Short answers about The Disruptor: what it is, what it costs (nothing), and how it works in teaching. The educators page has the detail.
A free, single-player business simulation where you take the role of Chief Innovation Officer at Vélox Dynamics, a Belgian fitness equipment company. You manage R&D projects, alliances, intellectual property, a digital platform, corporate ventures, hiring, standards and more across a three-year tenure. It runs in the browser with no installation and no account.
Yes. No premium tier, no adverts, no registration. It is an open educational project, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, with no fees of any kind. Commercial use requires a separate licence.
The game puts you in the role of Chief Innovation Officer at an established organisation. You will face some of the same challenges and draw on some of the same resources that real innovation managers have. You are not alone. You have a team of department heads and staff who run the day-to-day work, and many decisions can be delegated to them. Your job is to set the direction and strategy for each of the sixteen systems under your remit. Most of them already exist when you arrive, with legacy strategic choices and relationships in place that you can adopt or adjust. Others, like corporate venture capital, need to be created and designed from scratch. The game introduces each system gradually over the first year, and the board will be patient with you while you find your feet. Wait for each system to be presented, decide how you want to proceed, and start building your understanding of the challenges and resources you have and will need to create.
The Launchpad is where your investments in developing technologies, products, services, and capabilities are translated into innovations that you can prepare for launch into the market or the organisation. All potential innovations come to the Launchpad, and you decide which to launch, which to hold back, and which to kill. This is the authority the board has given you, and it is the area where you are the central decision maker. You feed the Launchpad by using the other systems of the game to seed the pipeline with valuable and useful products, processes, and services. Each launch carries risk, with greater risk and reward associated with more radical innovations. You will need to learn when to kill innovations and when to launch them even when there are mixed signals. Be too bold and you might end up with many costly failures. Be too risk-averse and you lose out on opportunities. The board will set targets for you, but you should not just look for short-term wins. Build the capabilities to generate a rich flywheel of innovations that can power the firm forward. This is the heart of the game, and it is where you will need to act with care but also boldness.
A full three-year run takes at least 45 minutes, and longer in most cases for new players. Probation mode covers one year and takes around 30 minutes. You can save the game and restart at any time. If your educator is using the Incubator, you will play in shorter sessions across several weeks rather than in a single sitting.
It is challenging. Sixteen systems compete for your attention and budget, events change your plans, and outcomes are uncertain. Most players will not get a top score on their first run. Probation gives a gentler start, the Forge is the standard game, and Gauntlet is deliberately punishing. You get better at reading the systems as you play. The game rewards experience and strategic thinking, not memorising a walkthrough.
Sixteen, and they interact. The R&D Portfolio and Innovation Launchpad handle your pipeline from early research through development to market. Innovation Strategy sets the direction. Alliances and University partnerships connect you to external knowledge. Standards let you shape industry rules. The Platform manages your digital ecosystem. IP Management covers patents and trade secrets. Scouting and Crowdsourcing bring in ideas from outside. Venturing and Grant Funding provide alternative routes to innovation. Staff & Hiring builds your team, Organisation shapes how it works, and Corporate handles the relationship with the parent company. Competitors & Markets round out the picture. Each system has its own logic, and decisions in one affect the others. The game does not tell you which to prioritise. That is the job.
No, you do not. The game gives you staff and managers who can handle the detail of individual systems on your behalf. You do not need to negotiate every alliance yourself, review every patent, or manage every collaboration. Your job is to ensure that the different systems are contributing to your goals and objectives, and to decide where to direct your attention when they are not. The players who do well are the ones who focus on the bigger strategic challenges rather than getting lost in the mechanics of each engagement. Trying to control everything yourself is one of the fastest ways to fall behind.
Five modes plus the Incubator. The Forge is the standard three-year game with all systems open. Pivot starts you mid-crisis, forcing a portfolio restructure. Jugaad strips the budget and makes you innovate with fewer resources. Gauntlet sets punishing targets against aggressive competitors. Probation gives you one year to prove yourself, with gentler expectations. The Incubator unlocks systems one at a time as you go, so you learn each one before the next arrives. Each mode changes what you are up against.
A one-year variant of the Forge. The board gives you a single year to prove yourself, with gentler targets. It takes around 30 minutes and covers the core systems without the full three-year commitment. It is a good way to learn the game before taking on a full tenure.
Three arcade-style games that appear at set points during a run. Design Thinking Pinball rewards capability boosts through a pinball mechanic. Lead User Patrol is a defender game where you spot unmet customer needs from lead users, feeding your scouting missions. Wellness Ecosystem Chase builds platform complementors and ecosystem partnerships. They are optional, but they reward you with in-game boosts and break up the management decisions with something different.
A gallery of forty researchers whose work shaped the field you are managing in. You will see their names and ideas come up during play, connecting what you are doing in the simulation to the thinking behind it. Each entry has a biography and key works if you want to read further. Among them are Schumpeter, Freeman, Pavitt, Nelson, Teece, Chesbrough, von Hippel, Christensen, Penrose, Tushman, Henderson, and Eisenhardt.
Not spending the resources the board gives them. Being unable to kill innovations that are not working, because they have already sunk time and money into them. Being unwilling to take risk on uncertain projects, chasing safe incremental bets instead. Not using the full range of systems available: alliances, grants, scouting, standards all extend what the firm can do, but players ignore them. Chasing short-term income rather than building capabilities and taking long-term bets on new products, categories and services. These are the same patterns you see in real firms, and they show up clearly in your end-of-game report.
You still get the full case study PDF, the same report you would receive at the end of a completed tenure. It records what you did, what went wrong, and where the board lost confidence. Read it, then start again. A dismissal is not wasted time. You made decisions under uncertainty, they had consequences, and the report sets both out clearly enough to learn from. The simulation is a safe place to take risks that would be unthinkable in a real firm, and some of the most useful lessons come from playthroughs that ended early.
The game draws from a large pool of events, and a single playthrough only sees a fraction of them. The board strategy vote at the start reshapes the CEO's expectations. The five modes create different strategic problems. Competitors behave differently each time. Two students can play the same mode and have quite different experiences.
There is more in the game than any single playthrough can show you. Events are drawn from a large pool, and each time the game deals a different hand, but the bigger reason to go back is that the sixteen systems interact in ways you will not see first time round. Most players spend their first go working out what the systems do. On later playthroughs they start to see the trade-offs between them, and to try strategies they would not have risked before. There is no single winning formula. The board strategy, the mode, and the events all shift the ground, so what worked once may not work again. The point is to learn, to raise your awareness of the challenges and complexity of managing innovation and corporate entrepreneurship. That is what makes the game a space for experimentation rather than a test to be passed.
A multi-page PDF report of your tenure, covering how you performed across every dimension: portfolio balance, capability development, IP, partnerships, platform health, revenue and board approval. It gives you a Legacy Score from A to D and a narrative of what happened, what worked, and what did not. You keep the PDF, and it is worth reading carefully before you play again.
Start with Probation in the Forge to learn the systems without the full three-year commitment. If you have time, read the Vélox Dynamics case study first. It sets the context and helps you treat the game as a strategic simulation rather than a resource puzzle. Once you have found your feet, play a full three-year Forge run. The built-in tutorials cover the dashboard and every system.
Yes. The game has two built-in tutorial modes: a Quick Guide covering five topics to get you playing in minutes, and a Full Guide walking through every system. There is also a free Player's AI Assistant, hosted on Google's NotebookLM, that answers questions about the game in plain language. It is spoiler-free and will not reveal scoring thresholds or end-of-tenure mechanics.
Because it puts you somewhere specific rather than somewhere generic. Vélox Dynamics sits in a real institutional world: European research universities, enterprise-foundation ownership, EU funding instruments and standards bodies. That setting shapes the decisions you face in ways that a placeless company would not.
Because everyone understands what a fitness equipment company makes, so you can focus on the management decisions rather than learning unfamiliar technology. But the industry is broader than it looks. Vélox sells to consumers and to businesses, runs a connected platform alongside the hardware, and reaches from physical products through data and AI to medical rehabilitation. That range means you face the full spread of innovation management problems in a single firm.
Vélox Dynamics is listed on Euronext Brussels, but the Van Marcke Foundation for Health and Movement controls it through a dual-class share structure, holding 78% of the voting rights. The Foundation has a mission around health, movement science, and wellness, and the game tracks how well your decisions as CIO align with it across three pillars: environmental, social, and governance. Your choices affect the Purpose score — forming the right alliances can strengthen it, ignoring a supply chain scandal can damage it, and the board will let you know if you are drifting. The commercial side of the business still needs revenue, launches, and market share. Managing both at once is the tension at the heart of the game.
No. The game runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, no sign-in and nothing to submit. No data is collected, no cookies are set, and nothing is sent to a server. Game state lives in memory during the session and is discarded when you close the tab.
Yes. Email ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk or use the Issues tab on the GitHub repository. Players' ideas have shaped every version of the game.
The game is free for education and research, and the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence is there to keep it that way. If you come across anyone putting it behind a paywall, selling access, using it in paid consulting or corporate training without a licence, or passing off the materials as their own, please let us know at ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk. Reports help protect the project for everyone who uses it.
A modern web browser. The game sets no cookies, holds no student data, and runs entirely client-side. Students open a link and play.
Innovation management and corporate entrepreneurship together, through running the innovation function of an established firm. Around twenty-five concepts from the research literature 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. The in-game Pantheon of Innovation introduces the relevant scholar at each decision point, connecting the simulation directly to the field. The Educator's Companion maps each system to the underlying theory.
Innovation management, corporate entrepreneurship, technology strategy, R&D management and related subjects, at undergraduate, postgraduate, MBA, executive-education and doctoral level. The game modes let you match difficulty to the cohort: Probation or Incubator for first-timers, Forge for the standard experience, Pivot or Jugaad for specialist topics, Gauntlet for a serious challenge.
No. You post a link. The game has built-in tutorials, help throughout, and the Player's AI Assistant for anyone who wants more. Students can replay as often as they like. Some play once, others go back several times chasing a better score. How much further you go is up to you: the Educator's Pack is there if you want to tie it into your course with session plans, debrief questions and assessment ideas.
No. Many colleagues have used the game with their students without ever playing it as a game themselves. The game teaches concepts and ideas that most educators in this field understand well already. The Educator's Pack was created to lower the challenges of adoption, and the Educator's AI Assistant can answer questions before class and in real time as they come up. Some of your students will end up knowing the game far better than you. Gamers will look for hacks to gain advantage, just as entrepreneurs do. That is part of the learning.
A teaching variant of the Forge designed to control how students encounter the game's sixteen systems. Students begin with two playable systems (Portfolio and Innovations) and unlock others progressively. Both educators and students can unlock systems, so it works whether you set the pace or let students explore on their own. The CIO cannot be dismissed, so students can experiment without the risk of an early game over. It maps directly to a syllabus: if you are teaching alliances this week, unlock alliances; next week, unlock IP strategy. Students play between sessions and bring their experience to class, and each unlock introduces a new layer of complexity. By the end of a module, students are managing all sixteen systems and can see how the decisions connect.
Most educators assign it as between-session homework. Each week you or the students unlock the system that matches your teaching topic, students play for 30 to 45 minutes outside class, and the class session opens with a structured debrief: what happened when you tried alliances, how did IP strategy change your approach, what trade-offs did you face. The Incubator works well across 6 to 10 weeks. Some colleagues use it differently: a concentrated two-day workshop, a flipped classroom where the simulation replaces pre-reading, or a capstone exercise where students write up their full tenure as a reflective case. The Educator's Pack includes a suggested unlock sequence matched to a typical innovation management syllabus and session plans for several formats.
Through reflection rather than the score. The game scores each player at the end, but that is feedback, not a grade: outcomes carry a large element of chance, so the score alone is a poor measure of learning. What works well is a reflective essay. Every run produces a PDF report the student keeps, and they write about the decisions they made, why, and what they would do differently. The Educator's Pack includes assignment ideas built around this approach.
The game's systems are designed around concepts from the innovation management and corporate entrepreneurship research literature. The in-game Pantheon of Innovation is a gallery of forty scholars from the field, including Freeman, Schumpeter, Pavitt, Nelson, Teece, Chesbrough, von Hippel, Christensen, Penrose, Tushman, Cohen, Levinthal, Henderson, Eisenhardt, and many others. Each has a biography, key works, and contextual advice that appears during play. The Educator's Companion maps each of the sixteen systems to the relevant research, so you can connect what happened in the simulation to the concepts in your syllabus.
Very. It runs from a thirty-minute Probation session to a full-semester module, and from first-year undergraduates to executives, with five modes and the Incubator's progressive unlock. With no install and no account, it drops into a lecture, a workshop, homework or an online class without setup.
Yes, and it is free on request from ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk. It includes a teaching companion, assignment bank with rubrics, exam question bank, student onboarding materials, an introduction slide deck, and two AI assistants (one for educators, one for students). The educators page lists everything in the pack.
Yes. The current version is 1.0.2. Since its launch on 26 April 2026, the game has been accessed by over 600 people from 50 countries, and educators from 31 universities have used it in their teaching. Development is continuous, with bug fixes, balance adjustments and new features driven by playtesting feedback. The game is open source on GitHub, and contributions are welcome.
Because it was built by an academic, not a company, and giving it away is part of the point. Credit comes through citations rather than sales. The game is free for education and research; commercial users pay for a licence, which helps keep it that way. There is no premium version behind the free one. What you play is the whole game.
Commercial simulations are typically licensed per student, need accounts and setup, and often cover a narrower range of topics. The Disruptor is free and open source, runs in the browser with no setup and no student accounts, covers sixteen interconnected systems across the full breadth of innovation management and corporate entrepreneurship, and comes with a free Educator's Pack. Because the licence is open, you can adapt the game to your course rather than fitting your course around the game.
The Disruptor was created by Ammon Salter, Professor of Technology and Innovation Management at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. His research covers open and distributed models of innovation, R&D decision-making, innovation and social networks, AI and new ventures, university-industry collaboration, and innovation policy. He is co-author of The Management of Technological Innovation (Oxford University Press, with Mark Dodgson and David Gann) and former co-editor of Research Policy. He has worked with companies, governments, and other organisations on the management of innovation, and teaches the subject at all levels. The game is his attempt to translate research findings into play, so that students can experience the challenges of managing innovation at an established firm rather than just reading about them. He built it himself, with help from colleagues and students, through AI-assisted development, because he is also a lifelong gamer who wanted to bring the feel of commercial games into an educational setting. The Disruptor sits alongside Build, Bin, Boost and the Slingshot as complementary tools for teaching innovation management and corporate entrepreneurship. It is an open, not-for-profit educational project, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Salter, A. (2026). The Disruptor: An Innovation Management and Corporate Entrepreneurship Simulation (Version 1.0.2) [Software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21127039
Email ammon.salter@wbs.ac.uk. It is free. Include your institution and the course you teach, and you will receive the full set of materials plus access to the Educator's AI Assistant.