Threshold Entrepreneur - Business Simulation

Give your entrepreneur students the opportunity to "Learn by Doing." Threshold Entrepreneur is a web-based business simulation that allows students to compete against each other managing a small startup company. Threshold Entrepreneur is best suited to instructor-lead entrepreneur classes at all college levels. As a web-based application, Threshold Entrepreneur also works very well for distance-learning scenarios.

Threshold Entrepreneur has been adopted by over 20 universities and thousands of students, including Hofstra University, University of Texas, the University of Bristol in Great Britain, and Helsinki University of Technology in Finland.

Product Description

Threshold Team Entrepreneur and Solo Entrepreneur are programs that simulate many of the decisions involved in starting and managing a small company. Students act as chief executives of a small company that sells two plastic molded products - Product 1 and Product 2. Students make decisions regarding (a) marketing (e.g., pricing and promotion of the products), (b) manufacturing (e.g., how many units to produce or whether to have the products manufactured by a sub-contractor), and (c) financing (e.g., requesting a bank loan to pay current bills or accessing venture capital funding.). The manufacturing process consists of forming plastic raw materials (sheets of plastic) into the finished consumer products. The products are sold through retail markets to the general public. The two products are not substitutes for one another, nor are they complementary. The sales of one product do not affect sales of the other product.

Benefits

Using Threshold Team Entrepreneur and Solo Entrepreneur, students will:

Decide their company mission, goals, policies, and strategies.
Develop skills in planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling a business.
Make decisions in the areas of:

Starting and managing a business.
Marketing, including market research and sales forecasts.
Finance, including short-term and long-term loans.
Manufacturing, including raw materials, production, scheduling, staffing, and inventory control.

Have the opportunity to ask "what-if" questions by entering a sales estimate and seeing what the results of your decisions would be given this level of sales.
See the results of their decisions and have an opportunity to correct mistakes in the following quarters of operation.

Product Features

Two versions of Threshold Entrepreneur are included with each purchase, Threshold Team Entrepreneur and Threshold Solo Entrepreneur. Threshold Team Entrepreneur and Solo Entrepreneur are complementary products. They are identical in the decisions students make and in the reports generated by those decisions. The procedures for entering decisions and working with the software are also identical. The only difference is the competition the students face.

Threshold Team Entrepreneur

In Threshold Team Entrepreneur, a student team manages a company in competition with other student-managed companies. They are not in competition with the computer. The computer's function is just to process their decisions quickly and to provide reports that show the results of those decisions.

In Threshold Team Entrepreneur, the instructor processes the decisions that teams make regarding the operation of their respective companies after all the competing teams have submitted their decisions.

Threshold Solo Entrepreneur

In Threshold Solo Entrepreneur, the students compete against computer-managed companies. By having the computer manage the competing companies in Solo Entrepreneur, we are able to simplify the procedure for processing of the decisions students enter.

In Solo Entrepreneur, the computer makes the decisions for the competing teams, with the exception of the student-managed company. Although the computer-managed competitors will act rationally, they are not all-knowing, perfect competitors. Having the computer make decisions for the competitor companies allows students to work at their own pace with the software. Using Solo Entrepreneur, students can process a set of their decisions and then see the results those decisions quickly and easily.

Pricing

Entrepreneur is priced per-student per-semester. There is no charge to the professor or to the university. Licenses are not reusable, resalable, or transferrable.

Students can pay for use of the simulation with a credit card on a secure order page. Instructors will be provided with a custom purchase link to give to their students.

Pricing starts at $30/student. Please contact sales@greatsims.com for more information.