innovations systems bring the human and market side of innovation into play.
Firms operate through habitual routines that encode knowledge. Frequent restructuring breaks routines and slows the firm; stability lets depth accumulate.
Deep knowledge travels through face-to-face interaction, not documents. Team stability and cross-functional collaboration compound; high turnover erases them.
Teams that can admit errors iterate faster; autonomy and mastery unlock creative work. Decentralised structures raise both; hierarchical surveillance suppresses them.
Fast, iterative decisions using real-time data beat slow, comprehensive analysis. Corporate Venturing rewards staged commitment over big upfront bets.
Innovation is managed tension between exploration and exploitation. Alliances and university partnerships let you do both simultaneously; the game makes the tension explicit.
Adoption follows an S-curve — early adopters, then majorities, then laggards. Product launches ramp along the curve; timing against competitors determines whether you lead or follow the wave.
The Pantheon of Innovation is a feature of the game that surfaces the ideas underpinning each system. When a player faces a strategic dilemma, a relevant scholar appears with a short insight drawn from the research. Players can also browse the full gallery at any time — a library of innovation thinkers, their biographies, and their contributions — giving a direct route from gameplay into the literature that has shaped the field, and a chance to learn about the people whose work built it.
From zero prep to full course integration. Start with Quick Play or Homework — you can always scale up.
Share the game link five minutes before class. Students play Incubator mode (progressive unlock — just Portfolio and Innovations to start). The built-in Quick Guide gets them going in minutes. 45 min play + 15 min debrief. Walk the room, observe, facilitate discussion at the end. Remind students to download their PDF scorecard.
Assign as homework: "Play the Incubator mode for 45 minutes. Unlock at least 3 systems. Come to class ready to discuss what happened." Students choose which systems to unlock based on curiosity. In class: 20–30 min discussion. "Who unlocked Alliances? What happened? Who tried CVC?" Students arrive with stories, not summaries.
Choose which system to unlock each week, matched to your syllabus. Students play the same game across the semester, building a layered understanding. 30 min play + 10 min debrief each week. By week 8–10, students have a rich, multi-system company to discuss. Each week's unlock mirrors your lecture topic — students experience the concept before or after you teach it.
Assign the Vélox case study as pre-reading. Phase 1 (30 min): Case discussion — students discuss strategic position and what they would do as CIO. Phase 2 (60 min): Play the Forge (all systems available). Phase 3 (30–45 min): Debrief using PDF scorecards. The case gives students context before they play; they arrive with opinions, then test them.
Pair gamers with non-gamers in teams of 2–3. All teams play the same mode for fair comparison. 60–90 min play + 30 min competitive debrief. Teams compare PDF scorecards: innovation maturity scores, portfolio balance, revenue growth. Gamers navigate the interface quickly; non-gamers bring strategic thinking. The combination is powerful.
Design a multi-mode progression: case study in Week 1, Incubator for weeks 2–8, switch to Forge or Pivot for weeks 9–12. Assessment: The ISO 56001 Innovation Maturity score (0–100) provides a structured, academically grounded metric. The PDF scorecard gives evidence for reflective assignments. Students build expertise over time, just like real managers.
The Incubator is the single most important feature of The Disruptor for classroom use. It turns a full, sprawling simulation into a teachable progression that maps directly onto a syllabus.
The Incubator is a variant of the Forge that hands you — the educator — control over which managerial practices and systems your students can access. Students begin with just two playable systems unlocked (Portfolio and Innovations), along with informational views of a handful of others. Everything else is locked behind a gate. As the term goes on, or as you direct, students unlock additional systems one at a time using small budget allocations. Each unlock adds a new layer of complexity — alliances, platform, IP strategy, corporate venturing, standards, and so on — and a new set of decisions that connect back to the choices they have already made.
This lets you match the game to the week's topic. Teaching alliances this week? Unlock Alliances, then debrief on what actually happened. Covering IP strategy next? Unlock Value Capture. Want to focus on portfolio and people first, and skip standards entirely? You can. The Incubator keeps the full richness of the simulation available, but stages it so students are never drinking from a fire hose.
Competitive pressure is lower, budget is a little more forgiving, capability decay is slowed, and the CIO cannot be dismissed. Students who have never played an interactive simulation before can find their feet without being punished for early mistakes. By the end of their first session they are usually asking to unlock more.
The Incubator is deliberately built to allow a weekly or bi-weekly rhythm: one or two systems a week, debriefs tied to what they just unlocked, cumulative decisions that carry forward. By week eight a student will have a richly textured company — product portfolio, people moves, patents, alliances, a platform, an investment or two — all built by their own hand. That shared experience is what the final debrief draws on.
You decide the unlock schedule, or let students choose — or do both, setting a core sequence and leaving optional unlocks open. Because each unlock costs budget, students have to make a real choice about what to bring online next. That meta-decision is itself a teaching moment: why invest in scanning versus IP? Why now? What's your theory?
Because students unlock the systems at different times in different runs, their experiences diverge. One team leans into alliances early and gets a boost; another plays a purer internal-R&D game. The debrief then becomes a real comparison of strategies, not a right-answer exercise. Teaching-guide prompts are included for each system.
Students may find the simulation challenging at first - that is by design. No one just walks in off the street and starts to be an effective CIO. Like Football Manager, novice players may struggle. There are three ways to help: 1) try to encoruage them to see the simulation as a 'safe space' where failure is part of the process of learning, 2) require them read the case (or at least the key facts and website) before starting to gain a better understanding of the company and its industry context, 3) pair a gamer with a non-gamer, as experienced gamers (especially in simulations) will learn more quickly how to play and can share their experience. This can also encourage a more social learning experience.
At the end of their tenure, students sit down with Katrien De Wolf, CEO of Vélox Dynamics, for an exit interview about their run. She reads the 3-Year CIO Performance Review PDF (downloaded from the final scorecard) before she says a word — no report, no debrief. To try her yourself, use the sample review in the Educator's Pack.
A purpose-built Educator's Pack is available to lecturers and educators on request.
Educator guide covering deployment formats, the Incubator unlock system, debrief questions, and suggested discussion threads for each system of the game.
A set of exam questions pitched at Master's level, mapped to the game's systems and to the Vélox case study.
One-page student handout covering the game's core concepts, the CIO role, and what to expect. Designed to get students playing without a lengthy briefing.
Slide deck for introducing the simulation in class — the setting, the CIO role, and how the session will run.
The Educator's Pack is free to use in non-commercial educational settings under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Email a request here.
A separate business school teaching case is embedded in the game as a PDF and available as a standalone document. It covers the company's origin story, the Van Marcke Foundation's governance, the competitive landscape, and the strategic tension between engineering heritage and digital transformation. Students who read the case before playing tend to make strategic decisions rather than treating the game as a resource-allocation puzzle.
A structured 2.5–3 hour session integrating case discussion, gameplay, and debrief.
Students read the Vélox Dynamics case study (20–30 min) and prepare written answers: What is Vélox's core tension? What strategic options exist? How would you approach it?
Facilitate discussion exploring the heritage vs. disruption tension, Foundation governance trade-offs, and strategic options. Draw out key concepts: ambidexterity, open innovation, capability constraints. Build buy-in for the simulation.
Individual or pairs — each student takes the CIO role. Use The Forge (all systems) for experienced groups, or The Forge/Incubator (progressive unlock) for first-time players. The built-in tutorials handle onboarding; you walk the room and observe.
Structured reflection using PDF scorecards as evidence. What surprised you? How did Foundation governance constrain your choices? What trade-offs did you face? What would you do differently? Three good questions are better than ten generic ones — pick the ones that match your course. The teaching guide includes ready-made debrief questions organised by topic.
Short answers to the questions educators and students ask most often.
A free, single-player business simulation in which you run the innovation portfolio of a company as its Chief Innovation Officer. It is built to teach corporate entrepreneurship and innovation management by having students make decisions and live with the consequences, rather than reading about frameworks.
Educators and students in corporate entrepreneurship, innovation management, technology strategy and related subjects, at undergraduate, postgraduate, MBA, executive-education and doctoral level. It is also open to anyone who wants to try it independently.
Yes. Students find it challenging and enjoy the challenge, and the three arcade mini-games break up the management with moments of surprise and play. Because the systems interact and outcomes vary, each run plays differently, so students come back to try another strategy rather than repeat a solved puzzle.
It varies, by design. How long a run takes depends on the mode, on how deeply the player engages, and on how familiar they are with the game, since a first playthrough takes longer than later ones. As a rough guide, allow about an hour for a single sitting, though the teaching Incubator mode is meant to be spread across several short sessions.
Yes. It is free for educational use under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, with no licence fees, no per-student charges and no registration. Commercial use, such as paid executive education or corporate training, needs a separate commercial licence.
No. The whole simulation is a single web page. Students open a link and play. There is no install, no account, and no student data is collected. The file can also be saved and played offline.
Yes, in two senses. No student data is collected, since there is no account, no sign-in and nothing to submit, and the whole thing runs in the browser, so there is nothing to leak. It is also a safe place to fail, as mistakes are part of the learning, runs can be replayed, and a poor result costs nothing but teaches a good deal.
Innovation management and corporate entrepreneurship together, as the player runs the innovation function of an established firm. Around twenty-five concepts from the research are built into its systems, among them absorptive capacity, organisational ambidexterity, appropriability and value capture, dynamic capabilities, open innovation, path dependence, platform strategy and disruptive innovation. Students meet the ideas in context as they play, and a Pantheon of real scholars introduces the relevant thinker at each decision.
Very. It runs from a one-hour drop-in to a full-semester module, and from first-year undergraduates to executives, with four modes and a teaching Incubator that unlocks the game's systems at whatever pace suits your syllabus. With no install and no account, it drops into a lecture, a workshop, homework or an online class without any setup. The “Six Ways to Use The Disruptor” section above sets out the common formats.
Four: Forge (the standard, full experience), Pivot (move the company into a new sector), Jugaad (frugal innovation under a tight budget) and Gauntlet (a very hard challenge). Forge also runs as the Incubator teaching variant.
A deliberate choice. Most business teaching quietly defaults to a United States setting, so placing Vélox Dynamics in Belgium puts students in a different and real institutional world of European universities, enterprise-foundation ownership, and EU funding and standards, rather than a Silicon Valley template. Rooting the company in a specific place and culture also gives students something concrete to care about before the decisions begin.
Because it is tangible and familiar, and it stretches across the whole innovation problem. Everyone understands fitness equipment, so no student is shut out by unfamiliar technology. Yet these firms sell both to consumers and to businesses such as gyms and clinics, and increasingly run a digital platform alongside the hardware, so a single company reaches from physical products and materials through connected services, data and AI to medical rehabilitation and sustainability. That breadth lets the player face the full range of innovation-management decisions, from incremental improvement to platform bets and breakthrough research.
Yes, and it is free on request from ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk. It includes a teaching note with deployment formats and debrief prompts, an exam question bank, a student onboarding sheet, an introduction slide deck, and the Vélox Dynamics teaching case.
Through reflection rather than the score. The game gives each player an overall score at the end, but that is feedback for the player rather than a grade, since outcomes carry a large element of chance by design and so make a poor measure of learning. What works well is a reflective essay: every run produces a report the student keeps, and they write about the decisions they made, why they made them, and what they would do differently. The educator pack includes assignment ideas built this way.
It was created by Ammon Salter, Professor of Technology and Innovation Management at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, and built through AI-assisted development. Suggested citation: Salter, A. (2026). The Disruptor: An Innovation Management and Corporate Entrepreneurship Simulation (Version 1.0.0) [Software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20141142. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
In the browser at disruptorsim.org, free. The source code is on GitHub at github.com/ammonsalter-del/thedisruptor-sim.
The Disruptor runs entirely in the browser with no installation, no server, and no student registration.
Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge — any modern browser. Desktop or laptop recommended. Tablets work in landscape orientation. No app store, no plugins, no IT department involvement.
The whole simulation is a single HTML file. Save it once and it plays on any machine, no internet required — drop it on a laptop, open in a browser, play. The game auto-saves progress; if anything freezes, refresh the page.
Average game: 45–60 minutes. Built-in Quick Guide: 5 minutes. Case study pre-reading: 20–30 minutes. Full tutorial: 10–15 minutes for first-time players.
Free. No licence fees, no per-student charges, no registration required. Open-source under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Students open a link and play.
The Disruptor is released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Educational use is free; commercial use (executive education with fees, corporate training, paid consulting, bundling into paid products, etc.) requires a separate commercial licence.
Educational use — free. Undergraduate, postgraduate, MBA, EMBA, and doctoral programmes (including fee-paying programmes), short courses and summer schools at accredited institutions, MOOCs offered free or as part of accredited programmes, in-class or flipped-classroom use, embedding in Moodle/Canvas/Blackboard, student competitions and hackathons, academic research, faculty development, and self-directed learning by individuals.
Commercial use — separate licence required. Paid executive education, corporate training, consulting engagements using the simulation as a deliverable, commercial workshops or bootcamps, reselling or sublicensing, or hosting behind a paywall.
Full terms and the commercial-licence request process: see the Licence page.
Suggested citation:
Salter, A. (2026). The Disruptor: An Innovation Management and Corporate Entrepreneurship Simulation (Version 1.0.0) [Software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20141142. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Start with Quick Play — share the link, walk the room, debrief. You can always scale up from there.
